In the Baltic Sea – home of the twisted wreckage of the Nord Stream pipelines – another pipeline was recently damaged along with telecommunications cables.
Western officials are making escalatory statements and are again floating the idea of closing the “NATO lake” to Russian ships, which would likely be viewed by Moscow as an act of war.
Onshore, Finland is rapidly militarizing its border with Russia. And a notable Chinese cargo ship is now at the center of the firestorm.
The Newnew Polar Bear
Over the weekend of October 8th there was an unusual drop in pressure in the Finnish-Estonian Balticconnector gas pipeline. By the morning of October 10th, an investigation had found that the pipeline had ruptured. Telecom cables linking Finland, Estonia and Sweden had also been damaged, as had a Russian telecom cable in the Gulf of Finland.
By October 20th, Finland and Estonia were pointing the finger at the Newnew Polar Bear – a Chinese vessel. The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation produced a large anchor found near the damaged pipeline, which it believes belonged to the 169-meter-long ship and likely broke off as it was dragged across the sea floor. Investigators have not explained a theory for how exactly the anchor damaged telecom cables on opposite sides of the pipeline and broke off at the Balticconector.
I haven’t been able to track down an exact distance between the Balticconnector and the telecom cables, but Finnish telecom operator Elisa told Reuters that the distance between the two was “significant.”
Nonetheless, speculation is that damaging the pipeline and cables would have been hard to do without knowing. According to Insurance Marine News:
It seemed unlikely-to-impossible that the crew could have been unaware of this incident, as the event would have slowed the ship dramatically and involuntarily. If the anchor had fallen accidentally and it had hit the gas line, it could have caused severe damage to the pipe. If the anchor had been stuck to the seabed, it would not have passed unnoticed because the speed would have slowed and the ship would have tilted.
Accusations have already been flying of a plot by the Russians and Chinese since the Newnew sails under the Hong Kong flag and had a Northern Sea Route sailing permission issued by the General Administration of the Northern Sea Route addressed to Torgmoll, a Russian-registered company with offices in Moscow and Shanghai. While this has been treated by some as some sort of smoking gun, it’s simply because of a joint project of two Chinese companies – the international shipping line Hainan Yangpu Newnew Shipping Co and cargo agent Torgmoll. Russia’s state-owned Rosatom also provides information and navigation support for the newly established container transportation service via the Northern Sea Route between China and Russia.
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