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Suspicions Multiply as Nord Stream Sabotage Remains Unsolved

Intelligence leaks surrounding the sabotage of the pipelines have provided more questions than answers. It may be in no one’s interest to reveal more.

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By Erika Solomon

Erika Solomon traveled to Copenhagen and the island of Christianso in Denmark, as well as to the ports of Rostock and Wiek in northern Germany, to report and write this article.

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Russian and Danish naval vessels that disappear in the Baltic Sea, days before an underwater pipeline blast. A German charter yacht with traces of explosives, and a crew with forged passports. Blurry photographs of a mysterious object found near a single surviving pipeline strand.

These are the latest clues in the hunt to reveal who, last Sept. 26, blew up most of the Kremlin-backed Nord Stream pipelines, some 260 feet below the Baltic Sea, that were once the largest supplier of Europe’s natural gas.

Nord Stream

pipelines 1 and 2

Sites of leaks

Christianso

Kaliningrad

Just a few weeks ago, New York Times reporting on new intelligence, along with German police findings reported by the German media, suggested a possible solution to the Nord Stream puzzle: pro-Ukraine operatives renting a German pleasure boat and pulling off a fantastical covert mission.

Since then, a flurry of new findings and competing narratives has sown distrust among Western allies and presented an opening for Russian diplomatic pressure that has raised the geopolitical stakes in Europe’s Baltic region.

Nowhere is the tension felt more strongly than among the 98 residents of Denmark’s Christianso — an island so tiny, you can walk across it in 10 minutes. Living just 12 nautical miles away from the blast site, everyone from the herring pickler to the inn chef sees skies and waters filled with foreboding.

“Before the blast, no one talked about Nord Stream. I didn’t even know how close we were until it happened,” said Soren Thiim Andersen, governor of Christianso. “Afterward, we all felt exposed. We were all wondering: What really just happened here?”

The pleasure boat at the center of the German investigation, the Andromeda, docked at Christianso’s stone harbor after being chartered in the northern German port of Rostock on Sept. 5 and making an overnight stop at Wiek, a more obscure north German port with no security cameras and little oversight.

A local port worker, who asked not to be identified because of ongoing investigations, told The Times that he remembered the visit unusually well: He had repeatedly tried to speak to the crew, first in German, then English. Instead of attempting any kind of reply, in any language, one man simply handed him the docking fee and turned away.

The Andromeda now sits in dry dock overlooking the Baltic Sea, its innards pulled out by investigators. Three German officials told The Times that the investigators had found traces of explosives on the boat, and discovered that two crew members had used fake Bulgarian passports.

That hunt led back to Christianso, where Mr. Andersen, the governor, said that in December, the Danish police had him write a Facebook post, instructing residents to send photographs of the harbor or boats from Sept. 16 to Sept. 18, around the time the Andromeda is believed to have docked. Investigators arrived a month later to interview residents and check the photos.

Christianso locals scoffed at the idea a 50-foot pleasure yacht could pull off such a spectacular attack — and so have naval experts from Germany, Sweden and Denmark.

They argue that even with skilled divers, it would be extremely challenging for a six-person crew to plant the explosives needed on the seabed some 262 feet below, and create blasts registering 2.5 on the Richter scale.

“Knowing how the explosion would work, with the sea pressure at those depths — you need very specialized knowledge. How do the physics play out?” said Johannes Riber, a naval officer and analyst at Denmark’s Institute for Strategy and War Studies, who called it a “James Bond” theory.

Whether the Andromeda was a decoy or part of a broader mission, he said, remained unanswerable. But the most plausible attack, he said, required an undersea drone or mini submarine to plant the explosives, and either naval or professional underwater drilling vessels.

Mr. Riber and others also pointed to photographs of the aftermath — pipes bent backward, cracks and craters on the seabed — as traces of a massive bomb, something in the range of 1,000 to 1,500 kilograms.

“This was not a few pieces of plastic explosives,” Mr. Riber said. “That is a powerful explosion at play.”

Yet one pipeline expert and a professional diver who was part of the team that laid the Nord Stream 2 pipelines last year disagreed. Both the expert and the diver, who works regularly in the Baltic Sea, insisted a small plastic explosive could do the job, as long as it was placed near a seam of the pipeline. They asked not to be identified because they were speaking without authorization from Nord Stream.

“It is like lighting a match next to a leaking gasoline pump — the gas is all you need,” said one diver.

By the end of March, Russian diplomats threw up yet another twist: They revealed that in February, Nord Stream 2 had hired a vessel to inspect its pipelines and discovered an unidentified object next to a seam of its sole undamaged strand, about 19 miles from the explosion sites. The company alerted both Russia and Denmark, which controls the waters in which the object was spotted.

Even under pressure from Vladimir V. Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, who summoned Denmark’s chargé d’affaires in Moscow, Denmark initially resisted offering much information to the company or Russia, aside from publicly releasing a blurry photo of a 12-inch-long cylinder, covered in algae.

Last week, Danish authorities allowed Nord Stream 2 to observe their dive to recover the object — releasing photographs of a now cleaned-off dark cylinder. Denmark’s ministry of defense said it might be part of a maritime smoke buoy.

But Russia’s ambassador to Denmark, Vladimir Barbin, told The Times that experts in Moscow believed the cylinder was part of an explosive device.

“The continued secrecy of the ongoing investigation by Denmark, Germany and Sweden, as well as the refusal to cooperate with Russia, undermine its credibility,” Mr. Barbin wrote in a statement to The Times.

And Mr. Putin himself continues to use the incident to pressure Denmark to back Moscow’s demands for a joint international investigation. On April 5, he warned the situation in the Baltic Sea was becoming “turbulent in a literal sense.”

Even as Moscow pushes for a joint probe, other findings are pointing fingers back at Russia.

The German news website T-Online worked in late March with an open-source investigator, Oliver Alexander, to present the paths of six Russian vessels whose names were given to them by what they described as an “intelligence source from a NATO country.”

Their findings showed the boats disappeared from satellite signals on Sept. 21 — around the time Christianso residents spotted vessels that disappeared from their apps — after veering off course from a publicly announced Russian maritime exercise.

That information could match an early lead that one German official told The Times was explored late last year by Germany’s intelligence services who had also tracked Russian vessels from naval exercises, but were unable to bridge an approximately 20-nautical-mile gap between where some veered off course and the sites of the blasts.

The open source investigation also discovered a Danish naval ship, the Nymfen, which had sailed toward the same area as the Russian vessels in the hours after they disappeared. It too had turned off its signal upon reaching the site.

A day later, a Swedish fighter jet took an unusual flight path over the area, followed by a Swedish naval vessel that lingered near the spot where the Nord Stream 1 pipelines later exploded.

The researchers argued that perhaps these forces went to check the site — hinting that some countries may know more than they have said thus far.

Denmark is the most tight-lipped, but security sources who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Times that Danish and Swedish investigators have been wary of the latest German findings, and feel a sense of pressure to counter that narrative.

On Thursday, Mats Ljungqvist, Sweden’s senior prosecutor in the case, told the Swedish newspaper Norrkopings Tidningar that although his probe had not ruled out nonstate actors, only a “very few companies or groups” could have done it, and that a state actor still seemed most likely.

And he hinted his team came across some red herrings in the course of their investigation: “Those who carried this out were careful with the traces they left behind,” he said.

Privately, Swedish, German, and Danish officials argued that investigators have reasons not to share findings, which can reveal their intelligence capabilities. Allies have also grown wary after a string of Russian espionage and infiltration cases in Europe — including one within Germany’s spy agency.

Nor may it be in anyone’s interest to share: Naming a culprit could set off unintended consequences.

Claiming Russia was behind the attack would mean it had successfully sabotaged major critical infrastructure in Western Europe’s backyard, and could spark demands for a response.

Blaming Ukrainian operatives could stoke internal debate in Europe about support for their eastern neighbor.

