A situation that has more or less brought us back to the Cold War era, which followed the occupation and control of Eastern Europe by Russia in the aftermath of World War II after the defeat of Germany. According to announcements by the Finnish government, there are strong indications that the tanker “Eagle S”, of Russian interests and registered in the Cook Islands, is responsible for the destruction of two submarine power cables on Christmas Day, which created problems in the operation of the country’s power grid, which shares a 1,300 km land border with Russia.
The vessel in question is a tanker which, according to evidence found by the Finnish Police during an inspection yesterday, belongs to the so-called shadow fleet that Russia has developed over the past 2 years to transport oil to its customers in Africa and Asia while avoiding Western sanctions. The suspicions of the Finnish authorities of sabotage against the country’s energy infrastructure turned into certainty as yesterday’s inspection of the “Eagle S” revealed that one of the ship’s two anchors was missing as it was used to destroy two electrical cables and three fiber optic cables used in telecommunications.
Which prompted the Finnish President to declare that, “we should be able to prevent the dangers posed by ships belonging to Russia’s shadow fleet”. This latest episode has raised alarm in NATO as it is not isolated and is considered a continuation of a whole series of sabotage against energy infrastructure in the Baltic.
Let us recall that last year on October 10, a Chinese ship, the “Newnew Polar Bear” destroyed in a similar way, namely by dragging its anchor to the bottom, a 77 km long undersea gas pipeline connecting the Finnish and Estonian gas networks.
Not far from the Chinese ship in question, off the coast of the Gulf of Finland, was sailing the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker “Sevmorput”. Although the Finnish authorities have not been able to identify concrete evidence of the Russian ship’s involvement in the sabotage in question, suspicions of the Russian ship’s involvement in the destruction of the gas pipeline remain strong.
To the above episode, we should also add that of another Chinese ship, the “Yi Peng 3”, also in November 2023, which managed to disable undersea telecommunications cables between Finland, Germany and Sweden.
Finally, we should mention the sabotage against the Nord Stream pipeline system in September 2022, which transported natural gas from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. The pipeline in question (Nord Stream I), 1,222 km long and carrying 55 billion cubic meters (bcma), had been operating successfully since its completion in 2011 until the day an underwater explosion occurred on the seabed of the Baltic Sea off Denmark. The result was that both pipelines were completely disabled.
With Nord Stream II following a similar path to that of NS I. Although the construction of Nord Stream II had been completed by the beginning of 2022, it had not been put into operation after the German government refused to license it, succumbing to US pressure.
The Biden government had warned Berlin from the first moment it took office in January 2021 that it would consider the operation of Nord Stream II a hostile act, having at the same time incriminated the German political class for an energy partnership with Russia. There were many instances when Biden himself openly accused Berlin of excessive dependence on Russian gas, something that, as he had emphasized, “had to end”.
That is why when the explosion occurred on the bottom of the Baltic Sea on September 26, 2022, all suspicions turned to Washington and its allies. This was also revealed through extensive journalistic research by the respected American journalist Seymour Hersh (here).
Today, as the confrontation between Russia and the West and between Israel and Iran intensifies, assassinations of leading figures and sabotage at the military and energy levels, that is, behind enemy lines, have returned to the forefront. With sabotage being used alongside conventional warfare in order to hit the enemy on the widest possible spectrum.
The first to teach the necessity of a parallel underground and unorthodox war was the great politician and Prime Minister of Britain during World War II, Winston Churchill, who was so convinced of its necessity that he established, trained and manned a special branch of the armed forces (with the participation of all arms) under the supervision and organization of a shadowy ministry known as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and now officially, although secret for many years, the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
