China’s ‘accidental’ damage to Baltic pipeline viewed with suspicion

Helsinki, Finland — Western officials and analysts are suspicious of Beijing’s admission this week that a Chinese container ship damaged the Balticconnector — a vital Baltic Sea gas pipeline linking Estonia and Finland — in October.

The South China Morning Post reported August 12 that the Chinese government notified Finland and Estonia 10 months after the incident that it was caused by a Hong Kong-registered ship called Newnew Polar Bear, but blamed a storm for what it called the accident.

In an interview August 13 with Estonia’s public radio, ERR, Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said he was skeptical of China’s claim that a storm caused the incident.

“Personally, I find it very difficult to understand how a ship’s captain could fail to notice for such a long time that its anchor had been dragging along the seabed, but it is up to the prosecutor’s office to complete the investigation,” he said.

Markku Mylly, the former director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, told local media in Helsinki there were no storms in the Gulf of Finland at the time. The Finnish newspaper Iltalehti consulted data from the Finland Meteorological Institute and confirmed that Mylly’s memory was correct.

Pevkur told ERR that Estonia would not give up claims against China for compensation.

The Baltic Sea oil and gas pipeline, which was built with EU assistance, was commissioned in 2019 at a total cost of around $331 million, to wean Finland and the three Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — off their dependence on Russia for natural gas.

The pipeline was the source of almost all of Estonia’s natural gas supply after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine sparked European restrictions on the import of Russian gas.  After the damage, Estonia had to temporarily rely on Latvia for natural gas.

The pipeline was reopened for commercial operations in April after repairs that cost about $38 million, a senior vice president at Gasgrid Finland told The Associated Press. A few telecoms cables were also damaged in the incident.

Finnish and Estonian investigative agencies recovered the ship’s 6-ton anchor from the sea floor near the damaged pipeline after the incident and tracked it to the ship, which they tried to contact; it refused to respond.

The damage occurred at a time of heightened tension between Europe and Russia over sanctions against Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, and critics suspected it was a deliberate act of sabotage by Russia or its ally China.

After the damage to the pipeline, the Newnew Polar Bear first sailed to St. Petersburg and Arkhangelsk in Russia and later docked in China’s port of Tianjin. 

Eoin Micheal McNamara, a global security expert at the Finland Institute of International Affairs, told VOA that Finnish people doubt Beijing’s claim that the ship’s damage to the pipeline was an accident.

“Undersea infrastructure elsewhere in the wider Nordic-Baltic region has also been damaged by ‘manmade activity’ in recent years. There was the Nord Stream sabotage in 2022 and the severing of a data cable between Norway and its Arctic island of Svalbard before that,” McNamara said. “As geopolitical tensions rise, more targeted sabotage is being expected.”

German media reported this week that investigators asked Poland to arrest a Ukrainian diving instructor for allegedly being part of a team that blew up the Baltic Sea’s Nord Stream gas pipelines, which supplied Russian gas to Europe. Russia blamed Britain, Ukraine and the United States for the sabotage, which they denied.

McNamara said there are suspicions that Russia was involved in the damage to the Balticconnector pipeline. “Plausible deniability is a key tenet for hybrid interference. There are suspicions that use of a Hong Kong-registered vessel was a tactic to gain this plausible deniability,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last year dismissed the idea that Russia could have been behind an attack on the pipeline as “rubbish.”

Estonia and Finland are still jointly investigating the ship, which China’s NewNew Shipping Company owns.

The Estonian prosecutor’s office, which oversees the investigation, said under international law, China’s statement acknowledging the ship caused the damage as an “accident” cannot be used as evidence in a criminal investigation because China has not invited Estonian criminal investigators to participate in Beijing’s own investigation.

VOA contacted the Chinese Foreign Ministry about the matter but was referred to the Chinese shipping departments.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian at a news briefing on August 13 said, “China is advancing the investigation in accordance with the facts and the law and is in close communication with relevant countries. It is hoped that all parties will continue to promote the investigation in a professional, objective and cooperative manner, and jointly ensure that the incident is handled in a sound manner.”

Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen told VOA in an email, “We are constantly cooperating with China and exchanging information regarding this matter, but we will not go into details because the investigation is still ongoing.”

The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, or NBI, which is investigating the case, told VOA that the Finnish and Estonian authorities have been cooperating with the Chinese authorities on the matter. The NBI said it will publish the findings with the Estonian side as early as this fall.

“Based on the evidence collected and information analyzed during the investigation, it can be stated that the course of events is considered clear and there are sufficient reasons to suspect that the container vessel Newnew Polar Bear is linked to the damages. The cause for the damages seems to be the anchor and anchor chain [struck] the mentioned vessel.”

The NBI added, “It must be stated that the investigation is still ongoing and final conclusions, what was behind these incidents (technical failure — negligence, poor seamanship — deliberate act), can be made only after all necessary investigative measures have been finalized, and this will still take some time.”

VOA’s Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report. Some information was provided by Reuters.
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