And naming a Western nation or operatives could trigger deep mistrust when the West is struggling to maintain a united front.

“Is there any interest from the authorities to come out and say who did this? There are strategic reasons for not revealing who did it,” said Jens Wenzel Kristoffersen, a Danish naval commander and military expert at the University of Copenhagen. “As long as they don’t come out with anything substantial, then we are left in the dark on all this — as it should be.”

Reporting was contributed by Christopher F. Schuetze in Berlin, Jasmina Nielsen in Copenhagen and Christina Anderson in Stockholm.

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis .

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/traces-of-explosives-found-in-yacht-in-nord-stream-sabotage-investigation-diplomats-say

Traces of explosives found in yacht in Nord Stream sabotage investigation, diplomats say

BERLIN (AP) — Investigators found traces of undersea explosives in samples taken from a yacht that was searched as part of a probe into last year’s attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, European diplomats told the United Nations Security Council.

The diplomats said the investigation has not yet established who sabotaged the pipelines, which were built to carry Russian natural gas to Germany, or whether a state was involved.

The attack, which happened as Europe attempted to wean itself off Russian energy sources following the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine , contributed to tensions that followed the start of the war. The source of the sabotage has been a major international mystery.

Denmark, Sweden and Germany have been investigating the Sept. 26 attack, and the Danish Foreign Ministry tweeted a letter Tuesday from the three countries’ U.N. ambassadors to the president of the Security Council with information on their activities so far.

Officials voiced caution in March over media reports that a pro-Ukraine group was involved in the sabotage . German media reported then that five men and a woman used a yacht hired by a Ukrainian-owned company in Poland to carry out the attack, and that the vessel set off from the German port of Rostock.

German federal prosecutors declined to comment directly on that and other reports, but they confirmed that a boat was searched in January, and said there was suspicion that it could have been used to transport explosives to blow up the pipelines.

WATCH: State Department says sanctions against Nord Stream 2 are ‘just the beginning’

A section of this week’s letter detailing Germany’s findings said that the yacht’s precise course had not been definitively established. The letter said “traces of subsea explosives were found in the samples taken from the boat during the investigation,” but it did not elaborate.

“At this point it is not possible to reliably establish the identity of the perpetrators and their motives, particularly regarding the question of whether the incident was steered by a state or state actor,” it said. “All information to clarify the matter will be pursued during the continuing investigations.”

The undersea explosions ruptured the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was Russia’s main natural gas supply route to Germany until Russia cut off supplies at the end of August.

The blasts also damaged the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which never entered service because Germany suspended its certification process shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The pipelines were long a target of criticism by the United States and some of its allies, who warned that they posed a risk to Europe’s energy security by increasing dependence on Russian gas.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian officials have accused the U.S. of staging the explosions, which they have described as a terror attack.

Ukraine has rejected suggestions that it might have ordered the attack. The countries investigating the explosions have not commented on who might have been responsible.

Since the blasts, NATO has boosted its presence in the Baltic and North Seas, using dozens of ships, aircraft and undersea equipment such as drones.

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Investigators skeptical of yacht’s role in Nord Stream bombing

Officials believe more than one vessel might have been involved in sabotaging the natural gas pipeline last year and wonder if a 50-foot sailing yacht that investigators scoured for clues could be a decoy

After saboteurs severely damaged the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines last September, German officials zeroed in on a rented sailboat that appeared to have taken part in planting explosive devices deep below the surface of the Baltic Sea.

But after months of investigation, law enforcement officials now suspect that the 50-foot yacht, the Andromeda, was probably not the only vessel used in the audacious attack. They also say the boat may have been a decoy, put to sea to distract from the true perpetrators, who remain at large, according to officials with knowledge of an investigation led by Germany’s attorney general. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details about the active inquiry, including doubts about the Andromeda’s role that haven’t been previously reported.

Officials hope that the true purpose of Andromeda in the deep-sea demolition will provide further insight in a high-stakes, international whodunnit that could eventually lead to those responsible and explain their motives, which remain unclear.

U.S. and European officials said they still don’t know for sure who is behind the underwater attack. But several said they shared German skepticism that a crew of six people on one sailboat laid the hundreds of pounds of explosives that disabled Nord Stream 1 and part of Nord Stream 2, a newer set of pipelines that wasn’t yet delivering gas to customers.

Experts noted that while it was theoretically possible to place the explosives on the pipeline by hand, even skilled divers would be challenged submerging more than 200 feet to the seabed and slowly rising to the surface to allow time for their bodies to decompress.

Such an operation would have taken multiple dives, exposing the Andromeda to detection from nearby ships. The mission would have been easier to hide and pull off using remotely piloted underwater vehicles or small submarines, said diving and salvage experts who have worked in the area of the explosion, which features rough seas and heavy shipping traffic.

The German investigation has determined that traces of “military-grade” explosives found on a table inside the boat’s cabin match the batch of explosives used on the pipeline. Several officials doubted that skilled saboteurs would leave such glaring evidence of their guilt behind. They wonder if the explosive traces — collected months after the rented boat was returned to its owners — were meant to falsely lead investigators to the Andromeda as the vessel used in the attack.

“The question is whether the story with the sailboat is something to distract or only part of the picture,” said one person with knowledge of the investigation.

Still others allow that the bombers may simply have been sloppy.

“It doesn’t all fit,” a senior European security official said of the fragments of evidence. “But people can make mistakes.”

Suspicions turn to Poland and Ukraine

The German investigation has linked the yacht rental to a Polish company, which is in turn owned by a European company that’s connected to a prominent Ukrainian, fueling speculation from Berlin to Warsaw to Kyiv that a deep-pocketed partisan may have financed the operation. The identity of the Polish company and the Ukrainian individual, as well as his potential motive, remains unclear.

Based on the initial German findings, officials have been whispering about the potential involvement of the Polish or Ukrainian government in the attack. Poland arguably had a motive, some said, considering it has been among the most vocal critics of the Nord Stream project since it began in the late 1990s, warning that the pipelines, running from western Russia to Germany, would make Europe dependent on the Kremlin for energy.

Marcin Przydacz, the Polish president’s chief foreign policy adviser, urged caution about reaching conclusions from the initial evidence. He too shared the view that the Andromeda could be a red herring, but said it may have been planted by Moscow.

“This could be a Russian game to blame” Poland, Przydacz said in an interview at the presidential palace in Warsaw. “Poland had nothing to do with this [attack].”

Intelligence agencies have found no clear evidence that Russia, initially the prime suspect, was responsible.

Privately, former Polish government officials said that despite the country’s vehement opposition to Nord Stream and staunch support for arming Ukraine, they doubted that President Andrzej Duda would authorize an act that risked fracturing the alliance of nations that have come to Ukraine’s defense. Polish officials routinely refer to Ukraine’s conflict with Russia as “our war” and are fearful that if Russian President Vladimir Putin succeeds there, he would set his sights on Poland next.

Suspicion also has turned toward Ukraine as the culprit behind the Nord Stream bombings, based in part on intercepted communications of pro-Ukraine individuals discussing the possibility of carrying out an attack on the pipelines before the explosions, The Washington Post previously reported.

A senior Western security official with knowledge of the secretly gathered intelligence said the communications were only discovered after the bombing, when Western spy agencies began searching their records for insights.

“Ukraine absolutely did not participate in the attack on Nord Stream,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said last month, questioning why his country would conduct an operation that “destabilizes the region and will divert attention from the war, which is categorically not beneficial to us.”

Those who suspect Ukrainian involvement said that disabling the pipeline could have been an effort to galvanize allied support in the face of Russian aggression, and particularly to strengthen German resolve. Germany had halted activated authorization for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline days before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Officials in the United States and Europe initially blamed Russia for the bombing. The country had already halted gas flows on Nord Stream 1, the older of the two sets of pipelines. That suggested that Moscow was willing to engage in a form of political blackmail with energy supplies.

