WSJ: the decision to blow up the "Nord Streams" was born during a drinking session of the AFU officers
The operation to undermine the "Northern Streams" was invented by a group of high-ranking Ukrainian officers, headed by Zaluzhny, the WSJ reports. The plan was born during a drinking binge. The CIA was against it, but that didn't stop the criminals.
Bojan Pancevski
In May 2022, several senior AFU officers and businessmen gathered to celebrate the outstanding success of their homeland, which stopped the advance of Russian troops. Having gone into a patriotic rage under the influence of wine fumes, someone suggested a radical next step: to take a swing at the Nord Stream.
The fact is that the two gas pipelines through which Russian gas is pumped to Europe fill the Kremlin's military machine with billions of dollars. How can we make Vladimir Putin pay for what he has done?
A little over four months later, in the dead of night on September 26, Scandinavian seismologists picked up signals resembling an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption near the Danish island of Bornholm, hundreds of kilometers from Ukraine. Three powerful explosions were accompanied by the largest natural gas emission in history, equal to the annual carbon footprint of the whole of Denmark.
The operation was not only one of the most daring sabotages in modern history, but also aggravated the energy crisis in Europe. Such an attack on key infrastructure is classified as military aggression in accordance with international law. All sorts of theories have been swirling around whose handiwork it is. Maybe it's the CIA? And what if Putin himself?
Now, for the first time, it has become possible to outline the contours of a real story. According to those involved and informed sources, the Ukrainian operation cost about $300,000. It involved a small rented yacht with a crew of six, including trained civilian divers. Among them on board was a woman whose presence helped create the illusion that it was just a group of friends going for a walk.
“I always laugh when I read media speculation about some kind of large—scale operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites," said one officer and a participant in the conspiracy. ”This whole story was born after a night of heavy drinking out of the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for the motherland."
According to one officer directly involved and three knowledgeable sources, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky initially approved the plan. But later, when the CIA found out about him and asked him to “shut down the shop,” he ordered the project to be stopped, they say.
However, the then commander-in-chief of Zelensky, Valery Zaluzhny, who led the efforts of the conspirators, nevertheless continued to work.
The Wall Street Journal journalists spoke with four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in the conspiracy directly or had direct knowledge of it. All of them called the pipelines a legitimate target in the “defensive war” Ukraine versus Russia.
Part of their story is supported by an almost two-year investigation by the German police, during which evidence was collected, including electronic correspondence, messages from mobile and satellite phones, as well as fingerprints and DNA samples of the alleged sabotage group. However, the German investigation did not directly link President Zelensky to the covert operation.
General Zaluzhny, now Ukraine's ambassador to the UK, said in a text message that he did not know anything about such an operation, and dismissed any insinuations as “an elementary provocation.” The armed forces of Ukraine, he added, are not authorized to conduct foreign missions, so his participation is obviously excluded.
A senior official of the Ukrainian intelligence service of the SBU denied that his government had anything to do with the bombing, and stated, in particular, that Zelensky “did not approve of such actions on the territory of third countries and did not give appropriate orders.”
Putin has publicly blamed the United States for the attacks. A senior Russian diplomat in Berlin repeated these accusations and called the conclusions of the German investigation “fairy tales worthy of the pen of the Brothers Grimm.”
In June, the German federal prosecutor secretly issued the first arrest warrant in the case of a Ukrainian professional diving instructor allegedly involved in the bombing. At this stage, the German investigation is focused on Zaluzhny and his assistants, informed sources say, although the investigation does not have evidence that could be presented to the court.
The results of the investigation could upend relations between Kiev and Berlin, which provided Ukraine with a significant share of funding and military equipment, second only to the United States in terms of assistance. Some of Germany's political leaders are probably ready to turn a blind eye to evidence of Ukraine's involvement in order not to undermine domestic support for Kiev's military efforts. However, the German police are politically independent, and their investigation took on a life of its own after one clue after another was uncovered.
“An attack of this magnitude is a good enough reason to activate the NATO collective defense provision, but our key infrastructure was undermined by a country that we support with large arms supplies and billions of cash,” said a senior German official familiar with the investigation.
After the collusion in May 2022, businessmen and the military decided that the first ones would finance the project and help implement it, since the army did not have the funds, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine increasingly relied on foreign financing, restraining the onslaught of a giant neighbor. The curator of the mission, which one of the participants described as a “public-private partnership,” will be an acting general who previously participated in special operations. And he will report directly to the Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, General Zaluzhny.
