The gas leak at the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline as seen from the Danish Defence's F-16 rejection response off the Danish Baltic island of Bornholm, south of Dueodde, on Sept. 27, 2022.Supplied/AFP/Getty Images
The Ukrainians blew up the pipelines. Case closed. Let’s move on.
That at least is what German prosecutors who issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen, and subsequent media reports this week, would have us believe about one of the most sensational and daring acts of industrial sabotage since the Second World War: the explosions in September, 2022, seven months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that destroyed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea.
Before the war, Nord Steam 1 was Germany’s main source of Russian gas, a vital – and cheap – energy supply that kept the country’s mighty industrial machine rolling. In an apparent effort to punish Germany for its support of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin greatly reduced, then halted, gas deliveries through Nord Stream 1 a few months after the start of the war (Russia in part blamed Canada for the halted deliveries, accusing it of seizing a piece of equipment needed to repair a pipeline turbine). The newer Nord Stream 2 was completed, but German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stopped its certification process just before the invasion.
The explosions ensured that the pipelines will almost certainly never operate again. They wrecked three of the four Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipes.
At first, the speculation centred on Russia. The Kremlin denied the allegations, which made little sense anyway. Why would Russia destroy a costly piece of infrastructure that was majority owned by state-owned Gazprom? Doing so would also eliminate any chance that Russia could resume gas exports after a Ukraine-Russia peace treaty.
Then the focus shifted to the Americans. Pulitzer Prize-winning, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a Substack piece in February, 2023, that concluded that U.S. President Joe Biden made the secret decision to wreck the Nord Stream pipelines. He noted that, three weeks before the start of the invasion, Mr. Biden said: “If Russia invades … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Mr. Hersh said the CIA was the mastermind behind the plan and argued that the spy agency, with the help of the U.S. Navy and NATO ally Norway, certainly had the technical means to blow up pipelines 80 metres below the surface. The motivation? The White House wanted to end permanently the Kremlin’s ability to buy influence in Berlin and other European countries dependent on Russian energy, according to Mr. Hersh.
Almost no reporter pursued Mr. Hersh’s story, which cited anonymous sources. The White House denied his claims. And why would the Norwegians get involved in what could be considered an act of war against a NATO ally?
Last year, The New York Times suggested a “pro-Ukrainian group” was behind the Nord Stream attack. A breakthrough came a few days ago – sort of. A Swedish newspaper reported that in June Germany issued a warrant for the arrest of one “Volodymyr Z,” later identified as Volodymyr Zhuravlov, a Ukrainian diving instructor suspected of involvement in the attack.
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal supported the story, insisting that a Ukrainian team of saboteurs used a rented 15-metre sailboat to plant explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines. The article said the sabotage was at first approved by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who then called it off when the CIA learned about it. By then it was too late. The operation went ahead anyway and was overseen by the then-commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who is now Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain, the Journal said. Mr. Zaluzhnyi denied the allegations.
It is hard to believe that a small pleasure boat would have the capacity to carry all the equipment needed for a deep-water operation on three tubes of the pipelines, including explosives so powerful that the blasts were picked up by seismic monitors. The boat would be too small to carry a decompression chamber to prevent potentially fatal diver decompression sickness, known as the “bends.”
The alternative would have been a slow, staged ascent that could have taken hours, requiring several sets of scuba tanks and forcing the sailboat to be immobile for a long time. The Baltic is one of the most heavily monitored bodies of water in the world. How could NATO or the coast guards of the eight non-Russian countries that border the sea not notice a boat loitering right above the pipelines that played a starring role in the war?
The bigger question is why Germany keeps supporting Ukraine with financial aid and weapons if it thinks Ukrainian operatives were behind the plot to destroy the German economy’s most important piece of energy infrastructure?
Despite the arrest warrant, there are more questions than answers, and we will probably never know the truth. The Americans don’t seem interested in getting to the bottom of the story, and Sweden and Denmark earlier this year dropped their investigations into the attack.
And Germany? It looks like the German prosecutors will never get their man. The Polish prosecutor’s office has confirmed that Mr. Zhuravlov was not listed on the wanted persons database used by the Polish Border Guard, allowing him to slip into Ukraine in early July, where he is highly unlikely to be extradited. This oversight, intentional or not, has emerged as another mystery in the Nord Stream saga.