Chinese, Russian vessels in vicinity of Baltic Sea links damage -vessel tracking data
By Nerijus Adomaitis
OSLO (Reuters) — A Chinese container vessel and a Russian-flagged ship investigated over damage to a gas pipeline in the Gulf of Finland were also present at the sites, and at around the time two telecoms cables sustained damage, vessel tracking data showed.
Early on Oct. 8, a gas pipeline and a telecoms cable connecting Finland and Estonia were broken, in what Finnish investigators say may have been deliberate sabotage.
On Tuesday, Sweden said a third link, connecting Stockholm to Tallinn, had been damaged at roughly the same time as the other two.
The incidents have stoked concerns about the security of energy supply in the wider Nordic region, prompted NATO to ramp up patrols in the Baltic Sea and Helsinki to contact Moscow and Beijing via diplomatic channels about the incidents.
TWO SHIPS
Only two ships were present at all three sites around the approximate time when the damage occurred, according to data from MarineTraffic, a ship-tracking and maritime analytics provider.
The ships are: the NewNew Polar Bear, a Chinese container ship travelling between China and Europe via the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic, and the Sevmorput, a nuclear-powered cargo vessel transiting between Murmansk and St. Petersburg.
Finnish investigators, in charge of the pipeline investigation, are probing both ships, as well as others, they said on Tuesday.
Based on vessel tracking data, Reuters matched the ships' path with the locations where the damage occurred at all three sites.
The locations match the movements of military and service vessels deployed to investigate the incidents.
Finnish and Estonian authorities have also established restricted navigation zones around the incident sites in the Gulf of
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