Well, I dunno. If it was just the Balticconnector gas pipeline, but two telecom cables were also damaged – one between Estonia and Finland and which was completely severed, and one between Estonia and Sweden – and they weren’t all that close to the pipeline for it to make sense that the damage was due to eg. a ship dropping its anchor due to the storm.
Here’s a picture of the cables. The Balticconnector cut happened at approximately its midpoint, while I’ve understood the EST-FIN cable damage happened closer to the Estonian shore, and the EST-SWE cable damage happened 50km west of Hiiumaa (the northernmost island that’s above the “Meremöisa” text in this image).
So while accidents do happen, the fact that not just one or two but three cables were damaged around the same time and separated by quite a bit of distance, it’s more than a bit suspicious. Completely possible it’s just breathtaking incompetence from the Chinese ship’s crew, but they would have had to drag their anchor for over 100km. There has been a case where an oil tanker’s crew didn’t realize they had their anchor down and it damaged two Estonian cables, but the distance was shorter (I only have a Finnish-language source for all of this, sorry. DeepL is great for translating Finnish but I don’t think they do web pages yet so you’d have to copy’n’paste).
So while I definitely believe it’s possible this was all accidental, it would have required a fantastically incompetent crew for them to not notice that they were dragging their anchor for 100 – 200km and snagged on a pretty hefty pipeline in addition to two telecom cables. But, we’ll have to see what, if anything, the investigation turns up. It’s also entirely possible that one or both of the telecom cable damages are completely unrelated to the pipeline damage, it’s not like cable damage is an extremely rare occurrence in the Baltic.