The Estonian Environmental Investment Centre, in cooperation with the Police and Border Guard Board, has conducted underwater surveys on three most dangerous shipwrecks in Estonian waters and discovered up to eight kilograms (17.7 lbs) of mercury on one of them.
As new details emerge about the pipeline blasts, they also prompt questions: What did US intelligence know about the biggest whodunit of the century, when did they know it, and how did they know it?
The construction of the Nord Stream pipelines breached international environmental law's precautionary principle and ecosystem approach. In addition, in the aftermath of the Second World War about 230,000 tons of chemical weapons were dumped into the Baltic Sea and the Skagerrak Strait at sites near the current Nord Stream gas pipelines, writes Alexander Lott, a fellow at the Norwegian Center for the Law of the Sea and lecturer in administrative law at the University of Tartu.
Egert Belitšev, head of the border guard department of the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board (PPA), believes that, if and when, Russia closes its borders to prevent mobilized men living in nearby regions from leaving the country, this will create additional pressure on Estonia's borders.