WASHINGTON, October 20. /TASS/. Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna has said that damage to the Balticconnector natural gas pipeline that connects Finland and Estonia appears to be man-made and the incident can be viewed as an attack on NATO infrastructure.
"This is not an environmental accident," he said in an interview with the Foreign Policy magazine. He added it could be regarded as an "attack against NATO infrastructure."
The question of what constitutes an attack on NATO infrastructure was raised earlier by the alliance's secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, in connection with the Nord Stream explosions. Stoltenberg said NATO should decide whether an attack, for example, on submarine cables, would trigger the Article 5 of the treaty that established the alliance, which calls for collective defense. In an interview with The Washington Post, Stoltenberg said attacks on undersea infrastructure are easy to deny because they are hard to trace.
The undersea pipeline between Finland and Estonia has suspended operation due to a suspected leak. Finnish authorities told a press conference on October 10 that the damage on the pipeline, discovered in the early morning hours of October 9, was likely the result of outside activity. An investigator said that the place of the rupture was in the central part of the Gulf of Finland, within Finland's economic zone.