Feb 8 (Reuters) - An underwater Russian Baltic Sea

telecoms cable was damaged by an "external impact," Russia's

TASS news agency cited the country's state-owned Rostelecom

company as saying on Saturday.

"Rostelecom's submarine cable was damaged in the Baltic Sea

as a result of an external impact some time ago," TASS cited

Rostelecom as saying.

Restoration work is under way and the incident has had no

impact on subscribers so far, Rostelecom added.

Rostelecom did not provide further details and it was

unclear when the damage occurred. Finland's coast guard said

earlier on Saturday on platform X that it was monitoring a

Russian vessel repairing a broken Russian cable in the Gulf of

Finland.

The Baltic Sea region has been on high alert after a string

of outages affecting power cables, telecom links and gas

pipelines between the Baltics and Sweden or Finland, leading to

increased surveillance operations by NATO members.

All were believed to have been caused by ships dragging

anchors along the seabed following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Russia has denied any involvement.

(Writing by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne

Additional reporting by Essi Lehto in Helsinki

Editing by Matthew Lewis)