“External impact” Damaged Russian Cable

An underwater Russian Baltic Sea telecoms cable was damaged by an "external impact," Russia's TASS news agency cited the country's state-owned Rostelecom company as saying on Saturday.

"Rostelecom's submarine cable was damaged in the Baltic Sea as a result of an external impact some time ago," TASS cited Rostelecom as saying.

Restoration work is under way and the incident has had no impact on subscribers so far, Rostelecom added.

Rostelecom did not provide further details and it was unclear when the damage occurred. Finland's coast guard said earlier on Saturday on platform X that it was monitoring a Russian vessel repairing a broken Russian cable in the Gulf of Finland.

The Baltic Sea region has been on high alert after a string of outages affecting power cables, telecom links and gas pipelines between the Baltics and Sweden or Finland, leading to increased surveillance operations by NATO members.

All were believed to have been caused by ships dragging anchors along the seabed following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russia has denied any involvement.

(Reuters - Writing by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Additional reporting by Essi Lehto in Helsinki; Editing by Matthew Lewis)