By – Mansi Khetan
Abstract
When the tanker Eagle S dragged its anchor across the Gulf of Finland on Christmas Day 2024, severing five subsea cables, it exposed a legal order built for accidents rather than sabotage. The regime under the 1884 Convention and UNCLOS entrusts enforcement to the flag state, a division of labour that collapses when the offender sails under a flag of convenience for a hostile power. This article traces how Finland’s seizure of the vessel pushes against the conventional reading of coastal state power on the exclusive economic zone. It argues that, incident by incident, affected states are quietly forging a customary norm that treats deliberate harm to seabed infrastructure as a wrong the injured state may itself prosecute.
Introduction
The internet is usually imagined living somewhere ethereal, in a “cloud,” in the air, in this world. In truth it lives with the mud. Roughly ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of intercontinental data crosses the ocean floor through fibre-optic cables no thicker than a garden hose, and the countries that once fought over sea lanes now quietly circle the seabed beneath them. On Christmas Day 2024, that rivalry surfaced. The Eagle S, an oil tanker flying the flag of the Cook Islands and linked to Russia’s sanctions-dodging “shadow fleet,” dragged its anchor for nearly ninety kilometres across the floor of the Gulf of Finland, a giant fleeing the scene with the alarm still trailing behind it. It severed the Estlink 2 power cable connecting Finland and Estonia and four telecommunications cables, an outage that lasted more than seven months and cost up to €60 million to repair. Finland then did something almost no coastal state had dared: it boarded the ship. Nearly two years on, its own courts cannot agree whether it was allowed to do so. The clearest contrast is the Yi Peng 3 incident. After two Baltic cables were cut, Danish naval vessels shadowed the Chinese bulk carrier in the Kattegat for about a month. Sweden and Denmark never boarded it and only got on board as observers after Beijing agreed, before the ship sailed away.
The Architecture of the Pipelines
The law governing submarine cables was drafted keeping in mind the underlying problem of accidents and not malicious sabotage. Its foundational text, the 1884 Convention for Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables, conceived of the typical offender as a negligent fishing vessel accidentally snagging a line, a conception its modern successor, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), has largely inherited. Article 113 obliges every state to make the breaking of a cable a punishable offence, but it hands the punishing to the flag state, the country whose flag the offending ship flies. In a world of accidental damage by honest vessels, that division of labour is sensible enough. In a world of hybrid warfare, it is a trapdoor.
The Baltic sabotage campaign drove a tanker straight through it. When a hostile state wants to damage infrastructure without firing a shot, it does not use its navy; it uses a rusting tanker flying a flag of convenience, a registry like the Cook Islands, Panama or Liberia that sells its flag cheaply and enforces almost nothing. The flag state that is supposed to prosecute has neither the will nor the reach to do so. The sponsoring state never appears on the crew manifest. Thus, the coastal state whose lights actually went out is left holding a duty to criminalise but, on the conventional reading, little power to enforce beyond its narrow twelve-mile territorial sea.
The Eagle S case exposed this with almost cruel reality. On 3rd October 2025, the Helsinki District Court dismissed all charges against the captain and two officers for lack of jurisdiction, classifying the anchor-drag as an “incident of navigation” under Article 97 of UNCLOS, a category that reserves prosecution to the flag state or the states of which the crew are nationals. A ninety-kilometre gouge through five cables, causing tens of millions in damage, was reclassified as something close to a traffic accident at sea. The court even ordered the Finnish state to pay the defendants’ legal costs of around €195,000. Lawyers warned the ruling could leave ships flying flags of convenience free to damage undersea infrastructure in international waters without consequence. The loophole had not merely survived; a European court had just widened it. By treating a deliberate 90 km anchor-drag across five cables as a mere “incident of navigation” under Article 97 UNCLOS, the Helsinki District Court handed jurisdiction back to the flag state. That extended the flag-state gap from accidental damage to apparent sabotage.
The Coastal State’s Counter-Move
Finland’s response is where this story becomes more interesting because the other states refused to accept the rulebook they were handed. Consider the actions taken by Finland. With the Eagle S near its territorial waters, the Finnish prime minister authorised the extraordinary step of intercepting the tanker; the coast guard boarded it and escorted it to the port. The damage had occurred in Finland’s exclusive economic zone, where waters, under UNCLOS, foreign ships enjoy high-seas freedoms of navigation and a coastal state’s enforcement powers are supposed to be sharply limited. Boarding a foreign vessel there for a seabed offence stretches the conventional reading of the Convention to its seams. Finland was, in effect, asserting a protective jurisdiction over critical infrastructure that the treaty text does not cleanly grant.
Then came the reversal that makes this case genuinely live. This week, the Helsinki Court of Appeal overturned the district court, ruling that Finland does have jurisdiction because the events directly impacted the country, and ordering the case reopened. Its reasoning is the crucial move, as it held that the events did not amount to a “maritime accident” under UNCLOS at all; while the anchor’s initial drop might be regarded as accidental, what followed- dragging it across the seabed for kilometre after kilometre cannot be termed as accidental at all. Strip away the shield of “incident of navigation,” and Article 97’s grant of jurisdiction to the flag state simply falls away. What is left is a coastal state prosecuting harm that landed on its own shores.
This glorifies the quiet significance of the Eagle S. Customary international law is not written in a single treaty conference, it accretes through what states actually do and what other states tolerate. By boarding the tanker, seizing it, charging the crew and now securing a jurisdictional ruling grounded in effects rather than flags, Finland is helping build a norm that the 1884 drafters never contemplated. That is, deliberate, sustained damage to seabed infrastructure is not a private navigational mishap but a harm the injured state may itself prosecute. NATO’s parallel “Baltic Sentry” patrols, launched with frigates, aircraft and naval drones, are the muscle behind the same claim. The gray zone, it turns out, cuts both ways: hybrid aggression below the threshold of war is being met by lawfare below the threshold of the treaty.
Conclusion
The final irony worth naming is that the humans in the Helsinki dock were the ship’s master and officers, nationals of Georgia and India, employees of a management company, low in the chain and long since departed from Finland. The state whose strategy the incident allegedly served never once appeared as a party. This is the structural sleight of hand of the shadow fleet: a flag of convenience registry to launder responsibility, a Global South crew to absorb the legal risk, and a sponsoring power that remains, quite literally, offshore. Whatever the district court decides on retrial, the deeper lesson of the Eagle S is that the law of the sea was designed to catch clumsy sailors and not to reach the geopolitics conducted through them. The Baltic’s frayed cables are a reminder that the most contested territory of the coming decade may be the one no one can see, and that the rules meant to protect it are still, for now, being written one dragged anchor at a time.
About the Author:
Mansi Khetan is a fourth-year B.B.A. LL.B. student at Jindal Global Law School with research interests in constitutional law, international relations, and commercial litigation. She has interned with leading practitioners, published on contemporary legal issues, and writes on foreign policy and global governance.
Image Source: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202207/1270619.shtml