Finnish Court Jails Russian Captain 3.5 Years Over Baltic Cable Damage

A Finnish court has convicted the captain and a senior crew member of the cargo ship Fitburg for damaging two undersea telecommunications cables in the Gulf of Finland.

The Helsinki District Court ruled Thursday, Nov. 5, that both men were guilty of aggravated criminal damage. English-language reports also render the offense as aggravated sabotage. The Russian captain got three years and six months. The Azerbaijani crew member, a boatswain, got two years and 10 months.

What the court found

The 132-metre Fitburg left St. Petersburg on Dec. 30, 2025, flagged in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and bound for Haifa, Israel. Finnish authorities seized it on Dec. 31 after it was found dragging its anchor.

The court said the ship pulled its anchor along the seabed for about 130 kilometers (80 miles). It said the anchor's locking mechanism worked properly and that the anchor had been raised when the ship left St. Petersburg.

According to Finnish broadcaster Yle, the court concluded the anchor was lowered before the vessel left Russian territorial waters. The trailing gear crossed nine telecom and electricity cables and one gas pipeline. Two telecom cables, belonging to Elisa and Arelion, were damaged. Seven other cables and the pipeline were put at risk.

The court's statement said the defendants acted intentionally. It also found the limited damage, compared with what could have happened, was partly down to chance.

No order to drop the anchor

The case did not rest on direct evidence. The indictment did not allege the captain explicitly ordered the anchor lowered, and Yle reported the court did not establish that either man personally lowered it.

The judges instead ruled that both men must have known the anchor was dragging while the ship kept moving. The captain was found to have accepted the continued passage. The boatswain was found to have contributed to it, including after Finnish authorities contacted the ship, according to Yle.

The court dismissed a separate charge of aggravated interference with telecommunications, saying the sabotage counts already covered it.

Money and custody

The defendants were ordered to pay compensation for the costs of examining and repairing the cables. Reuters reported the total at roughly €1.9 million ($2.1 million), with the captain owing about €85,000 more.

Yle named the captain as Andrei Maksimenko and the boatswain as Vusal Majidov. It reported both men were taken into custody after the verdict and that the sentences exceeded the prosecution's minimum request of two and a half years.

The defense

Both men deny wrongdoing. They have also challenged Finland's jurisdiction over the case, according to Deutsche Welle. The judgment is not final and can be appealed.

The jurisdiction question carries weight here. Euronews reports the Elisa cable sits in Estonia's exclusive economic zone, while Finnish police said they found the ship in Finland's exclusive economic zone. The sources do not say how the court resolved the question, and that is likely to be central on appeal.

Other findings from the investigation

Finnish customs determined in January that the ship's steel cargo was subject to sanctions against Russia. No criminal investigation followed, because the products entered Finnish territorial waters only when authorities ordered the ship to move. The Finnish Transport and Communications Agency inspected the vessel and found no severe deficiencies.

A rare conviction

The Baltic has seen a run of damaged cables and pipelines since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and many political leaders and experts see them as part of a hybrid campaign. Eight NATO countries bordering the Baltic have been on high alert, and NATO has added patrol frigates, aircraft and naval drones.

Prosecutions have been harder. Finnish authorities boarded the Russian-linked tanker Eagle S in December 2024 after damage to power and telecom links, and a Finnish court later dismissed that case. Euronews reports prosecutors there failed to prove intent. In the Fitburg case the court found intent without evidence of who gave an order, which is a lower evidentiary bar than a direct-order theory.

The Associated Press has tracked around 200 incidents of sabotage and malign activity across Europe that Western officials blame on Russia since the invasion. The Fitburg verdict does not say that the Russian state directed this one. It convicts two crew members of knowingly dragging an anchor through critical infrastructure.

Whether the sentences survive depends on the appeal, where the jurisdiction challenge and the court's inference of knowledge will be tested. No appeal hearing date has been reported.