The Finnish Intelligence Agency Skeptical That Russia Is Sabotaging Cables

The agency (SUPO) released their 2026 National Review a few days ago: https://supo.fi/en/growing-tensions-in-the-baltic-sea. It stated that Russia has not engaged in sabotage against Finland. The agency did not qualify that statement in any respect. So in their view there is no evidence that sabotage is responsible for outages of power or fibre optic cables landing in Finland. The majority of the Baltic Sea cable outages have involved Finland.


1. The agency notes that Russia sabotaging cables would not be in its self-interest as it might jeopardize the Baltic Sea freedom of navigation crucial to its war effort.

"According to the SUPO’s assessment, Russia is making every effort to safeguard its opportunities to practise free shipping. The country will not take any voluntary risks that could deteriorate its freedom of navigation. To Russia, the Baltic Sea is also an undersea channel to the West: most of the network traffic from Russia to the West is transmitted via cables in the Baltic Sea."

"State influencing activities always have a goal and a motive, and they must somehow benefit the perpetrator. Just causing confusion is not a sufficient reason to engage in risky actions that have had negative consequences even for Russia. The incidents of ships dragging their anchors in recent years have damaged not only Western undersea infrastructure but also Russia’s own infrastructure."

I agree. There is little Russian advantage to targeting Baltic Sea cables when Western countries could retaliate by preventing the Shadow Fleet from reaching Russia's most important port, St. Petersburg. Even random inspections would create Baltic Sea traffic jams and deprive Russia of revenue and arms. And yes, Russian telecommunications traffic traverses those Baltic cables as well. Most Russian carriers use Helsinki as a telecom hub. If you are not connected to Europe, how do you hack it? 😄

2. According to SUPO, Baltic Sea freight traffic has sharply increased due to the Russian shadow fleet and these "vessels are usually old and in poor condition." The report also notes that Baltic Sea is extremely shallow and the number of cables have doubled over the last five years. SUPO is really suggesting that conditions are prefect for cable sea outages: more cables, more shipping traffic, and shallow waters.

3. SUPO also asserts that there has been no uptick in outages. They clearly believe that public concern about recent outages reflects media attention, not an unusual increase in the number of incidents.

4. SUPO also points out that Baltic telecommunications is highly resilient. Even multiple simultaneous subsea outages have little impact on the regional Internet: "On the other hand, the network connections Finland has to Europe, for example, are highly fault-tolerant. Even several simultaneous cable failures would do nothing more than slow down the connections.".

Screenshot of Finnish Intelligence Article on Subsea Cable Sabotage


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