A Finnish court has dismissed a lawsuit against the crew of the “shadow fleet” tanker Eagle S, which damaged cables in the Baltic Sea

A court in Helsinki has ruled that Finland does not have jurisdiction to prosecute the crew of the oil tanker Eagle S, which was detained by the Finnish coast guard in December 2024 after damaging submarine cables. Reuters writes about this.

The case against the captain of the Eagle S and two crew members was dropped on Friday, October 3. The Helsinki District Court found that the broken cables were outside Finnish territorial waters, the Financial Times explains . This makes it difficult to hold the Eagle S crew accountable.

The lawyers for the crew members took the same position at the trial, the publication notes: they argued that Finland had no grounds for persecuting the sailors. The Finnish prosecutor's office demanded that the defendants be sentenced to 2.5 years in prison without the right to parole.

As the Finnish publication Yle notes, Eagle S crew members can now claim compensation of up to 195 thousand euros. The court in Helsinki has been considering this case since August. Finland thus became the first NATO country to bring charges against the captain and crew of a Russian “shadow fleet” vessel that damaged submarine cables in the Baltic Sea.

Eagle S, which left the Russian port of Ust-Luga on December 25 at 3:25 local time, was detained in the Gulf of Finland after damage to the EstLink 2 cable connecting Estonia and Finland. Before the rupture site, the Eagle S slowed down significantly and began to make strange circular maneuvers, data from monitoring services showed. The ship dragged its anchor nearly 100 km along the Baltic Sea floor, severing five electrical and telecommunications cables.