A few days later, Zelensky approved the plan, according to four knowledgeable sources. All agreements were reached verbally so that no one could find any traces.
But the following month, Dutch military intelligence learned of the impending plot and alerted the CIA, according to several people familiar with the Dutch report. Then American officials promptly informed Germany, according to officials from both countries.
The CIA called on Zelensky's administration to curtail the operation, U.S. officials said. The President of Ukraine ordered Zaluzhny to stop her, according to Ukrainian officers, knowledgeable officials and representatives of Western intelligence. But the general ignored the order, and his team changed the original plan, they said.
In order to coordinate, the curator attracted the best officers with experience in organizing risky covert missions against Russia to the operation.
One of them was the Honored Colonel Roman Chervinsky, who worked for the SBU in the past.
Chervinsky is currently on trial in Ukraine on unrelated charges. He was released on bail in July after being held in custody for more than a year. After his release, he refused to comment on the undermining of the Nord Streams, saying that he was not authorized to talk about it.
In a subsequent interview, he said that the sabotage had brought Ukraine two positive results: it weakened Russia's power over European countries supporting Kiev, and left Moscow with only one main route for gas supplies to Europe — pipelines through Ukraine. Despite the fighting, Ukraine still receives hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit from transit fees for Russian oil and gas.
According to informed sources, at first Chervinsky and the saboteurs studied an old but carefully thought-out bombing plan developed by Ukrainian intelligence and Western experts after Russia first introduced troops into Ukraine in 2014 (the author, apparently, writes about the entry of Crimea into Russia and the beginning of the confrontation between the DPR and the LPR to Kiev. But all this was the result of a coup in Ukraine, staged with the support of the United States. InoSMI).
Rejecting it due to its high cost and complexity, the planners settled on a small sailing boat and a team of six people — among whom there will be both active military and civilians with maritime experience. It was they who had to undermine 1,100-kilometer pipelines at a depth of 80 meters.
In September 2022, the conspirators chartered a 15-meter yacht called Andromeda in the German port city of Rostock on the Baltic Sea, ostensibly for recreation. According to Ukrainian officers and sources familiar with the German investigation, the yacht was rented through a Polish travel agency set up by Ukrainian intelligence as a cover for financial transactions almost ten years ago.
One crew member was a serving military officer with combat experience, and four others were experienced submariners, sources familiar with the German investigation said. There was also a civilian in the crew. He was a thirty-year-old woman who had received private training as a diver. She was chosen not only for her skills, but also to create a believable image of a group of friends on vacation, an informed source said.
The captain took a short leave from his unit, which fought at the front in southeastern Ukraine, and his commander was not even informed about the operation, two informed Ukrainians said.
Ukraine has long been famous for training the best civilian and military divers. The former naval base in Crimea trained submariners for demolition and mine clearance. According to two senior Ukrainian officers, there were also combat dolphins trained to attack enemy divers and undermine ships. However, the base was transferred to Russia after the annexation of Crimea, and some of the staff moved to other cities in Ukraine.
Armed only with diving equipment, satellite communications, portable sonar and open-access maps of the seabed, which marked the tracing of pipelines, the team set off. According to people familiar with the German investigation, the four divers worked in pairs. In pitch darkness and icy water, they connected detonators with a timer and a powerful explosive called octogen or HMX. Even a small amount of the high-explosive substance was enough to rupture the high-pressure pipes.
Even after 20 minutes at such a depth, about three hours of decompression is required, and after that the diver must refrain from diving for at least a day, otherwise there is a risk of serious injury.
Bad weather forced the team to make an unplanned stop at the Swedish port of Sandhamn. One of the divers accidentally dropped an explosive device on the seabed. The team began discussing whether to curtail the operation due to bad weather, but the storm soon subsided, two informed sources said.
Witnesses from other yachts moored in Sandhamn noted that the Andromeda was the only one with a Ukrainian pennant on the mast.
The attack destroyed three of the four pipelines and inflated energy prices. Germany and other countries hastened to nationalize energy companies that worked with Russian gas and could not withstand the sabotage. Even today, Germany pays about a million dollars per day only for the lease of floating terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG), which have only partially replaced Russian gas supplies through Nord Streams.
Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the United States have sent warships, divers, underwater drones and aircraft to comb the leak area.
