A senior official patrolling the busy Gulf of Finland ship lane on Thursday said that Estonia's Navy is ready to take action against vessels that are a threat to Baltic Sea infrastructure, even if they were in international waters.

After a series power, telecom and pipeline failures since Russia invaded Ukraine 2022, the Baltic Sea region has been on high alert. NATO's presence in the area has also increased. The majority of the outages were caused by ships that dragged their anchors.

Some of the breaches underwater have been declared accidental. Others are still being investigated, but no suspects have yet been brought to trial.

The Sakala, a mine-hunting vessel, approached a barge with a Cypriot banner but what appeared to be a Russian title on a cold, snowy morning. It used a zoom lens to focus on the anchors of the barge from a distance a few hundred meters.

The navy ship did not detect anything wrong and continued to patrol the area, which is traversed by 500-600 vessels per week, most of them heading towards or coming from Russian ports.

Johan-Elias Seljamaa, deputy commander of the Estonian Navy, said that if there was a danger that the critical infrastructure would be broken, they were forced to intervene. He added that this could happen "even in international waters".

He refused to discuss specific operational details.

Patrols were launched after Finland, in December, seized a tanker suspected of tearing apart the Estlink 2 underwater power cable by dragging the anchor along the seabed and cutting one of two electricity lines connecting the country to Estonia.

In an effort to prevent future sabotage, Estonia has deployed three vessels in the Gulf of Finland, a busy arm of the Baltic Sea which at its easternmost end extends into Russian waters.

Moscow has denied that it was involved in the breaches of cable. (Reporting and writing by Janis Lasizans; editing by Barbara Lewis.)

(source: Reuters)