One of the pair of Nord Stream 2 pipes remains intact. Both of the Nord Stream 1 lines were severed in the explosions on Sept. 26.

Some officials said that Ukrainian saboteurs or those from other countries acting in what they felt were Ukraine’s best interest could have attacked Nord Stream without Zelensky’s knowledge, arguing that he doesn’t have complete visibility into all the operations of his government or the military. That kind of plausible deniability could protect the celebrated leader and dampen the political fallout of a brazen attack tied to his country, these officials said.

No country has provided firm evidence tying the attacks to Ukraine, and a senior Biden administration official has cautioned that the intercepted communications of pro-Ukrainian actors are not conclusive.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned against making early conclusions as to who was responsible, suggesting that it might be a “false flag” operation, an idea echoed by other German politicians.

Roderich Kiesewetter, a German lawmaker who is part of a committee that was briefed last month by intelligence officials on the probe’s progress, said he believes that investigators have not yet communicated any results because the “evidence is far too thin.”

Kiesewetter said that unfounded speculation over the culprits could endanger cohesion in Europe. “We should continue to ask who had an interest in the detonation” and who “benefits from uncertainty and accusations,” he said.

Trail of breadcrumbs

As the Nord Stream mystery has turned into an international game of Clue, German investigators have scoured the Andromeda for leads. Officials first became interested in the vessel after the country’s domestic intelligence agency received a “very concrete tip” from a Western intelligence service that the boat may have been involved in the sabotage, according to a German security official, who declined to name the country that shared the information.

German authorities determined that the tip was credible and passed the information onto law enforcement officials, the official said.

The Andromeda left a virtual trail of breadcrumbs as it set off from a German port for the Baltic Sea, according to investigators.

Mola Yachting rented out the boat on Sept. 6 from Hohe Düne harbor in Warnemünde, a German port town on the Baltic, near Rostock, which is about 145 miles north of Berlin. The rental location is in plain sight of a huge vacation complex, home to a five-star hotel, seven restaurants and a high-end shopping area, with views across the harbor.

Investigators said the boat then traveled in a northeasterly direction, stopping in Hafendorf Wiek, or “Wiek harbor village,” on the northernmost part of Rügen island.

When a reporter from The Post visited in early March, the area had emptied out, save for the odd local dog-walker braving the biting temperatures. A half-dozen yachts bobbed in the water where the Andromeda is said to have been. “Investigators came [in] mid-January, and we helped them where we could,” said the harbor master, René Redmann.

“It wouldn’t be unusual for a boat setting off from Rostock with the destination of Bornholm to stop in Wiek,” Redmann noted, referring to a Danish island near the site of the Nord Stream explosion. Investigators believe that the Andromeda left Hafendorf Wiek and moored off the coast of the tiny island Christianso, near Bornholm.

A stop in Hafendork Wiek may have offered the Andromeda’s crew a final chance to stock up on supplies before heading to the explosion site.

“Lots of things are loaded on the boats … including groceries,” Redmann said. “Some people stop to tank up on fuel.” Redmann would not confirm that the Andromeda stopped there, citing the continuing law enforcement investigation. But he said he wouldn’t have any record of the crew’s identities, just the name of the boat, the number of people aboard and the type of vessel.

“Recording names of passengers is the job of the charter,” Redmann said.

Thomas Richter, co-owner of the charter company Mola, said that the search of the Andromeda took place in Dranske, on Rügen island, where the yacht was kept in winter storage. He declined to share further details.

‘Don’t talk about Nord Stream’

For all the intrigue around who bombed the pipeline, some Western officials are not so eager to find out.

At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm, said one senior European diplomat: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” Leaders see little benefit from digging too deeply and finding an uncomfortable answer, the diplomat said, echoing sentiments of several peers in other countries who said they would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.

Even if there were a clear culprit, it would not likely stop the provision of arms to Ukraine, diminish the level of anger with Russia or alter the strategy of the war, these officials argued. The attack happened months ago and allies have continued to commit more and heavier weapons to the fight, which faces a pivotal period in the next few months.

Since no country is yet ruled out from having carried out the attack, officials said they were loath to share suspicions that could accidentally anger a friendly government that might have had a hand in bombing Nord Stream.

In the absence of concrete clues, an awkward silence has prevailed.

“It’s like a corpse at a family gathering,” the European diplomat said, reaching for a grim analogy. Everyone can see there’s a body lying there, but pretends things are normal. “It’s better not to know.”

Harris reported from Warsaw and Washington, Mekhennet from Berlin and Washington, Morris from Berlin, Birnbaum from Washington and Brady from Rügen and Rostock, Germany. Meg Kelly in Washington contributed to this report.

What to know about Ukraine’s counteroffensive

The latest: The Ukrainian military has launched a long-anticipated counteroffensive against occupying Russian forces , opening a crucial phase in the war aimed at restoring Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and preserving Western support in its fight against Moscow.

The fight: Ukrainian troops have intensified their attacks on the front line in the southeast region, according to multiple individuals in the country’s armed forces, in a significant push toward Russian-occupied territory.

The front line: The Washington Post has mapped out the 600-mile front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces .

How you can help: Here are ways those in the United States can support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.

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Online Sleuths Untangle the Mystery of the Nord Stream Sabotage

It’s been six months since the Nord Stream gas pipelines were ruptured by a series of explosions, leaking tons of methane into the environment and  igniting an international whodunit . Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and an unnamed pro-Ukrainian group have all been accused of planting explosives on the Baltic Sea pipelines in recent months. But half a year since the sabotage took place, the mystery remains unsolved.

Digital sleuths are stepping in to help provide clarity around bombshell claims about who was behind the attacks. Open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers are using public sources of data in their efforts to verify or debunk the snippets of information published about the Nord Stream explosions. They’re providing a glimpse of clarity to an incident that’s shrouded by secrecy and international politics.

Since early February, multiple media reports have claimed to provide new information about who could have attacked the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on September 26. However, the reports have largely been based on anonymous sources, including unnamed intelligence officials and leaks from government investigations into the attacks.

First, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published claims that the US was behind attacks in a  post on Substack . This was followed by reports in The New York Times and German publication  Die Zeit claiming a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible. (European leaders have  previously speculated Russia could be behind the attacks, and Russia has  blamed the United Kingdom .) No country has claimed responsibility for the blasts so far, and official investigations are ongoing.

Each of the recent reports has provided little hard evidence to show what may actually have happened, while helping to fuel speculation. Jacob Kaarsbo, a senior analyst at Think Tank Europa, who previously worked in Danish intelligence for 15 years, says the claims have been “remarkable” but also “speculative” in nature. “In my mind, they don’t really alter the picture,” Kaarsbo says, adding the attacks look highly complex and would likely be “very hard to pull off without it being a state actor or at least with state sponsorship.”

In the absence of official information, OSINT researchers have been trying to plug the gaps by examining the claims of the new reports with public data.  OSINT analysis is a powerful way to determine how an event may have unfolded. For instance, flight- and ship-tracking data can reveal movements around the world, satellite images show Earth in near real-time, while small clues in the backgrounds of photos and videos can reveal where they were taken. The techniques have  uncovered Russian assassins , spotted North Korea evading  international trading sanctions , identified  potential war criminals , and  documented pollution .

For the Nord Stream blasts, there was little OSINT available. Researchers  identified “dark ships” in the area . But underwater, there are obviously limited data sources that can be tapped into—cameras and sensors don’t monitor every inch of the pipelines. “OSINT probably won’t break this case open, but it can be used to verify or strengthen other hypotheses,” says Oliver Alexander, an analyst who focuses on OSINT and has been closely looking at the Nord Stream blasts. “I do think that it’s more of a verification tool.”

Alexander and others have been examining the claims made so far. The New York Times and  Die Zeit  both published stories on March 7 claiming a Ukrainian group was behind the sabotage. (Ukraine has  denied any involvement .)  Die Zeit published more details, claiming German investigators searched a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, knew where the yacht sailed from, and that six people were involved in the operation, including two divers. All of them used forged passports, the publication reported.

