Baltic Sea at the bottom is the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia to Germany last fall developing into one of the biggest mysteries of the 2020s. There are already so many factors that have ended up on the suspect lists, that a history that satisfies everyone may never be completed.
On Tuesday, information became public from the American and German media, based on which the gas pipelines were blown up by some “pro-Ukraine” actor. In the past, the finger of blame or speculations have mostly pointed to Russia and from there back to Western countries.
The New York Times magazine said on Tuesday based on anonymous US official sources rather vaguely that some Russian president Vladimir Putin the opposing “pro-Ukraine” party would have blown up the pipes near the Danish island of Bornholm on September 26, 2022.
However, according to the newspaper, the US authorities had no evidence that the Ukrainian government had participated in the attacks or requested them to be carried out. President of Ukraine to Volodymyr Zelensky adviser Myhailo Podoljak immediately denied that his country was in any way involved in the explosions.
German Die Zeit newspaper reported also about possible pro-Ukraine factors, in more detail than The New York Times.
Die Zeit’s information was based on information gathered by several German media from the intelligence services of many Western countries. The newspaper reported that there has apparently been a breakthrough in the investigation.
of Die Zeit According to the report, a group of five men and one woman who had rented a boat from a company operating in Poland, apparently owned by two Ukrainians, were responsible for the explosions. The group set sail on September 6 from the port of Rostock in Germany, the paper reported and explained the boat’s route: from Rostock to Wieck and from there to the Danish island of Christiansø, which is close to the explosion site.
“The group included the captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor. They are said to have transported and installed the explosives at the crime scene,” Die Zeit reported.
According to the German media, there is no certainty about the nationalities of the perpetrators, because the group would have cleverly used forged passports. According to Die Zeit, they had returned the boat to the port of departure. The researchers had said that the boat had been in a messy condition following the group. Traces of explosives had been found on the cabin table.
“Although the traces lead to Ukraine, investigators have not yet found out who commissioned the suspected group of perpetrators,” Die Zeit reported.
The magazine according to the international intelligence circles, the theory has been put forward that this is a staged operation in which they try to make Ukrainian parties look guilty. However, this is just an assumption for which there is no evidence, Die Zeit reported.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Wednesday in Stockholm that he considers the idea of a staging viable.
“It could very well have been a staged operation to blame Ukraine,” Pistorius said According to Reuters.
According to Pistorius, “the probability of either is equally high”. By this he meant the Ukrainian party’s culpability for the explosions or staging the Ukrainians as the culprits. He cautioned people against jumping to conclusions.
In autumn in Western countries, Russia was most commonly suspected of gas pipeline explosions. Suspicion was raised, for example, by an American CNN story, according to which European intelligence authorities had seen Russian navy ships in the vicinity of the explosion site. According to the sources, sightings had also been made of Russian submarines.
“It seems that Russia wants to expand the situation and that he [Putin] is crazy enough to start something even worse,” stated the HS interviewed a woman from Bornholm shortly after the explosions last September.
Under Christmas, The Washington Post magazine told referring to anonymous Western diplomatic and intelligence sources, that Russia is no longer considered a self-evident suspect in Western countries for the explosions.
“There is currently no evidence that Russia is behind the sabotage,” the European source stated.
At the end of September, Putin labeled the explosions as “unprecedented acts of international terrorism”. Russia has since directly blamed both Britain and the United States for the explosions.
At the end of last October Russia claimed According to Reuters, a special unit of the British Navy would have carried out the attacks, which Britain immediately denied. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the same British unit would have been directing the Ukrainian armed forces’ aerial attack against Russian ships in the Black Sea.
The year changed, and so did the culprit named by Russia. In February, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov claimed, according to the news agency Tassi, that the US authorities would admitted outright braggingthat the United States was behind the explosions.
According to him, the motive for the United States was that the joint game of Russian energy resources and German technology had worked too well for the last 20–30 years.
“It began to threaten the monopoly of the big American companies. Therefore, it was necessary to spoil it in some way,” Lavrov said.
Russia received surprising support for his accusations on February 8, when disputedAmerican reporter Seymour Hersh argued in his blog post, that behind the explosions would be the United States and Norway that started it. According to Hersh, the explosions would have been ordered by the president Joe Biden. The White House denied the claims, calling them “absolutely false and complete fiction.”
Hersh is known of his many controversies, some of which have been right: made by American soldiers My Lai massacre In the Vietnam War 1968 as well Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the Iraq war in 2004. However, he has also been accused of fabricating unreliable articles and spreading conspiracy theories.
Russia was excited by Hersh’s writing and demanded legal action to find out the truth, like Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov did. In mid-February, Russia demanded that the UN Security Council lead international investigations to find out the culprits.
Russia was not enthusiastic about Tuesday’s news, according to which a group possibly sympathizing with Ukraine had blown up gas pipelines. Spokesman of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova said According to the cupthat the information is a deliberate leak to try to hide the real perpetrators of the attacks: the western regimes.
Zaharova’s view was accompanied by the chairman of the Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee Leonid Slutskywho told According to the cupthat the news about the “pro-Ukraine” group was “another diversion” to divert attention away from US involvement in the explosion.
According to the news agency AFP, Putin’s confidant Peskov also rejected the theory of the involvement of factors possibly sympathetic to Ukraine in the attack and called the coverage of the Western media a “coordinated media campaign” that tries to divert thoughts away from the real factors.
In his telegrams about both Zaharova and Slutsky, Tass referred To Hersh’s article about the alleged joint operation between the United States and Norway. During Tuesday, the news agency asked Hersh to comment on the credibility of Tuesday’s news from The New York Times.
“I don’t want to do that. You have to draw your own conclusions,” Hersh had said According to the cup.
Helsinki university professor Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen ynnes on Tuesday on Twitter that so far the Nord Stream explosions have been blamed on Russia, Britain, the United States, Norway and eco-terrorists, and now, as the latest twist, a Ukrainian or Russian non-state entity.
Tynkynen stated In an interview with HS that he finds the idea presented in The New York Times interesting, according to which the authors could be a body consisting of citizens of both Russia and Ukraine.
“So is there a network that fights for a free Russia and a democratic Ukraine? Can there be such a thing? Russian society has been very closed and it is difficult to get and confirm such information”, Tynkkynen reflected in the story.
1,200 The kilometer-long Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines have been disputedfor years. The United States and a number of eastern EU countries have warned especially Germany about excessive dependence on Russian energy.
The consensus seems to prevail that the explosions had been caused intentionally. They damaged both pipes of the Nord Stream 1 project launched in 2011, as well as one of the two pipes of the Nord Stream 2 project. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline duo was completed in 2021, but they have never been put into operation.
Authorities in Sweden, Denmark and Germany are investigating the Nord Stream explosions. Russia has complained that the country has not been included in the investigations.
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