Dragging Anchor, Dodging Jurisdiction: Rethinking Deterrence for Hybrid Maritime Threats

It reads like a law school exam question. The Motor Tanker (M/T) Eagle S, a Cook Islands flagged vessel owned by a UAE company, departed a Russian port headed for Turkey. With a crew composed of a Georgian captain and first officer, as well as an Indian second officer, reports quickly emerged that she had dragged anchor on December 24, 2024 for approximately 90 kilometers across the seabed of the Gulf of Finland. It was outside Finnish territorial waters but within Finland’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), damaging power and telecommunications cables. The facts are undisputed, but, as with so many law school exam questions, the answer hinged on jurisdiction.

This was no hypothetical, however. The Finnish prosecutor brought charges of aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference with communications against the captain and officers. On October 3, 2025, the Helsinki District Court ruled Finland lacked jurisdiction over a negligent act occurring in its EEZ. This ruling has broad enforcement implications, given the unusually large number of similar “accidents” damaging undersea infrastructure, and it begs the question of how to deter such unconventional, irregular, or non-kinetic attacks in the future. The Eagle S incident also illustrates a growing enforcement gap: hybrid attacks below the threshold of armed conflict, particularly maritime incidents occurring outside territorial waters, are prone to be determined to fall outside of traditional criminal jurisdiction.

The Eagle S presents an example of hybrid threat actions, which by design are not easily attributable to a foreign state, but are too frequent to be explained by coincidence. It is no surprise that many European countries have publicly attributed a wide range of events to Russia, from drone incursions and sabotage to vessels damaging undersea cables. The Eagle S case also demonstrates the challenges in delivering appropriate responses to this type of event through criminal prosecution. If states rely solely on criminal prosecutions, their success is questionable and failure will embolden further hybrid threat actors; civil remedies, including special maritime rules such as vessel arrests and even law-of-war analogies, may offer more effective tools both in the specific case at hand and in deterring future uses of vessels in hybrid threat operations.

Criminal Cases

The Helsinki Court interpreted Articles 97 and 113 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) such 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). Many vessels associated with subsea cable damage are part of Russia’s Shadow Fleet—a clandestine network of aging, under-insured ships with opaque ownership used to bypass sanctions and fund the Kremlin’s war efforts. Given the predominance of “flags of convenience” among these ships, it is clear these flag states have neither the capability nor the desire to prosecute in these types of cases. Likewise, relying on prosecution by a crewmember’s state of nationality also seems an ineffective deterrent to these types of injuries to critical infrastructure. As such, there have been commentators who have argued against such an expansive interpretation of UNCLOS Articles 97 and 113. Leaving aside the Helsinki court’s emphasis that the allegations in Eagle S involved negligent rather than intentional conduct, it is axiomatic that intent—by design—is difficult to prove in hybrid operations, making this distinction of limited deterrent value.

Extraterritoriality of criminal charges is itself a broad area of law, and in theory, the Protective and Universality Principles, as described in Cedric Ryngaert’s Jurisdiction in International Law, could provide a legal basis for jurisdiction in a case such as the Eagle S. However, as we’ve seen, the Helsinki District Court opted for a stricter interpretation of jurisdiction. Similarly, the United States has not ratified UNCLOS, although it voluntarily adopts some of its precepts. Therefore a U.S. court would not necessarily be bound by Articles 97 and 113, but also U.S. undersea infrastructure has, to date, not been a target of hybrid tactics. So, whether or not the Helsinki District Court correctly interpreted UNCLOS, the Eagle S demonstrates that criminal jurisdiction—particularly when tethered to flag state or nationality—is structurally ill-suited to deter hostile actions below the threshold of open armed conflict, or “gray zone”, maritime operations such as those seen recently across Europe and elsewhere.

Civil Actions

Civil actions may provide some additional avenues to impose costs on, and eventually deter, these types of hybrid threats. Civil cases against the crew, however, would probably be ineffective. In the Eagle S case, the damages claimed by the cable companies affected were almost €56 million—well more than most Georgian captains could satisfy in a judgment. Civil actions against the owner and the owner’s insurer would also likely be useless, given historically obfuscated ownership through shell companies and denied access to reputable maritime insurance markets for sanctioned and Shadow Fleet vessels. While there is not 100% overlap between the sanctions and Shadow Fleet vessels, the intersection is significant, as with their role in likely hybrid threat activities. As such, civil remedies against the crew and/or owner in cases such as these are also unlikely to make victims whole.