The details were enough for OSINT researchers to start tracking down which yacht could have been used. Alexander, as well as contributors to the open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat, started following the breadcrumbs, narrowing down potential vessels. A follow-up  report soon named the boat under suspicion as the Andromeda , a 15-meter-long yacht. Webcam footage from the harbor where it is  believed the Andromeda was docked shows the movement of a boat around the time reported by the publications. (The Andromeda is  reportedly too small to be required to use ship-tracking systems.)  Years-old videos   and photos of the boat have surfaced. The sleuthing adds public details to the reports.

Similarly, OSINT has been used to debunk Hersh’s story claiming the United States was behind the explosions. (Hersh has  defended his article , while US officials have said it was false.) Alexander has used, among other things,  ship-tracking data to show Norwegian ships were “accounted for” and not in a “position to have placed the explosives on the Nord Stream pipeline, as claimed by Hersh.” Another detailed article from Norwegian journalists has similarly  poured cold water on Hersh’s claims , partly using satellite data.

The sabotage was always likely to be controversial and surrounded by rumors: Russia’s full-scale invasion of  Ukraine in February 2022 has heated global tensions and put pressure on diplomats around the world. There has been a whirlwind of disinformation around the blasts, further muddying the waters. Mary Blankenship, a disinformation researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has analyzed online conversations around the war, says the “high uncertainty and high stakes” of the incident help to fuel the spread of disinformation. 

“This is an issue that exploits existing worries, tensions, and grievances within European audiences,” Blankenship says. Initially, the earliest disinformation on Twitter about the explosions came from conspiracy theorists, Blankenship says, who shared a pre-war statement from US president Joe Biden, where he said there would be  an “end” to Nord Stream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine . Since then, Russia and China have taken to  sharing unproven theories about the sabotage, the researcher says.

“Disinformation actors, but also official representatives of the [Russian] regime, stepped up their efforts on every news story that was published on this—however contradictory about the origins of the blast—be it a blog post by Seymour Hersh or a  New York Times article,” says Peter Stano, an EU spokesperson, adding most disinformation narratives have circled around the idea that “the US is to blame.” The EU’s disinformation monitoring project, EUvsDisinfo, has  flagged more than 150 pieces of disinformation linked to the Nord Stream explosions, including those building on Hersh’s story. “EUvsDisinfo experts also found that Moscow considers the recent materials in German-language media a hoax,” Stano says.

While OSINT is helping to provide bits of extra detail on the claims about the Nord Stream attacks, it is likely that reports debunking dubious claims reach fewer people than disinformation or claims that are hard to verify. “It does not nearly get the same level of engagement,” Blankenship says. “You can have a book’s worth of evidence for it, and they would still find a way to discount it.”

And while OSINT research can answer some questions, it has its limits and can also raise new ones. Kaarsbo, the former Danish intelligence official, and other experts have pointed out that the Andromeda is a relatively small yacht, and it may have been unable to carry the amount of explosives needed to blow the pipelines. “The Andromeda is quite likely a piece of the puzzle, but I don’t think it’s a bigger piece of the puzzle that everyone makes it out to be,” Alexander says. “I think there are a lot of the big pieces missing.” Detailed sonar imagery of the damaged pipes would help people to understand what happened underwater, Alexander adds.

Ultimately, there is still very little hard public evidence—either from governments or publicly available online—about who may have been behind the attacks. Behind closed doors, intelligence agencies likely have more data and theories on the potential culprits. However, investigators in Sweden and Denmark refused to comment on their progress, while Germany’s Office of the Federal Prosecutor confirmed it had searched a yacht and is continuing to examine for explosives. German officials have also said there could be a  chance of a “false flag” operation to smear Ukraine . And when the countries complete their investigations, there’s no guarantee they will publish their findings or evidence to back them up. The mystery continues.

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Germany tells UN: Nord Stream inquiry found subsea explosive traces on yacht

UNITED NATIONS - Germany found traces of subsea explosives in samples taken from a yacht that it suspects “may have been used to transport the explosives” to blow up the Nord Stream gas pipelines , it told the UN Security Council in a letter with Sweden and Denmark.

A series of unexplained explosions hit the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines connecting Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea in September 2022 in the exclusive economic zones of Germany, Sweden and Denmark.

The trio is each conducting separate investigations and sent an update – seen by Reuters – ahead of a meeting of the 15-member Security Council on Tuesday called by Russia, which has complained that it has not been kept informed about the probes .

“None of the investigations has been concluded and at this point, it is still not possible to say when they will be concluded. The nature of the acts of sabotage is unprecedented and the investigations are complex,” the three wrote in a joint letter, dated Monday, which included an update on each inquiry.

The joint letter said Germany has been investigating “the suspicious charter of a sailing yacht” that had been rented in a way to “hide the identity of the real charterer”. Germany was still investigating the precise course of the boat.

“It is suspected that the boat in question may have been used to transport the explosives that exploded at the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines,” the letter said of Germany’s inquiry.

“Traces of subsea explosives were found in the samples taken from the boat during the investigation.”

“According to expert assessments, it is possible that trained divers could have attached explosives at the points where damage occurred to the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, which are laid on the seabed at a depth of approximately 70m to 80m,” it said of Germany’s inquiry.

Moscow has said the West was behind the blasts. Western governments have denied involvement, as has Ukraine, which is fighting Russian forces that invaded in February 2022.

Russia failed in March to get the UN Security Council to ask for an independent inquiry into the Nord Stream blasts.

“At this point it is not possible to reliably establish the identity of the perpetrators and their motives, particularly regarding the question of whether the incident was steered by a state or state actor,” the letter said of Germany’s inquiry. REUTERS

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A drunken evening, a rented yacht: The real story of the Nord Stream Pipeline sabotage

Private businessmen funded the shoestring operation, which was overseen by a top general; president zelensky approved the plan, then tried unsuccessfully to call it off.

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EXCLUSIVE: It was the kind of outlandish scheme that might bubble up in a bar around closing time.

In May of 2022, a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen had gathered to toast their country’s remarkable success in halting the Russian invasion. Buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor, somebody suggested a radical next step: destroying Nord Stream.

After all, the twin natural-gas pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe were providing billions to the Kremlin war machine. What better way to make Vladimir Putin pay for his aggression?

Just over four months later, in the small hours of Sept. 26, Scandinavian seismologists picked up signals indicating an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption hundreds of miles away, near the Danish island of Bornholm. They were caused by three powerful explosions and the largest-ever recorded release of natural gas, equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of Denmark.

GERMANY ISSUES ARREST WARRANT FOR UKRAINIAN SUSPECT IN CONNECTION TO NORD STREAM PIPELINE EXPLOSION: REPORTS

One of the most audacious acts of sabotage in modern history, the operation worsened an energy crisis in Europe —an assault on critical infrastructure that could be considered an act of war under international law. Theories swirled about who was responsible. Was it the CIA? Could Putin himself have set the plan in motion?

Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told. The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. It involved a small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers. One was a woman, whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise.

"I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites," one officer who was involved in the plot said. "The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the plan, according to one officer who participated and three people familiar with it. But later, when the CIA learned of it and asked the Ukrainian president to pull the plug, he ordered a halt, those people said.

Zelensky’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was leading the effort, nonetheless forged ahead.

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as seen in his office in the building of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Kyiv, Ukraine, on June 28, 2023. (Oksana Parafeniuk/For The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)

The Journal spoke to four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot. All of them said the pipelines were a legitimate target in Ukraine’s war of defense against Russia.

Portions of their account were corroborated by a nearly two-year German police investigation into the attack, which has obtained evidence including email, mobile and satellite phones communications, as well as fingerprints and DNA samples from the alleged sabotage team. The Germany inquiry hasn’t directly linked President Zelensky to the clandestine operation.

