On the menu today: Join me out on the sea as the Finnish Border Guard show off their fast boats and discuss the threat of Russia’s hybrid warfare against underwater infrastructure in the Gulf of Finland, the lingering problems created by Russia’s shadow fleet, and Ukrainian drones entering Finnish airspace on their way to targets near Saint Petersburg. Then, a chat with the Finnish foreign minister, where she lays out how her government agrees with President Trump. Read on.
On the Trail of the Russian Shadow Fleet
The Gulf of Finland, south of Helsinki — I’m on board one of the Finnish Border Guard’s RV20-class coastal patrol vessels when a pair of rubber-hulled fast boats come zipping up behind us. The boats are with the Finnish Border Guard’s special intervention units, the guys who chase down suspicious vessels and climb on board. The fast boats, each carrying four masked operators, live up to their name, passing us on both sides with blazing speed, and our vessel rocks in the wakes created by the fast boats.
Captain Mikko Simola, the commander of the Gulf of Finland Coast Guard District, is showcasing his agency’s capabilities, and the challenge it faces, for a group of visiting American journalists.
On any given day, 2,000 ships are in the Baltic Sea, a fairly narrow and shallow body of water. A significant portion of those ships are part of the Russian shadow fleet, smuggling oil sanctioned by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Simola said that the waters off Finland see the same number of vessels passing by as before the sanctions went into effect, but now the boats are older, the crews less well-trained and reliable, and the ships’ flags and ensigns (signaling their official country of origin) and the paperwork of who actually owns them and runs them are often a deliberately obfuscatory and confusing mess. Earlier in the week, I mentioned the ongoing efforts to jam global positioning signals in the Gulf of Finland; Simola tells me, “This year, we’ve had ships radioing our command center, asking, ‘Please give us our position, we don’t know where we are.’”
The Finnish Border Guard is considered part of the national armed forces, but reports to the country’s Ministry of Interior, not the Ministry of Defense, much like the way the U.S. Coast Guard is part of the U.S. armed forces but reports to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
On top of that, vessels in the Russian shadow fleet often attempt to spoof their position. So not only is the GPS sometimes jammed, sometimes the transponder’s reported locations of the ships don’t match up with reality. While all this jamming and spoofing hasn’t caused a large-scale collision yet, it’s a pressing concern for the Finnish Border Guard.
In addition to all the oil tankers moving east and west, large ferries regularly transit between Helsinki on the north side of the Gulf of Finland and Tallinn, Estonia, on the south side. Simola mentions the nightmare scenario would be a nighttime collision between a passenger ferry and an oil or chemical tanker that has a false sense of where it is because of GPS jamming or spoofing.
Besides transporting sanctioned oil, the Russian-aligned tankers sometimes do extra favors for Moscow’s interests by deliberately damaging undersea cables and other critical underwater infrastructure.
In December 2024, the Estlink 2 electricity cable and multiple telecommunications lines were damaged by a vessel named Eagle S, suspected of being part of Russia’s shadow fleet. The Eagle S, flying the Cook Islands flag, noticeably slowed down while passing over the cable around the time the transmission was disrupted. (The Eagle S, operating under different names, had already had a collision in 2012 and an oil spill in 2014.) The Finnish government charged the captain and two senior officers with aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference with communications, contending the crew cut five submarine cables in the Gulf of Finland by “dragging its anchor on the seabed for about 90 kilometers.” But in October, the Helsinki District Court interpreted Articles 97 and 113 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that “jurisdiction lay only with the flag state of the vessel (in this case, the Cook Islands) or with the nationality of the crew (Georgia and India).”
About one year later, a Finnish patrol ship and helicopter detained a cargo vessel, the Fitburg, sailing from Saint Petersburg to the port of Haifa in Israel, under the flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. They had determined that the Fitburg had dragged its anchor and damaged a cable owned by Finnish telecom operator Elisa. The operator said in a statement that the damage had “not affected the functionality of Elisa’s services in any way,” and its services had been rerouted.
As the Small Wars Journal writes:
Upon inspection, her cargo was found to be Russian steel, subject to EU sanctions. While the vessel and crew could not be held liable for attempting to trade sanctioned cargo in the EU, as it was brought into port by Finnish authorities, the cargo was seized pursuant to EU sanctions. As the incident also took place outside of Finnish territorial waters, but within its EEZ, the pending (as of mid-January 2026) criminal case against the Fitburg’s crew will be instructive on whether Finnish courts continue or change course relative to UNCLOS Articles 97 and 113. But, regardless, the seized cargo in the Fitburg case has imposed some additional cost against Russia.
In addition, Simola says his crews have noticed a significantly larger presence of Russian naval vessels in the Gulf of Finland. He said the Russian naval vessels are not escorting particular ships in the shadow fleet, but they are definitely making their presence known.
The Russian ships that are carrying oil westward are often coming from the Russian oil terminal at Ust-Luga just beyond the Estonian border and the port of Primorsk, just beyond the Finnish border. Roughly 42 percent of Russia’s oil flows through those two terminals. As I mentioned earlier this week, the Ukrainian military executed some creative redecorating of those two sites with drones in the month of April. Simola said that Finnish Border Guard staff could see the explosions from their easternmost Coast Guard station. He said that so far, there had been no signs of significant oil spills from the drone attacks.
But this doesn’t make the Finns particularly welcoming of Ukrainian drones in their airspace. The Ukrainian drones come in waves, and it is possible that the drones that have entered Finnish airspace — and in some cases, crashing on Finnish territory, although there’s been no significant damage so far — may have been driven off course by Russian air defense or electronic countermeasures.
“We have the responsibility to investigate these incidents,” Simola said. “Every time there is a territorial violation, it is our responsibility.”
In addition to all of this, the Gulf of Finland Coast Guard District handles about 1,000 search-and-rescue missions per year. He said spring was their busy season, as boaters take out vessels that sometimes haven’t been properly maintained during the long winters.
‘We Have Exactly the Same Position as President Trump’
Back on land, my little band of American reporters traveled to the Finnish parliament for a meeting with the country’s foreign minister, Elina Valtonen. I asked her how membership in NATO was treating her country so far, and how she felt when she heard President Trump speaking about the NATO alliance in less-than-glowing ways.
“First of all, we have exactly the same position as President Trump in the sense that we think that NATO is not at its full potential yet, because most of the European countries have not invested enough in the past years in their defense and deterrence,” Valtonen began. “Finland certainly has; always has, because we take these things extremely seriously. It’s an existential question for us. We have a very long border with Russia, and we know that the world on the other side of the border is completely different from what we hold dear as values — the rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech — all of these issues which [are] totally suppressed in Russia. Not to mention how prosperous you can be, because [in Russia] you don’t even own your company in the end, if it becomes too successful.”
She continued:
So, we have been meeting that, and we take pride in the fact that we, together with Sweden, are net contributors to NATO. And we are so glad that last summer in Hague, we were able to make the decision that each and every member state is going to raise their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP.
Having said that, I am a true believer in support of trans-Atlanticism, and I think together Europe and the United States can be so much stronger not only through NATO, but I hope also one day, trade. My dream is still that we would have a free trade agreement, if not a single market within NATO, because at the end of the day what supports our values best is the market economy. So that would be the next step.
Raise your hand if you foresaw me going to one of the Nordic countries and finding a government official singing the praises of free-market economics to ensure prosperity, stability, and safety.
ADDENDUM: The water temperature in the Baltic Sea near Helsinki is five degrees Celsius, which is somewhere around 41 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit. I know this because I went into the water — deliberately — six times in the Finnish sauna Löyly. I am either getting more adventurous, or dumber, as I age.