Estonian PM intends to engage NATO forces to protect infrastructures in the Baltic Sea

Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal intends to engage NATO maritime forces to protect critical infrastructures in the Baltic Sea. He said at a press conference on December 26.

"I will contact the NATO secretary general to discuss strengthening or upgrading the fleet to protect underwater infrastructure," the Postimees newspaper quoted him as saying.

In his opinion, there should have been more active on the issue.

"The most important thing is that the level of monitoring and protection of critical infrastructure be raised. We will ask allies for help in this regard," Mihal said.

He also pointed out the need to protect not only underwater but also land-based infrastructure.

The EstLink 2 DC cable between Estonia and Finland suffered an emergency outage on December 25. The Estonian operator of electricity and gas supply networks Elering reported that the cause of the incident is unknown, but the reliability of power supply to the Republic is ensured, and reserve capacities are used to compensate for the lack of electricity, reports "Gazeta.Ru"

Earlier in the day, the Finnish police stopped the tanker Eagle S under the flag of the Kukapo Islands on suspicion of cable breakage in the Baltic. The head of the police said that the police had reason to believe that this tanker was involved in the cable break.

Later, on December 26, Estonian broadcaster ERR reported that three more submarine cables between Finland and Estonia were interrupted. Elisa Eesti AS and CITIC Telecom CPC, the companies that own the cables, promptly started working on fixing the problems, and the outages had no noticeable impact on users. Nevertheless, the Estonian government decided to hold an emergency meeting about the incident.