Chinese-owned ship ‘unintentionally’ behind Baltic pipeline damage: Report

China has not answered “a legal aid request” from NATO allies investigating the damage done to an undersea pipeline linking Finland and Estonia last year, according to Estonian officials, following a report that Beijing acknowledged the involvement of a Chinese-owned ship.

“We submitted a legal aid request to the Chinese authorities to gather evidence from the vessel and its crew,” Kairi Küngas, who leads the public relations department of the Estonian prosecutor’s office, said Monday. “The Chinese authorities have not provided a response on executing the legal aid request as of yet.”

Baltic investigators have assessed that the damage, which Estonian officials regarded as a “man-made disaster” redolent of Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics, was caused by the anchor from a Chinese-owned vessel. Chinese authorities reportedly have acknowledged the ship’s involvement and described the incident as unintentional.

“The South China Morning Post understands that the Chinese authorities conducted an internal investigation and recently communicated the results to governments in the European countries,” the Hong Kong-based media outlet reported on Monday. “The Chinese-language report said the accident was the result of a strong storm.”

Finland and Estonia avoided confirming the transmission of those results, giving guarded statements about their dialogues with Beijing.

“We constantly cooperate with China and exchange information, but we do not go into details because the investigation is still in progress,” Estonian Foreign Affairs Minister Elina Valtonen said Monday.

Chinese officials emphasized “the poor sea conditions at the time” in the first weeks after the incident, which took place in October 2023. Yet senior European officials have cast doubt on the idea that the damage could have been inflicted accidentally, given the extent of the “wide dragging trail” of an anchor found on the seafloor near the pipeline.

“I’m not the sea captain. But I would think that you would notice that you’re dragging an anchor behind you for hundreds of kilometers,” Finnish European Affairs Minister Anders Adlercreutz said in December. “I think everything indicates that it was intentional. But of course, so far, nobody has admitted to it.”

China has emerged as an indispensable patron of Russia during the war in Ukraine, according to NATO, particularly through support for its defense industry. Baltic analysts have worried about the security of undersea cables and pipelines for years, but their vulnerability took on a new salience in 2022, with the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a dormant yet controversial Russian project to transport natural gas to Germany without having to use pipeline networks that pass through Ukrainian territory. 

Western officials have said they believe “a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack,” according to the New York Times. Sweden and Denmark closed their investigations without identifying a perpetrator, while Russian officials accused the United States of orchestrating the incident.

China’s reported assessment was not sent to the Estonian prosecutor’s office, according to Kungas, who implied that a document of the sort reportedly transmitted “can’t be used as evidence in an Estonian criminal investigation.” Finnish officials likewise emphasized the need for “legal assistance” from China. 

“It must be stated that the investigation is still ongoing, and final conclusions [regarding] what was behind these incidents (technical failure, negligence/poor seamanship, deliberate act), can be made only after all necessary investigative measures have been finalized, and this will still take some time,” Anna Zareff, communications director for the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, said Monday.