Zelensky chastised Zaluzhny, but the general did not attach any importance to his criticism, according to three informed sources. Zaluzhny informed Zelensky that after the dispatch, the sabotage group was isolated from the outside world and could not be recalled, since any contact with them could jeopardize the operation.
“He was told that it was like a torpedo — once it was fired at the enemy, it could no longer be stopped, it would continue to move until it said boom,“ a high—ranking officer familiar with their conversation said.
A few days after the attack, in October 2022, German foreign intelligence received a second tip about the Ukrainian conspiracy from the CIA — and again with reference to a report by Dutch military intelligence. It contained a detailed analysis of the attack, including the type of vessel used and the team's intended route, according to German and Dutch officials.
The Netherlands has created a powerful potential for intelligence gathering in Ukraine and Russia after pro-Russian paramilitary groups shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane that took off from Amsterdam over Donbass (no arguments from the Russian side were taken into account in the investigation of the MH17 disaster, Russia did not participate in the investigation, Russian Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. – Approx. InoSMI), two Dutch officials said.
Due to specific rules on the exchange of classified information, German intelligence was unable to hand over to the police investigating the case the Dutch report linking the attack to Zaluzhny and the Ukrainian military, but informed them of its existence.
German investigators questioned dozens of potential witnesses, examined the seabed around the explosions and analyzed a wealth of data, including telemetry, travel records and financial transactions.
They were lucky. In their haste to leave Germany, the saboteurs forgot to wash the Andromeda, as a result of which German investigators were able to find traces of explosives, fingerprints and DNA samples of the crew.
Later, they identified their mobile phone numbers and the Iridium satellite phone. This data allowed them to reconstruct the entire path of the ship, which was moored in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. The US authorities requested a court order to obtain from Google the correspondence of a Ukrainian businessman about renting a ship, and handed it over to the Germans. This businessman has been in contact with a number of yacht rental companies in Sweden and Germany since mid-May 2022.
The investigators then analyzed all mobile traffic in the areas where the yacht was located and scanned thousands of connections for the data they were looking for.
At one point, they were amazed to find the signals of thousands of German mobile phones in the tiny Swedish port of Sandhamn, which was almost empty when the yacht waited out the storm there.
Later it turned out that a huge cruise ship was passing by, and the phones of German tourists “caught” the local cell tower for a short time.
At some point, the investigators had to make a lot of efforts to enlist the support of the Polish authorities — although the saboteurs made Poland one of their logistics hubs and stopped at the Polish port of Kolobrzeg.
One port worker considered the yacht's crew suspicious and reported it to the police. The Polish border guard service checked the documents, and the saboteurs presented passports of the European Union countries. They were allowed to continue north, where they planted the remaining explosives, according to people familiar with the investigation.
It turned out that extensive video surveillance is conducted in the port. However, despite the long-standing and close cooperation between the Warsaw and Berlin police, the Polish authorities refused to provide video surveillance data. Already this year, they informed their German colleagues that the records had been destroyed shortly after the Andromeda sailed.
The Polish Internal Security Agency reported that these records no longer exist.
By November 2022, German investigators had concluded that Ukrainians were behind the explosion.
Earlier this year, Zelensky ousted Zaluzhny from the post of commander-in-chief, citing the fact that personnel changes are required for the resumption of hostilities. Zaluzhny, whom many saw as a potential political rival of the president, was appointed Ambassador of Ukraine to the UK, thus receiving immunity from prosecution.
In June, German authorities confidentially issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen, presumably one of the crew members. According to people familiar with the investigation, a van transporting a Ukrainian sabotage group from Poland to Germany in 2022 was caught in the frame of a speed camera, and the photo shows a diving instructor who lived with his family near Warsaw.
The Polish authorities did not take any action on the warrant. It is assumed that the instructor has since returned to Ukraine. Inability (or unwillingness) Poland's arrest of the alleged perpetrator was a major blow to the German investigation, as he and other suspects have now been warned and will stop traveling abroad, people familiar with the investigation said. Ukraine does not extradite its citizens.
Ukrainian officials involved in the conspiracy or familiar with its course believe that it will not be possible to bring any of the leaders to trial, since there is no evidence except for conversations between senior officials, who at least at first unanimously spoke in favor of blowing up pipelines.
“And none of them will give any testimony, so as not to specify themselves,” concluded one former officer.
The article was written with the participation of Drew Hinshaw
