Secretary General Rutte says he intends to strengthen NATO’s presence in the Baltic Sea
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance intends to strengthen its presence in the Baltic Sea amid the incident with an electric cable connecting Finland and Estonia.
‘NATO will strengthen its military presence in the Baltic Sea,’ Rutte wrote on the X network following talks with Finnish President Alexander Stubb. He also said the conversation included a discussion of the investigation into the incident.
The EstLink 2 power line between Finland and Estonia went down on Wednesday, Finnish power grid company Fingrid reported. The cause of the resulting fault is unknown. Finnish police said they were investigating whether a foreign cargo ship was involved in the power cable outage. According to Fingrid, there were two vessels near the cable at the time of the outage.
There are currently two electricity connections between Estonia and Finland. EstLink 1 with a capacity of 350 MW was commissioned in 2006 and EstLink 2 with a capacity of 650 MW was commissioned in 2014. EstLink 2 consists of converter stations in Estonia and Finland and more than 170 kilometres of DC lines, of which about 145 kilometres are laid under water.
