By Anne Kauranen
HELSINKI, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Finland's Border Guard hopes to prevent damage to critical undersea infrastructure in the Gulf of Finland with a maritime surveillance centre it plans to set up in cooperation with other Baltic Sea states and the EU Commission, it said on Monday.
The Baltic Sea region has been on high alert after a string of power cable, telecom link and gas pipeline outages since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The most recent incident occurred on New Year's Eve when Finnish authorities seized a cargo vessel en route from Russia to Israel on suspicion of sabotaging an undersea telecoms cable.
While NATO has boosted its military presence in the region with frigates, aircraft and naval drones, the Finnish surveillance centre is part of a joint action plan that the European Commission proposed to enhance the security of submarine cables in February last year, the Border Guard said.
"We are developing, and we have the need for, broader preventive measures, even before any harm has occurred," Mikko Hirvi, Head of Maritime Safety and Security at the Finnish Border Guard, told Reuters.
The preventive measures include sensors in the seabed, artificial intelligence solutions for enhanced and real-time analysis of maritime traffic and exchanging information on vessels with allies, he added, declining to comment on which capabilities were already operational.
Hirvi said the surveillance centre would be built gradually, drawing on the Border Guard's existing capabilities, and that Finland planned also to seek EU funding for it.
After a Chinese container ship sailed on after damaging a gas pipeline and cables in the Baltic seabed in 2023, Finnish authorities have boarded and seized two vessels - the oil tanker Eagle S in December 2024 and the cargo vessel Fitburg in December 2025 - on suspicion that they had severed undersea cables by dragging their anchors.
By seizing the ships, authorities managed to prevent further damage from happening, Hirvi said.
Mikko Simola, commander of the Gulf of Finland Coast Guard District, said factors to be monitored included unusual deviations in vessels' speed or course.
"For the past year in particular, we have focused on obtaining real-time information about vessel deviations," he told Reuters.
(Reporting by Anne Kauranen in HelsinkiEditing by Gareth Jones)
