Ninety kilometres of anchor track, zero convictions
Russia's Baltic cable sabotage campaign exploits a jurisdictional vacuum that international law cannot close
The Helsinki District Court dismissed all charges on 3 October 2025. Nine months of investigation—helicopter boardings, forensic analysis of anchor chains, seabed surveys, three foreign nationals trapped in Finland unable to leave—and at the end, nothing. The judges acknowledged tens of millions of euros in damage to critical infrastructure. They ruled that Finnish law simply didn't apply.
Captain Davit Vadatchkoria, a 39-year-old Georgian, walked free. So did his two Indian officers. The Finnish state was ordered to reimburse €195,000 in legal fees. The shipowner began considering a civil suit against the authorities who had boarded and detained his vessel. The Eagle S itself had already left Finnish waters months earlier.
Everything Finland did was legally impeccable. The rapid response, the armed boarding, the criminal investigation, the prosecution. None of it mattered.
A pattern emerges
Christmas Day 2024 was not an isolated incident. Since October 2023, at least ten undersea cables in the Baltic Sea have been damaged in circumstances European officials now describe, with increasing confidence, as deliberate.
The first major case came that autumn, when a Hong Kong-flagged vessel called NewNew Polar Bear dragged its anchor across hundreds of kilometres of seafloor, destroying a gas pipeline and telecommunications cables connecting Finland and Estonia. China acknowledged responsibility but called it accidental. The ship ignored requests to halt. It simply sailed away.
November 2024 brought two more severed cables—one linking Germany and Finland, another connecting Lithuania and Sweden. German officials called it sabotage. Danish authorities stopped a Chinese cargo ship that had passed over both sites, but the vessel sat in international waters for a month, refusing to enter Swedish jurisdiction where it could be legally boarded.
Then Christmas. The Eagle S, carrying Russian gasoline under a Cook Islands flag, crossed the Estlink 2 power cable at precisely 12:26 Finnish time. At that moment, Finland's grid operator reported a power outage. Tracking data showed the ship slowing dramatically over the cable, then resuming speed. Investigators later mapped an anchor track extending ninety kilometres across the seabed.
The damage that day severed a critical power link between Finland and Estonia. Repairs took until June, cost €60 million, and left the interconnection operating at one-third capacity for seven months. Estonian electricity prices spiked.
The incidents have not stopped. On New Year's Eve 2025, Finnish special forces descended from helicopters to seize the Fitburg, a vessel registered in St Vincent and the Grenadines, en route from St Petersburg to Haifa. Its anchor chain was lowered in Finnish waters; the damage site lay in Estonian territory. Fourteen crew members—from Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan—were taken into custody. A second cable, owned by Swedish company Arelion, had also been cut. Two submarine cables in as many days.
Finnish Customs found sanctioned cargo aboard. The investigation continues.
The architecture of impunity
Here is a detail that deserves more attention than it has received. The Gulf of Finland is not entirely Finnish and Estonian territorial waters. In the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse, Finland and Estonia signed a bilateral agreement leaving a corridor of international waters through the Gulf—a gesture of goodwill toward a Russia that seemed, at the time, to be stumbling toward democracy. That corridor now serves as a highway for sabotage vessels, a gap left open for a Russia that promised good faith and delivered hybrid warfare.
The legal framework protecting submarine cables was designed for a different world. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, finalised in 1982, drew substantially from even older law—the 1884 Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables, which established that damaging cables should be punishable. The drafters were thinking about accidents. Anchors dropped by fishing vessels in the wrong place. Incompetence, not strategy.
UNCLOS Article 113 requires states to criminalise wilful or negligent damage to cables by ships flying their flag. Article 97 specifies that criminal proceedings for incidents on the high seas may only be brought by the flag state or the nationality of the accused.
The Helsinki court ruled that the damage occurred in Finland's Exclusive Economic Zone—the band of water extending two hundred nautical miles from shore where coastal states have economic rights but not sovereignty. The crimes happened before the Eagle S entered territorial waters. Finnish jurisdiction could not reach the crew. The matter belonged to the Cook Islands, or Georgia, or India.
The Cook Islands has done nothing. Neither has Georgia. Neither has India. The shipowner—traced to a 42-year-old Azerbaijani woman suspected of fronting for Russian interests—faces no consequences anywhere.
This is not a bug. It is the system working exactly as designed, for circumstances its designers never imagined. State-sponsored sabotage through deniable proxies. Vessels flagged in permissive registries. Crews from states that will not prosecute.
Legal scholar Tara Davenport has documented how domestic protections remain "woefully inadequate" and "not commensurate with the damage resulting from intentional interference." Many states that ratified UNCLOS never implemented Article 113. Those that did often transplanted penalties from 1884, when the maximum fine for intentional damage was five hundred dollars.
Fixing this requires amending UNCLOS. Amending UNCLOS requires consensus among its parties. Its parties include Russia and China.
The trap is complete.
The economics of attrition
The Eagle S was worth perhaps five million euros. An aging tanker, built in China in 2006, operated by a UAE shell company, crewed by Georgian and Indian seafarers earning modest wages. The damage it caused exceeded €60 million in direct repair costs—before counting months of reduced power capacity, emergency naval deployments, or the investigative resources of multiple states.
This ratio defines asymmetric warfare. The concept has ancient roots, but security analysts have formalised its modern dynamics: when attack is cheap and defence expensive, the attacker can wage attrition at far lower cost. Defenders face an impossible calculus. Protect everything always, or accept that some attacks will succeed.
