Finnish authorities seize ship and crew after undersea cable cut, pursuing criminal charges — Finnish special forces board ship, detain all 14 crewmembers
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(Image credit: Getty / Eoneren)
At around 5 a.m. local time, an undersea telecommunications cable between Estonia and Finland was damaged for the fourth time in roughly 1.5 years. Finnish special forces have taken control of the cargo ship Fitburg, detained its 14-member crew, and revealed that they were citizens of Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan.
Authorities are currently investigating whether the vessel's movement and anchoring caused the incident, reports Postimees. Despite the damage, the owner of the cable claims connectivity remains intact due to extensive network redundancy.
Elisa, a leading telecom provider in Estonia and Finland and the cable's owner, alerted authorities under standard incident protocols at around 5 a.m. Although the fault was located inside Estonia's exclusive economic zone, the ship crossed into Finnish waters shortly afterward, which allowed Finnish authorities to detain the vessel and open a criminal case. When the ship was detained, its anchor chain was in the sea, the report notes.
Officials emphasize that the communications infrastructure between Estonia and neighboring countries is very redundant: Estonia is connected abroad via 12 international cables, so the loss of individual links does not translate into systemic outages.
“We could talk about a critical situation only if just one cable were still operational, but at the moment we have a significant margin,” said Liisa Pakosta, Estonia’s justice and digital affairs minister. “It is also worth noting that such breakdowns are usually not even reported, because they occur fairly often. One of the cables runs between Läänemaa and Hiiumaa — it is not part of these 12 and is a local cable. But communications on Hiiumaa are also functioning.”
Automatic Identification System (AIS) records from MarineTraffic indicate that near the route of Elisa’s submarine cable, Fitburg slowed from 8.9 to 7.3 knots, with a multi-minute data gap suggesting speed may have dropped even further. This naturally causes suspicions that the vessel’s anchor hit the cable when the AIS was disabled.
The ship in question is the Fitburg, a 132.2-meter general cargo vessel built in 2001. The vessel is currently owned by Turkey-based Fitburg Shipping Co Ltd (which happens to be a single-vessel company) and the ship sails under the flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines as of August 1, 2025. Safety management and commercial operations of the vessel are handled by Istanbul-based Sarfo Denizcilik ve Ticaret A.Ş and Albros Shipping & Trading Co. For now, the actual beneficiaries of Fitburg Shipping Co Ltd and Albros are unknown. Meanwhile, there is a growing list of evidence that Albros manages vessels that carry cargo of Russia origin.
This new cable damage episode adds to an already long list of similar incidents in the Gulf of Finland in recent quarters. In just 1.5 years, cables and pipelines in the Gulf of Finland were damaged three other times: On October 8, 2023 the Balticconnector gas pipeline, along with multiple telco cables between Estonia and Finland were damaged. On November 17, 2024,
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
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