We should hand it to the Finns. When this type of damage to the Baltic Sea’s cables and pipelines became a reliable trend last autumn, the country’s authorities stepped up their already active surveillance in the Gulf of Finland. Granted, it’s a small body of water, with similarly small shipping lanes, but Finland made sure no movement went unseen. And lo and behold, on Dec. 25, the Cook Islands-flagged Eagle S tanker crisscrossed the gulf, damaging not one but four undersea cables.
We know all this because Finnish authorities were actively observing. Better yet, the tanker was only slightly outside Finnish territorial waters, and authorities managed to coax the captain into sailing back into territorial waters. Had the ship remained in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ), very little could have been done.
There’s no two ways about it, the Finns got lucky — though as the saying goes, “the harder I practice, the luckier I get.” Had Finland not maintained such close surveillance or practiced what actions to take if a vessel dragged its anchor, the Eagle S could have easily gotten away with it.
We can’t assume this will be the case every time a ship damages our undersea infrastructure with apparent intent. We can’t assume our navies and coast guards will be able to catch the perpetrators in the act, and we can’t be sure it will all occur in our territorial waters — vessels wishing to cause such harm deliberately do so in EEZs. And no, we can’t assume we’ll be able to coax the ship into territorial waters as the Finns did.
This makes the new Nordic Warden initiative a crucial development. Announced on Jan. 6 by the JET — a military grouping comprising the U.K., the Netherlands and the Nordic and Baltic nations — it “harnesses AI to assess data from a range of sources, including the Automatic Identification System (AIS) ships use to broadcast their position, to calculate the risk posed by each vessel entering areas of interest.”
The action also reinforces existing and planned NATO responses: “Specific vessels identified as being part of Russia’s shadow fleet have been registered into the system so they can be closely monitored when approaching areas of interest. If a potential risk is assessed, the system will monitor the suspicious vessel in real time and immediately send out a warning, which will be shared with JEF participant nations, as well as NATO Allies.”
