MOSCOW, December 27. /TASS/. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to comment on the boarding of a Cook Islands-registered oil tanker by Finland on suspicion it had caused the outage of the EstLink 2 undersea power cable and two other lines connecting Estonia and Finland.
"I cannot say anything for sure, for this is a highly specialized issue that the presidential administration is hardly in a position to comment on," Peskov said, when asked by a Reuters reporter to comment on the latest Finnish move.
On December 25, Reuters reported that Finland’s police and border guards have detained an oil tanker, which flies under the flag of the Cook Islands, suspecting that an anchor of the vessel may have damaged the EstLink 2 cable.
On Wednesday, the underwater power cable, which connects Finland’s energy grid with Estonia through the bottom of the Gulf of Finland, was disconnected due to an emergency. The circumstances behind the incident are currently being established. Later, the Postimees newspaper said that Estonian companies had reported damage to three telecommunication cables between the two countries. On November 17 and 18, two cables in the Baltic Sea were damaged, one connecting Germany and Finland, and the other Sweden and Lithuania.