Beyond the Eagle S: how Yi Peng 3 and Newnew Polar Bear wreaked havoc in the Baltic Sea
On Christmas Day in 2024, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo was at home for the holidays when he received an unexpected phone call from the Finnish Border Guard.
Orpo was told that a critical undersea electric cable, the Estlink-2, had been severely damaged about 50 miles off the coast of Finland.
The Border Guard suspected that the cable had been deliberately severed by an oil tanker, the Eagle S. By that evening, the ship had been dragging its anchor for 66 miles.
Orpo then took an extraordinary step: he signed off on special forces boarding the ship and taking control before it caused more damage to critical undersea infrastructure.
An armed team of special forces dropped onto the ship by helicopter and seized control from about two dozen of the crew, most of them from Georgia and India.
"It was [the] first time [since] the second World War, when Finnish troops boarded a boat," Helsinki Chief of Police Jari Liukku told 60 Minutes.
Orpo suspects that Russia, which has been operating a shadow fleet of oil tankers in the Baltic Sea since the start of the war in Ukraine, may be responsible.
He sees it as part of a larger pattern of Russian aggression: sending aircraft into NATO airspace, firebombings, assaults on rail and arms depots, and explosive packages.
"Does it feel as though Russia is probing and prodding to find soft spots in not just Finland's defenses, but NATO's?" 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Orpo.
"This is their way to try to harm us, make us afraid," the prime minister answered.
60 Minutes producer Oriana Zill de Granados heard about the storming of the Eagle S from a U.S. government source based in Finland. 60 Minutes then pursued a seven-month investigation into the incident.
"They alerted me to the Eagle S, and they basically told me this is the first time that anyone has boarded one of these ships and really stopped the ship," Zill de Granados told 60 Minutes Overtime.
"I felt it was an important story to cover because, while we can't directly prove Russia's involvement, certainly Russia is involved behind the scenes with the shadow fleet."
The Russian shadow fleet is a network of hundreds of ships that evade sanctions and sell Russian oil, mainly to China and India, at a price higher than western sanctions allow.
"We found that a major Russian oil company, right after the sanctions were put into place, agreed in advance to lease these ships," Zill de Grandos told Overtime.
"In one example, they gave $35 million to lease a ship for two years. The broker used that $35 million to buy the ship," she said, referring to the Kudos Stars, a vessel that is now sanctioned by the European Union, United Kingdom, and Canada.
In the case of the Eagle S, the ownership was hidden in shell companies. "It was very hard to find out who actually owned the Eagle S and who was controlling it. But in the end, we came to believe that the Russian oil company that had leased it was actually controlling [the Eagle S]," Zill de Granados told 60 Minutes Overtime.
Russia today is selling as much oil as it was before the sanctions, according to Orpo.
"We didn't have these kinds of incidents before war started in Ukraine… and when [the] shadow fleet started to work by [the] Baltic Sea, we have had these incidents," Orpo told 60 Minutes.
The seven-month 60 Minutes investigation found that other similarly suspicious incidents had occurred in the Baltic Sea after the start of war in Ukraine.
In October 2023, a Hong Kong-registered container, the Newnew Polar Bear, left a Russian port and sailed into the Baltic Sea accompanied by a Russian cargo ship.
Finnish investigators say the Newnew Polar Bear damaged two telecommunications cables and the Balticconnector gas pipeline by dragging its anchor along the seabed.
"Its anchor, which we actually found [on] the seabed, had caused the Balticconnector damage, a gas pipeline between Estonia and Finland, and one data transmission cable between Finland and Estonia," Finnish investigator Risto Lohi told 60 Minutes.
In November 2024, a Chinese ship called the Yi Peng 3 left a Russian port with Russian fertilizer on board. It dragged its port anchor behind it for a day and a half and severed two undersea data cables. In the vicinity of the second cable, it turned off its transponder, a device that provides the real-time location data for the ship.
"In both of these previous cases, we have been able to find out… those vessels at that time caused the damages to our critical infrastructure," Lohi told 60 Minutes.
The investigations into Newnew Polar Bear and Yi Peng 3 are still ongoing. China says the Yi Peng 3 incident was an "accident."
NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Keith Blount said putting the anchor out and dragging it along the seabed, damaging cables, is "stupid" and "something you've got to try really hard to achieve."
He said the captain of the Eagle S's claim that the incident was an accident was "not credible."
"Even just having the anchor out at the full extent of its length… it's still going to have an effect on the way the ship handles, the way the ship turns," Blount told Whitaker.
"I'm genuinely surprised that he should claim that to be the case."
In response to the Eagle S incident, NATO set up Baltic Sentry, an operation that uses ships and planes to monitor critical undersea infrastructure and the Russian shadow fleet's activity in the Baltic Sea.
"And of course we haven't seen another incident since we established Baltic Sentry." Blount told Whitaker.
"We're not gonna be pushed around, interfered with. We're not going to be subject to illegal behaviors that either threaten the rule of law, or worse, threaten the safety and security of our people."
The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Patrick Lee. Jane Greeley was the broadcast associate. Data reporting by Joanne Stocker. Graphics by Bruce Jensen.
Photograph of Newnew Polar Bear courtesy of Jerzy Nowak.