Cybersecurity researchers recognised this pattern decades ago. A distributed denial-of-service attack costs pennies to launch and millions to defend against. Ransomware that takes hours to deploy can shut down hospitals for weeks. The insight was that services become vulnerable when handling a request costs significantly more than making one.
Russia has applied this logic to physical infrastructure. A shadow fleet of perhaps 1,400 vessels—aging tankers with obscure ownership, registered in permissive jurisdictions, crewing through shell companies—provides the means. Each ship represents a potential weapon. NATO's Baltic Sentry mission, launched in January 2025 to protect undersea infrastructure, deploys frigates, patrol aircraft, and maritime surveillance systems. The cost of continuous monitoring dwarfs the cost of the ships being monitored.
The attacker needs to succeed occasionally. The defender needs to succeed always.
Human shields of ignorance
Davit Vadatchkoria told Finnish broadcaster Yle that his situation was "stressful." Nine months unable to leave Finland, unable to work, unable to see his family. His lawyers argued from the start that the anchor loss was an accident—equipment failure, nothing more. When reached by telephone in January 2025, he described events as "just a normal marine incident."
Was he lying? Possibly.
But consider an alternative that is, in some ways, more troubling. The genius of shadow fleet operations may lie precisely in how little crews need to know. A captain is hired through an intermediary. He's told where to sail, what cargo to carry. At some point, someone communicates that the ship should slow down at a particular location, or that anchoring in a certain area would be acceptable, or simply that schedule pressure means taking a route that happens to cross cables marked on every chart.
The captain may not understand he's participating in sabotage. The shell company employing him may be controlled by Russian intelligence, but he would have no way of knowing. When investigators ask what happened, his bewilderment may be genuine.
This creates human shields of ignorance. Prosecuting crew members achieves nothing strategic—they're not the principals, and they may not understand their role. But the process consumes resources, reveals the prosecuting state's limitations, and fails in ways that demonstrate the futility of response.
Vadatchkoria joined the Eagle S in October 2024. He worked a few months. He spent nearly a year in legal limbo for something he may not have intended and certainly didn't plan. Now he's free, returning to an industry where the next ship might put him in the same position.
The Fitburg's fourteen crew members face similar uncertainty. Some may be knowing participants. Others may be ordinary seafarers caught in circumstances they don't understand. The distinction matters to them. For the strategic picture, it may not matter at all.
The response dilemma
European debates about Baltic cable security often frame the problem as political will. If governments would get tough—blockade suspicious vessels, sink them if necessary, abandon legal niceties—the sabotage would stop.
This misunderstands the trap.
The Eagle S case shows what maximum response within legal bounds achieves. Finland moved fast. Special forces boarded within hours. The investigation was thorough, the prosecution professional. At the end, the crew walked free because the law couldn't reach them. More aggressive enforcement wouldn't have changed jurisdiction.
Responses outside legal bounds carry different costs. Sinking vessels in international waters validates Russian narratives about Western lawlessness. It creates precedents usable against European shipping. It risks escalation with unpredictable consequences. Grey zone operations are designed to present only bad options—responses look either ineffective or disproportionate.
Some argue for treating cable sabotage as armed attack, triggering NATO Article 5. European officials have consistently declined. Estonia's foreign minister acknowledged after the Eagle S incident that invoking armed attack provisions remained "unlikely." The political threshold for Article 5 over damaged cables—rather than missiles hitting cities—stays high.
Russia pays a trivial price for each incident. European states expend diplomatic capital, naval resources, investigative capacity, political attention. The asymmetry holds.
What might actually work
If conventional responses cannot solve the problem, what might? Approaches that impose costs where Russia is vulnerable, rather than playing the game Moscow designed.
Support for Ukraine addresses the underlying capability. Every Russian resource consumed there is unavailable for hybrid operations elsewhere. The sanctions that created the shadow fleet arose from that invasion. Ensuring Russia cannot win does more for European security than any number of Baltic patrol vessels.
Targeting the shadow fleet's commercial relationships attacks its operating conditions. These vessels function because insurers, port operators, flag registries, and shipping services enable them. Making operation commercially impossible—denying insurance, port access, registry services, banking—may prove more effective than catching ships in the act.
Infrastructure redundancy reduces the value of sabotage. The Baltic cables are vulnerable because they're critical. Building alternative capacity through additional cables, satellite links, and interconnection routes diminishes the damage any single incident can cause. This doesn't prevent attacks but removes the strategic reward that makes them worthwhile.
None of these responses offer the satisfaction of sinking a ship. They don't provide the clarity of punishment following crime. They accept that legal and physical defences cannot be made adequate against a determined state adversary.
But they may be the only realistic path. The jurisdictional vacuum cannot be closed. The cost asymmetry cannot be reversed through defence. The grey zone cannot be eliminated by force. What remains is making the strategy fail—not by catching every anchor, but by ensuring that even successful sabotage doesn't achieve Russia's actual objectives.
Designing for the world as it is
The Fitburg sits in Finnish custody. Fourteen crew members await decisions about their fate. The cables are being repaired. Somewhere, other shadow fleet vessels sail through Baltic waters, anchors ready to drop when the order comes—or when commercial pressure creates the right conditions, or when nobody is watching.
Finland did everything right with the Eagle S. The court ruled correctly. The crew went free. The ship sailed away.
That's not a failure of the Finnish system. That's the system working as designed, for a world that assumed good faith among states and never imagined anchors as weapons of war.
The question is whether Europe can build systems for the world that actually exists.