The Foreign Ministry denied NATO's claims about Russia's involvement in the damage to cables in the Baltic Sea

The statements that there is allegedly a Russian trace in the damage of cables at the bottom of the Baltic Sea are needed in order to limit oil exports from Russia as well as shipping in the water area. This was announced by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova at a briefing on January 16.

"The real purpose of this is to restrict Russian oil exports by any means in order to create preconditions for imposing restrictions on international navigation in the Baltic Sea in light of speculations about its transformation into a NATO internal sea," Zakharova emphasized.

The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman also noted that Finland, Estonia and other European Union (EU) countries want to qualify the incident as sabotage and are preparing as the main version about the participation of a certain "shadow fleet" of the Russian Federation.

According to her, NATO took advantage of the situation to increase its military presence in the Baltic Sea. Zakharova clarified that the interests of electricity consumers do not bother Western countries, because they are only concerned with the violation of global energy security.

Zakharova added that there is not a single proof of Russia in sabotage.

Earlier, on January 7, Finnish broadcaster Yle reported that NATO is going to send a fleet to the Baltic Sea to protect important underwater installations. According to him, it will consist of about 10 ships, and the operation itself will last until April. It was specified that the forces of the Finnish and Estonian fleets will still be involved in the protection of the Gulf of Finland.

Prior to that, the plans of the North Atlantic Alliance to strengthen the presence in the Baltic Sea to protect critical infrastructures of the water area was reported by the Prime Minister of Estonia Kristen Mihal. He noted that this would be done against the backdrop of the incident with damage to the Estonian-Finnish EstLink 2 electric cable.

The EstLink 2 DC cable between Estonia and Finland suffered an emergency outage on December 25. The Estonian electricity and gas supply network operator Elering said that the cause of the incident was unknown, but the reliability of the country's power supply was ensured and reserve capacities were used to compensate for the lack of electricity.

Later, Finnish police stopped the Kukapo Islands-flagged tanker Eagle S on suspicion of breaking a cable in the Baltic. As a precaution against disrupting the investigation, the Finnish police banned seven members of the tanker's crew from leaving the country, followed by the eighth.