An Uneasy Alliance: Negotiating Infrastructures at the Finnish-Soviet Border

Abstract

In spring 2006, the Russian power company United Power Ltd announced plans to install a 1000 MW submarine cable under the Gulf of Finland. The high-voltage cable — commonly referred to as the “sea cable” — would connect the town of Kemovo near St. Petersburg with the Finnish coastal town of Kotka. Although the announcement was a surprise, the plan itself had been conceived much earlier in the mid-1990s- More precisely, the sea cable had been inspired by a Russian presidential decree issued on May 7, 1995, in which President Boris Yeltsin had declared energy to be a strategic component of Russia’s industrial and foreign policy. Accordingly, state-owned energy companies were encouraged to explore business opportunities beyond Russian borders, and this was precisely what United Power sought to do.