Gen. Zaluzhniy, now Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, said in a text exchange that he knows nothing of any such operation and that any suggestion to the contrary is a "mere provocation." Ukraine’s armed forces, he added, weren’t authorized to conduct overseas missions, and he therefore wouldn’t have been involved.

PUTIN SCRAMBLES AS UKRAINE ADVANCES TROOPS ALONG ‘DORMANT FRONT’ IN BORDER SECURITY OPERATION

A senior official of the main Ukrainian intelligence service, SBU, denied his government had anything to do with the sabotage, and said that Zelensky in particular "did not approve the implementation of any such actions on the territory of third countries and did not issue relevant orders."

Putin has publicly blamed the U.S. for the attacks. A senior Russian diplomat in Berlin echoed that claim, and said the German investigation findings were "fairy tales worthy of the Brothers Grimm."

In June, Germany’s federal prosecutor quietly issued the first arrest warrant in the case for a Ukrainian professional diving instructor for his alleged involvement in the sabotage. The German investigation is now focusing on Zaluzhniy and his aides, people familiar with the probe say, although they have no evidence that could be presented in court.

The findings could upend relations between Kyiv and Berlin, which has provided much of the financing and military equipment to Ukraine, second only to the U.S. Some German political leaders may have been willing to overlook evidence pointing to Ukraine for fear of undermining domestic support for the war effort. But German police are politically independent and their investigation took on a life of its own as they pursued one lead after another.

"An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash," said a senior German official familiar with the probe.

Following the May 2022 pact between the businessmen and the military officers, it was agreed that the former would finance and help execute the project, because the army had no funds and was increasingly relying on foreign financing as it pushed back against the onslaught of its gargantuan neighbor. A sitting general with experience in special operations would oversee the mission, which one participant described as a "public-private partnership." He would report directly to the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, the four-star Gen. Zaluzhniy.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses the 78th United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. headquarters in New York City on Sept. 19, 2023. (Timothy A. Clara/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Within days, Zelensky approved the plan, according to the four people familiar with the plot. All arrangements were made verbally, leaving no paper trail.

But the next month, the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD learned of the plot and warned the CIA, according to several people familiar with the Dutch report. U.S. officials then promptly informed Germany, according to U.S. and German officials.

The CIA warned Zelensky’s office to stop the operation, U.S. officials said. The Ukrainian president then ordered Zaluzhniy to halt it, according to Ukrainian officers and officials familiar with the conversation as well as Western intelligence officials. But the general ignored the order, and his team modified the original plan, these people said.

The general tasked with commanding the operation enlisted some of Ukraine’s top special-operations officers with experience in orchestrating high-risk clandestine missions against Russia to help coordinate the attack.

One of them was Roman Chervinsky, a decorated colonel who previously served in Ukraine’s main security and intelligence service, the SBU.

Chervinsky is currently on trial in Ukraine for unrelated charges. In July, he was released on bail after over a year in detention. Reached after his release, he declined to comment on the Nord Stream case, saying he wasn’t authorized to speak about it.

A gas leak causes bubbles on the surface of the water at Sea in Sweden on Sept. 29, 2022. (Photo by Swedish Coast Guard / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Getty Images)

In a subsequent broadcast interview, he said that the sabotage had two positive effects for Ukraine: It helped loosen Russia’s grip on the European countries supporting Kyiv, and it left Moscow with only one main avenue for channeling gas to Europe, pipelines traversing Ukraine. Despite the war, Ukraine collects lucrative transit fees for Russian oil and gas estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Chervinsky and the sabotage team initially studied an older, elaborate plan to blow up the pipeline drafted by Ukrainian intelligence and Western experts after Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, according to people familiar with the plot.

After dismissing that idea due to its cost and complexity, the planners settled on using a small sailing boat and a team of six—a mix of seasoned active duty soldiers and civilians with maritime expertise—to blow up the 700-mile-long pipelines that sat more than 260 feet below the sea’s surface.

In September 2022, the plotters rented a 50-foot leisure yacht called Andromeda in Germany’s Baltic port town of Rostock. The boat was leased with the help of a Polish travel agency that was set up by Ukrainian intelligence as a cover for financial transactions nearly a decade ago, according to Ukrainian officers and people familiar with the German investigation.

NORD STREAM 2: WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE CONTROVERSIAL GAS PIPELINE CONNECTING RUSSIA WITH EUROPE

One crew member, a military officer on active duty who was fighting in the war, was a seasoned skipper, and four were experienced deep-sea divers, people familiar with the German investigation said. The crew included civilians, one of whom was a woman in her 30s who had trained privately as a diver. She was handpicked for her skills but also to lend more plausibility to the crew’s disguise as friends on holiday, according to one person familiar with the planning.

The Andromeda, a 50-foot Bavaria 50 Cruiser recreational sailing yacht, stands in dry dock on the headland of Bug on Ruegen Island on March 17, 2023, near Dranske, Germany. According to reports, German investigators searched the boat recently and sus ((Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) / Getty Images)

The skipper took a short leave from his unit, which had been fighting on the front in the southeast of Ukraine, and his commander was kept in the dark, according to two Ukrainians familiar with the plot.

Ukraine has a long history of training top civilian and military divers. A naval base on the Crimean Peninsula in the past trained deep-sea divers for the purposes of sabotage and demining. It also kept combat dolphins trained to attack enemy divers and blow up ships, according to two senior Ukrainian officers. The base was taken over by Russia after it occupied Crimea, and some of its staff moved elsewhere in Ukraine.

Armed only with diving equipment, satellite navigation, a portable sonar and open-source maps of the seabed charting the position of the pipelines, the crew set out. The four divers worked in pairs, according to people familiar with the German investigation. Operating in pitch-dark, icy waters, they handled a powerful explosive known as HMX that was wired to timer-controlled detonators. A small amount of the light explosive would be sufficient to rip open the high-pressure pipes.

Spending 20 minutes at that depth requires around three hours of decompression, and the person must then refrain from diving for at least 24 hours or risk serious injury.

Inclement weathe r forced the crew to make an unplanned stop in the Swedish port of Sandhamn. One diver accidentally dropped an explosive device to the bottom of the sea. The crew briefly discussed whether to abort the operation due to the bad weather but the storm soon subsided, two people familiar with the operation said.

Witnesses on other yachts moored in Sandhamn noted that the Andromeda was the only boat with a small Ukrainian flag hoisted on its mast.

In the wake of the attack, which took out three of the four conduits forming the pipelines, energy prices surged. Germany and other nations scrambled to nationalize energy companies that handled Russian gas but collapsed after the pipelines were destroyed. Even today Germany is paying around $1 million a day alone to lease floating terminals for liquefied natural gas or LNG, which only partly replaced the Russian gas flows channeled by Nord Stream.

Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the U.S., among others, sent out warships, divers, underwater drones and aircraft to investigate the area around the gas leaks.

Zelensky took Zaluzhniy to task, but the general shrugged off his criticism, according to three people familiar with the exchange. Zaluzhniy told Zelensky that the sabotage team, once dispatched, went incommunicado and couldn’t be called off because any contact with them could compromise the operation.

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"He was told it’s like a torpedo—once you fire it at the enemy, you can’t pull it back again, it just keeps going until it goes ‘boom,’ " a senior officer familiar with the conversation said.

Days after the attack, in October 2022, Germany’s foreign secret service received a second tipoff about the Ukrainian plot from the CIA, which again passed on a report by the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD. It offered a detailed account of the attack, including the type of boat used and the possible route taken by the crew, according to German and Dutch officials.

The Netherlands built deep intelligence-gathering capacity in Ukraine and Russia after Russian-backed paramilitaries downed a Malaysia Airlines flight originating from Amsterdam over eastern Ukraine, two Dutch officials said.

Due to rules governing the sharing of classified intelligence, German police investigating the case weren’t allowed to see the Dutch report that linked Zaluzhniy and the Ukrainian military to the attack, but they were made aware of it by intelligence officials.