Civil remedies’ value may lie elsewhere: imposing friction, denying the use of assets, and forcing hybrid operators into legal and financial chokepoints while allowing states to control escalation in the gray zone. In addition to pursuing actions against the crew and owner, claims against the cargo owner, for example, may provide some additional leverage against vessels engaging in these actions, negligently or intentionally. Particularly for Shadow Fleet vessels, the cargo owner is likely closely aligned with a state instructing hybrid warfare-type activity, such as dragging anchor to damage undersea cables. While it is unusual for cargo to have to answer to damages caused by the vessel, in a subsequent case, the Fitburg, Finland took an interesting approach in this respect.

The Fitburg is a general cargo vessel which, like the Eagle S, dragged anchor, damaging a subsea cable, this time on December 31, 2025. She was seized by Finnish authorities and brought into port for inspection. 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.

One possible, though more controversial, approach would be to view cargo tied to a hybrid warfare-type event—analogizing to the law of maritime warfare—as a legitimate target should a state elect to apply the law of armed conflict rather than the law of the sea. By treating merchant shipping associated with a hybrid threat action as contributing to Russia’s military activities, a belligerent could be entitled to attack (or in a narrower approach, seize cargo from) a vessel carrying Russian cargo. Treating such vessels as lawful military objectives would be a dramatic escalation, especially contrasting the cases of Finland and the Eagle S, as opposed to Ukraine (an active combatant against Russia) attacking Shadow Fleet tankers such as the Kairos and Virat. Narrower measures—such as treating cargo tied to hybrid attacks as subject to seizure under an armed-conflict paradigm—may offer states a calibrated response short of force. This would require the seizing state to make a determination of belligerence, but given public statements by some European states, that threshold may not be as distant as it once appeared. Finally, there remains a specific remedy unique to maritime law, namely an in rem action including arresting the vessel. The respective international conventions governing arrests of vessels (signed 1952 and 1999) and domestic rules for vessel arrest allow an in rem proceeding against the vessel in question regardless of any jurisdictional concerns in a parallel criminal case. By treating a vessel as a legal entity capable of being arrested and sued to satisfy maritime claims, a vessel owner can be forced to answer in court, thereby establishing prima facie jurisdiction. Admittedly, given the age and generally poor condition of Shadow Fleet vessels, should an owner decline to answer and the vessel is left to satisfy any judgment against its liability through a judicial sale, it is unlikely to provide full satisfaction. Nevertheless, even when judgments are not fully unsatisfied, vessel arrest achieves a strategic effect: it removes aging and poorly maintained platforms from circulation, provides at least nominal recompense for victims of hybrid threat actions, reinforces the Rule of Law (itself frequently a target of hybrid warfare), and increases the cost of maintaining a Shadow Fleet over time.

The Eagle S and Fitburg cases also offer lessons applicable beyond the European theater. In the Pacific, states face similar gray zone maritime activity—often conducted by ostensibly civilian vessels—targeting undersea cables, fishing operations, offshore energy infrastructure, and maritime domain awareness systems. Chinese-flagged or Chinese-linked commercial vessels, maritime militia, and research ships routinely operate in ways that complicate attribution while advancing stated Chinese objectives.

As in the Baltic, reliance on criminal jurisdiction alone seems unlikely to deter such conduct, particularly where incidents occur outside territorial seas or involve vessels insulated by lax flag-state enforcement. Civil maritime remedies, such as cargo seizure and in rem vessel arrests, may therefore provide Pacific states and their partners—including the United States—with scalable, legally grounded options to impose costs and deny operational advantage without escalating to the use of force.

Conclusion

The Eagle S incident underscores a central problem in responding effectively to hybrid maritime threats: the law governing peacetime navigation was not designed to deter state-directed sabotage conducted through deniable commercial proxies. Criminal prosecutions, constrained by jurisdictional and evidentiary hurdles, seem poorly suited to effectively deter future actions or even impose meaningful costs on those responsible for a particular act. Civil remedies—particularly cargo seizure and in rem actions against vessels—offer states, including the United States and its partners, more flexible and operationally effective tools to respond below the threshold of armed conflict. As hybrid activity against undersea infrastructure is likely to continue, states may need to move beyond a singular reliance on criminal law and adopt a layered approach that borrows, cautiously and selectively, from both maritime civil claims and armed conflict paradigms. The alternative is a legal regime that remains formally intact, but increasingly irrelevant.