On November 19, a ship belonging to China was spotted in the Baltic Sea. The day before, it was moving near two damaged submarine cables.
This was reported by the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.
Earlier, the Finnish state-owned company Cinia said that its C-Lion1 submarine cable between Finland and Germany had broken in the Baltic Sea. Later, Telia Lietuva reported that the communication cable between Lithuania and Sweden was also damaged.
Two Danish warships tracked Yi Peng 3, Hufvudstadsbladet writes. This is a 217-meter-long cargo ship owned by the PRC company Ningbo Yipeng Shipping.
Around noon on November 19, Yi Peng 3 was heading north between the Danish islands of Funen and Zeeland.
Petri Salmén / HS
It appears to have been moving near both of the damaged wires — between Finland and Germany and between Lithuania and Sweden — at the time the faults were discovered.
The information was disseminated by OSINT analysts — they drew conclusions based on open data. The cable between Sweden and Lithuania broke on November 17, around 10:00 a.m. Finnish time. According to shipping monitoring service Marinetraffic, the Yi Peng 3 was in the area shortly before 10 a.m.
The same PRC vessel passed near the C-Lion1 cable between Germany and Finland at 04:04 am on November 18. The accident was discovered around the same time. The Yi Peng 3 left the Mediterranean about a month ago and headed across the Baltic Sea to Russia, according to Marinetraffic. The dry cargo stopped in the Russian port of Ust-Luga on the Gulf of Finland. From there, the ship apparently headed southwest on November 11.
Balticconnector accident in 2023
The movement of a Chinese vessel near the cables does not guarantee that the Yi Peng 3 is responsible for the malfunctioning of the wires. However, the incident has something in common with last yearʼs leak from the Balticconnector gas pipeline and damage to a telecommunications cable in the Estonian economic zone, the media writes.
Helsinki was informed that the leak from the gas pipeline occurred "due to external activity". No traces of explosives were found. Sweden later said that a third line connecting Stockholm and Tallinn was damaged around the same time as the other two.
The case involves the Chinese vessel NewNew Polar Bear and the Russian Sevmorput. Finlandʼs National Bureau of Investigation claims that the gas pipeline damaged the anchor, which was found at the bottom of the sea. And Estonia considers three cases of damage to underwater gas pipelines and cables to be "related".
In August 2024, China admitted that it was its ship that damaged the Balticconnector pipeline.
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