Finland just jailed a Russian captain for sabotaging NATO undersea cables

A Finnish court just convicted a Russian ship captain of wrecking undersea cables in the Baltic Sea.

And this is one of the first times anywhere that a crew has actually been found guilty of this kind of sabotage.

The Helsinki District Court handed down the verdict today.

Andrei Maksimenko is the Russian captain of the cargo ship Fitburg. He's 57. He just got three years and six months in prison.

Vusal Majidov is the ship's boatswain. He's 48 and from Azerbaijan. He got two years and ten months.

Three judges decided this. All three agreed. The trial ran eight days, spread across September and October.

So what did they actually do?

The court says they dragged the Fitburg's anchor along the seabed on purpose. For about 130 kilometres. That anchor cut two undersea cables owned by Elisa, the ones that connect Helsinki and Tallinn.

Here's the ship itself. The Fitburg is 132 metres long, flagged to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. It was sailing from St Petersburg in Russia to Haifa in Israel, loaded with steel. Finnish authorities seized it in the Gulf of Finland on 31 December last year. There were 14 crew on board, from Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

And it gets worse. The court says that same anchor crossed several other cables and a gas pipeline too, putting them at risk as well. Reports don't agree on the exact number — some say seven more cables plus the pipeline, others say nine. That detail hasn't been settled.

Now the money. The court ordered both men to jointly pay about €1.9 million in damages. Maksimenko has to pay another €85,000 on top of that, by himself.

Prosecutors had asked for at least two and a half years each. The judges went higher than that.

There was a second charge too — aggravated interference with telecommunications. The court dropped that one, because it said the damage conviction already covered it.