German investigators questioned dozens of potential witnesses, scanned the bottom of the sea around the blasts and sifted through masses of data including digital communication, travel records and financial transactions.

The Andromeda, a 50-foot Bavaria 50 Cruiser recreational sailing yacht, stands in dry dock on the headland of Bug on Ruegen Island on March 17, 2023, near Dranske, Germany. According to media reports, German investigators searched the boat recently a ((Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) / Getty Images)

They had one lucky break. In rushing to leave Germany, the sabotage crew neglected to wash the Andromeda, allowing German detectives to find traces of explosives, fingerprints and DNA samples of the crew.

Investigators later identified their mobile phone numbers and their Iridium satellite phone. That data allowed them to reconstruct the entire journey of the boat, which moored in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. U.S. authorities sought a court order to obtain from Google the emails a Ukrainian businessman used to lease the boat, and handed them over to the Germans. That Ukrainian businessman had contacted a number of boat rental firms in Sweden as well as in Germany, starting from mid-May 2022.

Investigators then analyzed all mobile phone traffic in the areas where the boat was located, trawling through thousands of connections to distill the relevant data.

At one point they were startled to find out that thousands of German mobile phones were active in the tiny Swedish port of Sandhamn, which was nearly empty at the time the boat was sheltering there from a storm.

It later emerged that a vast cruise ship belonging to a tourist operator passed by and the phones of German passengers briefly linked up with the local cellular mast.

They struggled at one point to secure the cooperation of Polish authorities despite the fact that the saboteurs used Poland partly as a logistical base and stopped in the Polish port of Kolobrzeg.

A port official suspicious of the yacht’s crew alerted police. Poland’s border guard checked the identification of the crew, who produced passports from European Union members. They were allowed to continue sailing north, where they laid the rest of the mines, people familiar with the investigation say.

The entire port was covered by extensive video surveillance, they found. However, despite a history of close cooperation between Warsaw and Berlin in police matters, Polish officials initially refused to hand over the CCTV footage of the port. This year, they told their German colleagues that the footage had been routinely destroyed shortly after the Andromeda departed.

The Polish internal security agency ABW told the Journal that no such footage exists.

By November 2022, German investigators believed Ukrainians were behind the explosion.

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Earlier this year, Zelensky ousted Zaluzhniy from his military post, saying a shakeup was needed to reboot the war effort. Zaluzhniy, who has been viewed domestically as a potential political rival, was later appointed Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.K., a position that grants him immunity from prosecution.

In June, German officials issued a confidential arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen who the Germans believe was one of the crew members. According to people familiar with the investigation, a van driving the Ukrainian sabotage team from Poland into Germany in 2022 was snapped by a German speed camera, and the man, a diving instructor living with his family near Warsaw, was in the photo.

Authorities in Poland didn’t act on the warrant. The instructor is believed to have since returned to Ukraine. Poland’s failure to arrest him is a major blow to the German probe, because he and other suspects have now been tipped off and will avoid travelling outside Ukraine, people familiar with the investigation said. Ukraine doesn’t extradite its own citizens.

Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, holds a press conference in Kyiv on Dec. 26, 2023. (Kaniuka Ruslan / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images) / Getty Images)

Ukrainian officials who participated in or are familiar with the plot believe it would be impossible to put any of the commanding officers on trial, because no evidence exists beyond conversations among top officials who were, at least initially, all in agreement about wanting to blow up the pipelines.

"None of them will testify, lest they incriminate themselves," one former officer said.

—Drew Hinshaw contributed to this article.

Divers used chartered yacht to sabotage Nord Stream pipelines – report

Report in Der Spiegel says six-person crew took Andromeda to Christiansø, close to site of blasts, but experts question theory

The underwater bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines last September was carried out by a team of divers operating from a 15-metre chartered yacht called the Andromeda, according to a new report.

The report in Der Spiegel traces the Andromeda’s route around the Baltic from its home marina in Rostock on 6 September to the German island of Rügen and then finally to the Danish island of Christiansø, close to the site of the blasts on 26 September.

Experts have questioned whether the amount of explosives used in the sabotage attacks, estimated to be several hundred kilograms, as well with the necessary breathing apparatus and other equipment could have been carried on such a small boat, raising the question of whether another vessel was involved.

Der Spiegel said that one of the six-person crew on the Andromeda was using a forged Bulgarian passport, but the German investigators have yet to identify the nationality of the bombers, or attribute responsibility to any government. A New York Times report this week cited intelligence sources as saying a pro-Ukrainian group was involved, but German authorities have warned about the possibility of a “false-flag” operations in which misleading clues are left deliberately to point in the wrong direction.

The Ukrainian government has denied any involvement in the attack on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which were built to transport natural gas from Russia to Germany, and are majority-owned by the Russian state-owned company Gazprom. They were not operational at the time of the attack, which came seven months after Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine , but they were filled with gas, which bubbled to the surface, creating a wide area of visible turbulence.

The Spiegel quotes a harbour master in Rügen as saying the group that hired the Andromeda were dressed like normal sailors, and that he saw them carrying shopping bags of provisions to the boat, speaking a language that “sounded Polish or Czech to him”. He said there were several men and a woman.

The Andromeda is a Bavaria C50, a sailing boat made by a German company, Bavaria Yachts . It has five cabins and room for up to 11 people. It has a platform at the back to dive from.

At the site of the blasts, the Baltic Sea is about 80 metres deep, requiring specialist diving skills and special air tanks, one with a helium-oxygen mixture and one with pure oxygen, the Spiegel report said.

Each dive would have required the boat to be over the pipeline for about three hours. To have laid explosives on two pipelines 4km apart would probably have required four dives over a few days.

Diving experts say such extended deep dives would have required a decompression chamber for the divers, which would not fit on a yacht. There are also question on whether there would be room for the required explosives. The Danish and Swedish governments have said that the blasts were equivalent to the power of “several hundred kilograms of explosive”. Some experts say up to 2,000kg would have been needed.

“We have been presented a piece of a puzzle. However, we don’t know how big the puzzle is. Is it 50 pieces, 500 or 5,000 pieces?” said Christian Mölling, the head of the centre for security and defence at the German Council on Foreign Relations .

“Was there was a second boat and did somebody transport the explosive from somewhere else?” Mölling asked. “So that’s why I think there are pieces of the puzzle missing for the moment.”

The chair of the Bundestag’s intelligence oversight committee, Konstantin von Notz, has warned the press “to be as cautious as possible with any conclusions at this point in time”.

He told Die Zeit the investigation was “very likely to be dealing with a state or quasi-state actor because it is very demanding to transport large quantities of explosives – up to two tons are now being discussed – undetected to the right place in the Baltic Sea, to transport them into a relevant depth in order to trigger several explosions in a controlled manner”.

He said a “state-backed act of terrorism makes it more likely that false or deceptive clues were laid”.

The German public prosecutor’s office has said that a boat had been searched between 18 and 20 January over “suspicions it could have been used to transport explosive devices that exploded on 26 September 2022”.

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Germany seeks Ukrainian suspect in Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, reports say

August 14, 2024 / 11:41 AM EDT / AFP

German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man over the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, German media reported Wednesday, with Polish prosecutors confirming they had received the warrant.

In the two years since the mysterious explosions hit the pipelines, speculation has been rife around who was responsible with Ukraine and Russia both vehemently denying any involvement.

But German media reported on Wednesday that a European arrest warrant had been requested for a Ukrainian man, a diving instructor whose last known address was in Poland.

The Polish prosecutor's office told AFP it had received the warrant for a man named as "Volodymyr Z." in June "in connection with proceedings against him in Germany."

However, the man left for Ukraine at the beginning of July before he could be detained, it said.

German investigators believe the man was one of the divers who planted explosive devices on the Nord Stream pipelines, according to the ARD broadcaster and newspapers Die Zeit and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

They have also identified two more Ukrainians, a man and a woman who they believe acted as divers in the attacks and are believed to be a married couple who run a diving school in Ukraine, the reports said.

