Finnish authorities have brought charges against the captain and two senior officers of a Russia-linked ship accused of deliberately damaging critical subsea cables in the Baltic Sea.
In a statement on Monday, Finland’s National Prosecution Authority said they had brought aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference with communications charges against the three senior officers aboard the Eagle S, a tanker registered in the Cook Islands. The three defendants were not identified publicly.
Full article, HERE from The Record.
And HERE is the statement from the Finnish prosecutors…
The sad part is that the US has NEVER charged any of the ‘third party’ ships that have attempted to cut the Transpac cable off LA, nor the ones that have cut the Hawaii cable more than once. All of the ships ‘say’ they didn’t know they were dragging anchor, but strangely, a number of them had their AIS go ‘suspiciously dead’ at just the right time…
Grrrr…
FWIW, I hope the Finns get a judgement, and this is the start of taking this shadow fleets to task for their actions, regardless of where in the world they occur…
In other news, I finally got some writing done on my book, granted it was only about 1000 words, but it was WORDS… 🙂
Broken undersea cables: It’s time to apply the ‘FAFO’ principle good and hard where circumstantial evidence indicates that there was nothing accidental about an undersea cable breakage. Bring charges.
I’m very glad you’re feeling good enough to be able to write again!
What did we call it in the Nav when wiring and piping were able to bypass and loop around breaks “redundancy” built into the system . Something like that , a work-around . Nordstream , we never really got a clear answer on that . There is a war going on Russia vs. NATO , E.U., Ukraine , and unfortunately the U.S. War shit happens during war . Not to diminish the foul deed or the culpability of the perpetrators , but better a cable than a city . I hope that didn’t come across as smart alecky , it is early and coffee hasn’t cleared the morning cobwebs yet .
Words are better than no words! (I managed 250 words this week, not counting blog.)
I’ve been tracking the European cable cuts, not so much the US/Pacific. The Finns have good reason to be steamed.
Not a good idea to mess with the Finns.
Ag- The issue is the ‘deniability’… sigh
Boats- Agreed! And don’t worry about it!
TXRed- Understood and agreed!
WSF- Nope. They have a ‘history’ with Russia…
Any ship that destroys a cable gets seized…. permanently and the command crew locked up…. permanently. Make consequences painful and things tend to not happen. Punishments these days tend to be way too light for a lot of things.
Dan- That would be interesting, considering the ‘third party’ licensing and homeporting of a lot of these ‘shadow’ fleets.
Well, NATO has effectively declared war on Russia. What did they expect? And let’s not forget all the Russian ships seized for no reason beyond spite back in 2022.