A Finnish court on Thursday convicted the Russian captain and a senior crew member of the cargo ship Fitburg for damaging two undersea telecommunications cables in the Gulf of Finland last year.

The Helsinki District Court found the two defendants guilty of "aggravated criminal damage."

It said in a statement that they had intentionally dragged the ship's anchor along the seabed for around 130 kilometers (81 miles). 

The captain was sentenced to three and a half years in jail, while the crew member, an Azerbaijani citizen, was sentenced to two years and 10 months.

They were also ordered to jointly pay around €1.9 million ($2.1 million) in damages, the Reuters news agency reported, with the captain to pay about €85,000 more.

The defendants denied any wrongdoing and have challenged Finland's jurisdiction in the case.

What else do we know about the Fitburg freighter?

Finnish authorities seized the vessel on December 31 on suspicion that it had damaged cables linking Finland's capital, Helsinki, and Tallinn, Estonia.

Finnish police at the time said the ship had been dragging its anchor for hours when it was discovered in Finland's exclusive economic zone.

The Fitburg and its 14-member crew had been en route to the port of Haifa, Israel, from the Russian city of St. Petersburg when the incident occurred.

Finland has stepped up efforts to protect its undersea infrastructure following a series of incidents involving cables and pipelines in the Baltic Sea since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.