Cooper made her comments on Wednesday after a demonstration on board the Finnish Border Guard ship Turva. It took part in a Dec. 31 operation to seize a cargo ship sailing from Russia to Israel, which was accused of deliberately damaging a cable between Helsinki and Estonia.
Finnish authorities demonstrated a mock operation similar to the one that seized the ship on New Year’s Eve. Cooper watched as five armed officers slid down a rope from a helicopter onto the deck and stormed the bridge, shouting: “Hands up.” The operation took around three minutes.
Cooper said after the demonstration: “The reason for being here is to see the work that Finland has been doing around the shadow fleet, and to look at what the further potential is for us to work with allies to strengthen that enforcement work.”
She name-checked work by France and Finland, while one U.K. official said she also intends to work with Norway.
Mari Rantanen, Finland’s interior minister, said the age of some Russian-linked tankers using northern shipping routes risks an ecologically disastrous oil spill. “These vessels, these tankers, are very old,” she told POLITICO. “They are not built [for] this kind of icy weather, and they are in very bad shape, so the environmental risk is huge.”
Mikko Simola, the commander of the Gulf of Finland coastguard, said he has seen “a rapid change since early 2022” in the prevalence of malign activity, for which Moscow denies responsibility.
Simola said he would let the courts decide who was culpable, but said it was “certainly very strange to believe that in a short period of time, many cable and gas pipe damages would happen by accident in the same area.”