FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) – A power cable connecting Finland and Estonia under the Baltic Sea has experienced a break, prompting an investigation, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said Wednesday.
Writing on X, Orpo said power transmission through the Estlink-2 cable had stopped on Wednesday and authorities were “investigating the matter”. He said the outage would not affect the electricity supply in Finland.
Estonian grid operator Elering said there is enough free capacity on the Estonian side to meet electricity needs, public broadcaster ERR reported on its website.
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The authorities were on edge over the undersea infrastructure in the Baltic. Two data cables, one between Finland and Germany and the other between Lithuania and Sweden, were cut in November.
Germany’s defense minister said officials had to assume the incident was “sabotage,” but without providing evidence or specifying who might be responsible. The remark came during a speech in which he spoke about the threat of hybrid warfare from Russia.
Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that once brought natural gas from Russia to Germany were damaged by underwater explosions in September 2022. Authorities called it sabotage and launched criminal investigations.
The Estlink-2 cable has been down for most of this year to repair short-circuit damage that may have been caused by the cable’s complex positioning, ERR reports.