However, no arrest warrants have yet been issued for them.

Different German media outlets reported Wednesday that they had reached Volodymyr Z. and the woman in question, who both denied any involvement.

The German federal prosecution service declined to comment when contacted by AFP.

German government spokesman Wolfgang Buechner also did not comment directly on the reports but stressed that German prosecutors' "investigations are being carried out according to the law regardless of who is concerned and which results they lead to."

Buechner told reporters at a press conference that the results of the probe "of course do not change anything about the fact that Russia is waging an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine."

Polish prosecutors said the suspect had been able to leave Poland because German investigators did not "include him in the database of wanted persons."

"The Polish Border Guard had no knowledge and no grounds for detaining Volodymyr Z.," the prosecutor's office told AFP.

Nord Stream's two pipelines had been at the center of geopolitical tensions as Russia cut gas supplies to Europe in suspected retaliation for Western sanctions over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

Four large gas leaks were discovered in September 2022 in the pipelines off the Danish island of Bornholm, with seismic institutes recording two underwater explosions just before.

While the leaks were in international waters, two were in Denmark's exclusive economic zone and two in Sweden's.

The pipelines were not in operation when the leaks occurred, but they still contained gas which spewed up to the surface and into the atmosphere.

The Ukrainian suspects are accused of transporting the explosives used in the attack in a sailing yacht called the Andromeda, according to the German media reports.

The same yacht was searched by German investigators in January 2023.

According to reports at the time, a team of five men and one woman chartered the yacht from Rostock port to carry out the operation.

In June 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insisted Kyiv knew nothing about any plan to blow up the pipelines.

As president he has the power to give orders, Zelenskyy said in an interview with Germany's Bild daily.

"I did nothing like that. I would never do that," he said.

Denmark, Sweden and Germany all opened investigations into the explosions.

However, Denmark and Sweden both closed their investigations earlier this year.

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A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage

It was the kind of outlandish scheme that might bubble up in a bar around closing time.

In May of 2022, a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen had gathered to toast their country’s remarkable success in halting the Russian invasion. Buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor, somebody suggested a radical next step: destroying Nord Stream.

After all, the twin natural-gas pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe were providing billions to the Kremlin war machine. What better way to make Vladimir Putin pay for his aggression?

Just over four months later, in the small hours of Sept. 26, Scandinavian seismologists picked up signals indicating an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption hundreds of miles away, near the Danish island of Bornholm. They were caused by three powerful explosions and the largest-ever recorded release of natural gas, equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of Denmark.

One of the most audacious acts of sabotage in modern history, the operation worsened an energy crisis in Europe—an assault on critical infrastructure that could be considered an act of war under international law. Theories swirled about who was responsible. Was it the CIA? Could Putin himself have set the plan in motion?

Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told. The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. It involved a small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers. One was a woman, whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise.

“I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites,” one officer who was involved in the plot said. “The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the plan, according to one officer who participated and three people familiar with it. But later, when the CIA learned of it and asked the Ukrainian president to pull the plug, he ordered a halt, those people said.

Zelensky’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was leading the effort, nonetheless forged ahead.

The Journal spoke to four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot. All of them said the pipelines were a legitimate target in Ukraine’s war of defense against Russia.

Portions of their account were corroborated by a nearly two-year German police investigation into the attack, which has obtained evidence including email, mobile and satellite phones communications, as well as fingerprints and DNA samples from the alleged sabotage team. The Germany inquiry hasn’t directly linked President Zelensky to the clandestine operation.

Gen. Zaluzhniy, now Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, said in a text exchange that he knows nothing of any such operation and that any suggestion to the contrary is a “mere provocation.” Ukraine’s armed forces, he added, weren’t authorized to conduct overseas missions, and he therefore wouldn’t have been involved.

A senior official of the main Ukrainian intelligence service, SBU, denied his government had anything to do with the sabotage, and said that Zelensky in particular “did not approve the implementation of any such actions on the territory of third countries and did not issue relevant orders.”

Putin has publicly blamed the U.S. for the attacks. A senior Russian diplomat in Berlin echoed that claim, and said the German investigation findings were “fairy tales worthy of the Brothers Grimm.”

In June, Germany’s federal prosecutor quietly issued the first arrest warrant in the case for a Ukrainian professional diving instructor for his alleged involvement in the sabotage. The German investigation is now focusing on Zaluzhniy and his aides, people familiar with the probe say, although they have no evidence that could be presented in court.

The findings could upend relations between Kyiv and Berlin, which has provided much of the financing and military equipment to Ukraine, second only to the U.S. Some German political leaders may have been willing to overlook evidence pointing to Ukraine for fear of undermining domestic support for the war effort. But German police are politically independent and their investigation took on a life of its own as they pursued one lead after another.

“An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash,” said a senior German official familiar with the probe.

Following the May 2022 pact between the businessmen and the military officers, it was agreed that the former would finance and help execute the project, because the army had no funds and was increasingly relying on foreign financing as it pushed back against the onslaught of its gargantuan neighbor. A sitting general with experience in special operations would oversee the mission, which one participant described as a “public-private partnership.” He would report directly to the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, the four-star Gen. Zaluzhniy.

Within days, Zelensky approved the plan, according to the four people familiar with the plot. All arrangements were made verbally, leaving no paper trail.

But the next month, the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD learned of the plot and warned the CIA, according to several people familiar with the Dutch report. U.S. officials then promptly informed Germany, according to U.S. and German officials.

The CIA warned Zelensky’s office to stop the operation, U.S. officials said. The Ukrainian president then ordered Zalyzhniy to halt it, according to Ukrainian officers and officials familiar with the conversation as well as Western intelligence officials. But the general ignored the order, and his team modified the original plan, these people said.

The general tasked with commanding the operation enlisted some of Ukraine’s top special-operations officers with experience in orchestrating high-risk clandestine missions against Russia to help coordinate the attack.

One of them was Roman Chervinsky, a decorated colonel who previously served in Ukraine’s main security and intelligence service, the SBU.

Chervinsky is currently on trial in Ukraine for unrelated charges. In July, he was released on bail after over a year in detention. Reached after his release, he declined to comment on the Nord Stream case, saying he wasn’t authorized to speak about it.

In a subsequent broadcast interview, he said that the sabotage had two positive effects for Ukraine: It helped loosen Russia’s grip on the European countries supporting Kyiv, and it left Moscow with only one main avenue for channeling gas to Europe, pipelines traversing Ukraine. Despite the war, Ukraine collects lucrative transit fees for Russian oil and gas estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Chervinsky and the sabotage team initially studied an older, elaborate plan to blow up the pipeline drafted by Ukrainian intelligence and Western experts after Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, according to people familiar with the plot.

After dismissing that idea due its cost and complexity, the planners settled on using a small sailing boat and a team of six—a mix of seasoned active duty soldiers and civilians with maritime expertise—to blow up the 700-mile-long pipelines that sat more than 260 feet below the sea’s surface.

In September 2022, the plotters rented a 50-foot leisure yacht called Andromeda in Germany’s Baltic port town of Rostock. The boat was leased with the help of a Polish travel agency that was set up by Ukrainian intelligence as a cover for financial transactions nearly a decade ago, according to Ukrainian officers and people familiar with the German investigation.

One crew member, a military officer on active duty who was fighting in the war, was a seasoned skipper, and four were experienced deep-sea divers, people familiar with the German investigation said. The crew included civilians, one of whom was a woman in her 30s who had trained privately as a diver. She was handpicked for her skills but also to lend more plausibility to the crew’s disguise as friends on holiday, according to one person familiar with the planning.

The skipper took a short leave from his unit, which had been fighting on the front in the southeast of Ukraine, and his commander was kept in the dark, according to two Ukrainians familiar with the plot.

