Finnish Government to Make Announcement on Gas Pipeline Leak in Gulf of Finland

Prime minister says it is considered not possible to be a normal fault, but that it is "because of external influence". No effect on Finnish needs for gas or communication. The Finnish Border Guard said that the damage was clearly not just a normal leak. National Bureau of Investigation is suggesting one might call it "aggravated vandalism".

Finnish Transport and Communications Agency says communication cable cut has no impact whatsoever as they have failovers.

Reporter questions:

Q: Was it Russia? A: Will not speculate.

Q: What will you do next? A: Gather evidence at the scene, see if there is a connection between the two connections being cut.

Q: How far are the damaged spots from each other? A: The cables are not right next to each other, but in the overall same area.

Q: How large is the damage? A: Large enough that it is clearly intentional damage.

Q: Did you see any ships or quakes? A: No explosion-like quakes. There is always a lot of traffic in the area.

Q: Heard there was a Russian research vessel called Sibiryakov in that area in September? A: Will not comment, there are always many ships of different origin in the area.

Q: Is there a growing military threat near the Finnish border after the incident? A: No.

Q: Is it clearly an explosion or could it be something else? A: It looks like it was not an explosion. It is currently difficult to investigate because of the conditions at sea.

Q: What does it mean that your "current responsiveness is elevated"? A: No we are operating as normal, but we are just paying some extra attention to these connections. Will not give details in what way.

The press conference is now over.

As we know, there's no Russian pipeline gas sales. Estonia and Finland were building floating LNG terminals, one in each country but also collaborating. It is expensive. A floating LNG terminal is basically a rented LNG tanker that has gasification equipment onboard. It's next to a pier with a natural gas pipe. In the end it was placed in Finland. The Estonian terminal construction was halted. Tanker is rented from USA. LNG is brought to the floating terminal, gasified, put to pipe network. There's this pipe between Finland and Estonia too.

Finland actually buys and ships the LNG for the terminal from ... Russia! This is because of existing contracts that can't be breached because there's no EU wide sanction for LNG buying from Russia.

Finland does not heat any houses with gas (There was a little bit in district heating). Also Finland has energy abundance since Olkiluoto 3 coming online and massive amounts of wind built in the last years. Also hydro and great grid connections to Sweden, Norway and Estonia. I think there has been very little use for the LNG in Finland.

Estonia is still grid connected to Finland and grid and gas connected to Latvia. Closest LNG terminal in the pipeline network is in Klaipeda, Lithuania. There's also the aborted LNG terminal in Estonia's Paldiski that's relatively far along.

So the real target of this attack could be Estonia and Baltic states in general.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putin-prepares-for-poss...

I hope this isn't the start of some campaign.

Russia is suspected.

Wikipedia page on the pipe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balticconnector

I get in the forums people would say all kinds of things, but for government officials, you would think they would know not to talk before they know for sure....