Photo by Jan Ledermann

On an island off the Finnish city of Kotka, less than 100km from the Russian border, workers have been drilling bolts into ancient coastal cliffs to create a permanent attachment system for oil containment booms — a defence against what officials describe as a “very high” risk of a major spill in the Gulf of Finland.

A narrow, risky route

The Gulf of Finland provides a key route for Russian oil exports that have continued despite Western sanctions imposed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia’s use of a “shadow fleet” of unregulated, often ageing vessels to circumvent those sanctions has raised fears of a spill in the narrow, shallow waters of the gulf. Jukka-Pekka Lumilahti, director of rescue services at the Gulf of Finland Coastguard and head of maritime environmental protection in the Kotka district, said the risk of an accident was “very high at the moment,” with “between five and ten of these big crude oil tankers” moving through the area every day, each loaded with around 100,000 cubic metres of crude oil. Recent Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian oil ports of Primorsk and Ust-Luga, at the far end of the gulf, have further raised the risk of “a big oil catastrophe,” Lumilahti added, warning: “We have several close calls per month.”

Building a permanent defence

The bolting work is being carried out by the John Nurminen Foundation, a Finnish organisation dedicated to protecting the Baltic Sea, working alongside Finnish authorities. Ulla Rosenstrom, the foundation’s Marine Environment Director, said the aim of the permanent bolt system was to “save time and money and nature” by allowing containment booms to be deployed rapidly the moment a spill is detected, rather than requiring emergency installation from scratch. Workers are installing 350 bolts for containment booms in the eastern part of the gulf, with the foundation’s ambition to eventually extend coverage along the whole of Finland’s southern coastline. “The whole of Gulf of Finland is actually in danger,” Rosenstrom said.

What’s at stake

Rosenstrom set out starkly what a major spill would mean for the region’s wildlife. “It will be terrible for some of the birds, seabirds that are nesting here that are quite endangered,” she said. The threat extends beneath the surface as well: species such as green-brown bladderwrack seaweed perform vital ecological functions for other marine life in the gulf, and if smothered by crude oil, Rosenstrom warned, “the consequences can be enormous to all species.”