Ukraine has a long history of training top civilian and military divers. A naval base on the Crimean Peninsula in the past trained deep-sea divers for the purposes of sabotage and demining. It also kept combat dolphins trained to attack enemy divers and blow up ships, according to two senior Ukrainian officers. The base was taken over by Russia after it occupied Crimea, and some of its staff moved elsewhere in Ukraine.

Armed only with diving equipment, satellite navigation, a portable sonar and open-source maps of the seabed charting the position of the pipelines, the crew set out. The four divers worked in pairs, according to people familiar with the German investigation. Operating in pitch-dark, icy waters, they handled a powerful explosive known as HMX that was wired to timer-controlled detonators. A small amount of the light explosive would be sufficient to rip open the high-pressure pipes.

Spending 20 minutes at that depth requires around three hours of decompression, and the person must then refrain from diving for at least 24 hours or risk serious injury.

Inclement weather forced the crew to make an unplanned stop in the Swedish port of Sandhamn. One diver accidentally dropped an explosive device to the bottom of the sea. The crew briefly discussed whether to abort the operation due to the bad weather but the storm soon subsided, two people familiar with the operation said.

Witnesses on other yachts moored in Sandhamn noted that the Andromeda was the only boat with a small Ukrainian flag hoisted on its mast.

In the wake of the attack, which took out three of the four conduits forming the pipelines, energy prices surged. Germany and other nations scrambled to nationalize energy companies that handled Russian gas but collapsed after the pipelines were destroyed. Even today Germany is paying around $1 million a day alone to lease floating terminals for liquefied natural gas or LNG, which only partly replaced the Russian gas flows channeled by Nord Stream.

Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the U.S., among others, sent out warships, divers, underwater drones and aircraft to investigate the area around the gas leaks.

Zelensky took Zaluzhniy to task, but the general shrugged off his criticism, according to three people familiar with the exchange. Zaluzhniy told Zelensky that the sabotage team, once dispatched, went incommunicado and couldn’t be called off because any contact with them could compromise the operation.

“He was told it’s like a torpedo—once you fire it at the enemy, you can’t pull it back again, it just keeps going until it goes ‘boom,’ ” a senior officer familiar with the conversation said.

Days after the attack, in October 2022, Germany’s foreign secret service received a second tipoff about the Ukrainian plot from the CIA, which again passed on a report by the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD. It offered a detailed account of the attack, including the type of boat used and the possible route taken by the crew, according to German and Dutch officials.

The Netherlands built deep intelligence-gathering capacity in Ukraine and Russia after Russian-backed paramilitaries downed a Malaysia Airlines flight originating from Amsterdam over eastern Ukraine, two Dutch officials said.

Due to rules governing the sharing of classified intelligence, German police investigating the case weren’t allowed to see the Dutch report that linked Zaluzhniy and the Ukrainian military to the attack, but they were made aware of it by intelligence officials.

German investigators questioned dozens of potential witnesses, scanned the bottom of the sea around the blasts and sifted through masses of data including digital communication, travel records and financial transactions.

They had one lucky break. In rushing to leave Germany, the sabotage crew neglected to wash the Andromeda, allowing German detectives to find traces of explosives, fingerprints and DNA samples of the crew.

Investigators later identified their mobile phone numbers and their Iridium satellite phone. That data allowed them to reconstruct the entire journey of the boat, which moored in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. U.S. authorities sought a court order to obtain from Google the emails a Ukrainian businessman used to lease the boat, and handed them over to the Germans. That Ukrainian businessman had contacted a number of boat rental firms in Sweden as well as in Germany, starting from mid-May 2022.

Investigators then analyzed all mobile phone traffic in the areas where the boat was located, trawling through thousands of connections to distill the relevant data.

At one point they were startled to find out that thousands of German mobile phones were active in the tiny Swedish port of Sandhamn, which was nearly empty at the time the boat was sheltering there from a storm.

It later emerged that a vast cruise ship belonging to a tourist operator passed by and the phones of German passengers briefly linked up with the local cellular mast.

They struggled at one point to secure the cooperation of Polish authorities despite the fact that the saboteurs used Poland partly as a logistical base and stopped in the Polish port of Kolobrzeg.

A port official suspicious of the yacht’s crew alerted police. Poland’s border guard checked the identification of the crew, who produced passports from European Union members. They were allowed to continue sailing north, where they laid the rest of the mines, people familiar with the investigation say.

The entire port was covered by extensive video surveillance, they found. However, despite a history of close cooperation between Warsaw and Berlin in police matters, Polish officials initially refused to hand over the CCTV footage of the port. This year, they told their German colleagues that the footage had been routinely destroyed shortly after the Andromeda departed.

The Polish internal security agency ABW told the Journal that no such footage exists.

By November 2022, German investigators believed Ukrainians were behind the explosion.

Earlier this year, Zelensky ousted Zaluzhniy from his military post, saying a shakeup was needed to reboot the war effort. Zaluzhniy, who has been viewed domestically as a potential political rival, was later appointed Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.K., a position that grants him immunity from prosecution.

In June, German officials issued a confidential arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen who the Germans believe was one of the crew members. According to people familiar with the investigation, a van driving the Ukrainian sabotage team from Poland into Germany in 2022 was snapped by a German speed camera, and the man, a diving instructor living with his family near Warsaw, was in the photo.

Authorities in Poland didn’t act on the warrant. The instructor is believed to have since returned to Ukraine. Poland’s failure to arrest him is a major blow to the German probe, because he and other suspects have now been tipped off and will avoid travelling outside Ukraine, people familiar with the investigation said. Ukraine doesn’t extradite its own citizens.

Ukrainian officials who participated in or are familiar with the plot believe it would be impossible to put any of the commanding officers on trial, because no evidence exists beyond conversations among top officials who were, at least initially, all in agreement about wanting to blow up the pipelines.

“None of them will testify, lest they incriminate themselves,” one former officer said.

Drew Hinshaw contributed to this article.

Write to Bojan Pancevski at [email protected]

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Germany’s Scholz demands honest Nord Stream probe

Germany has nothing to hide in its investigation into the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has insisted, days after Moscow described the probe as “absolutely not transparent.”

So far, no one has claimed responsibility for the 2022 blasts that severed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, which transported Russian natural gas to Germany and other parts of Western Europe.

”We call on all security authorities and the Federal Public Prosecutor General to investigate the blasts without regard for anyone,” Scholz said during a meeting with citizens in Prenzlau, Brandenburg, on Saturday.

”Nothing is being covered up, and that should be absolutely clear,” he emphasized, adding, “We want to bring those who did this to justice in Germany, if we can get hold of them.”

Last month, multiple German outlets reported that the authorities had issued a first arrest warrant in the case, allegedly for a Ukrainian national identified as “Vladimir Z.”

A few months after the Nord Stream blasts, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported – citing whistleblowers and other well-placed sources – that the operation was carried out by US divers. The charges were reportedly set under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercises, and detonated on orders from President Joe Biden. Moscow has refrained from openly accusing Washington, but noted that the US stands to gain the most from the disruption of cheap fuel supplies to the EU’s economic powerhouse.

However, according to a narrative promoted by Western media shortly after Hersh’s revelations, the explosions were caused by a small team of pro-Ukrainian commandos who rented a yacht to reach the site, and dived down to set the charges. The CIA and their European counterparts, as well as Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, were reportedly kept out of the loop. More recently, the Wall Street Journal alleged that Zelensky knew about and approved  of the operation, then unsuccessfully attempted to halt it.

Commenting on the German investigation into the sabotage on Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Berlin has not shared any information with Moscow despite numerous requests. He described the probe as “absolutely not transparent,” and dismissed the claims that six individuals carried out the sabotage impulsively as not credible.

”If someone can actually believe this version, then it’s only people who are afraid of the truth,” Lavrov said. He asserted that Moscow will insist on a transparent investigation, “which is being blocked by the US, Britain, and their allies.”

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