Let us be clear about what we are discussing here. After the USA, Germany has contributed the most money and arms to Ukraine’s war effort. The German government was also a major investor in Nord Stream, which makes landfall on their territory, and suffered huge economic damage from the sabotage.
by Joe Attard
The mysterious sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines has all the elements of a Hollywood crime drama: conspiracy, cover-up – and betrayal. A new series of revelations from the German police, published in the American press, purport to blow the case wide open. But when it comes to the Ukraine War, where lies have played an enormous role, we can accept nothing at face value.
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| The pipelines, which are majority-owned by the Russian state energy company Gazprom, make landfall in Germany / Image: Samuel Bailey, Wikimedia Commons |
First, a quick refresher on the story so far.
On 26 September 2022, explosions were detected in the Baltic Sea, after which three of the four pipes of Nord Stream 1 and 2 started leaking huge quantities of natural gas. The blasts occurred in international waters, but inside Swedish and Danish economic zones, near the Danish island of Bornholm.
The pipelines, which are majority-owned by the Russian state energy company Gazprom, make landfall in Germany. At the start of the Ukraine War, Moscow restricted the gas supply through Nord Stream, under the pretext of ‘maintenance’, to push up energy prices and pressurise Ukraine’s European allies not to get too heavily involved.
This unprecedented sabotage of a critical piece of energy infrastructure delighted Kiev, and US imperialism, which never made any secret of their opposition to the pipeline. But the bombing was a disaster for Europe in general and Germany in particular. Cutting the ready supply of cheap Russian energy wreaked havoc on millions of households, and had a catastrophic impact on Europe’s economy, particularly Germany’s heavy industrial base.
After the sabotage, Ukraine and its allies immediately pointed their fingers at Moscow. Russia replied with the rather obvious observation that it had nothing to gain and much to lose by bombing its own energy infrastructure and destroying a key bargaining chip with Europe. In a gross display of hypocrisy, the UN Security Council rejected Russia’s demand for an international inquiry – such are the double standards of international law!
Eventually, even Ukraine’s most ardent allies had to admit that the facts did not add up. Three separate investigations were set up by the governments of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Curiously, the Danes and Swedes soon dropped the case, with little explanation – almost as though they had uncovered some inconvenient truths…
Then in early 2023, famed American journalist Seymor Hersch published a Substack post citing “unnamed sources” from the US security services, to accuse Washington of having masterminded the bombing of Nord Stream with the assistance of the Norwegian navy. The claims were immediately rubbished by the US, who accused Hersch of spreading “Russian disinformation.”
Just over a year ago, separate reports appeared in the US and German press claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” led by a “Ukrainian commando” was responsible. These reports alleged that a six-person crew, acting independently of Zelensky’s government, operated from a 50-foot leisure yacht called Andromeda, leased from a Polish company. These reports conveniently spared Washington and Ukraine’s government from direct responsibility.
But now, we have some results from the German probe, and fresh allegations in the US and German press squarely pointing the finger in Ukraine’s direction, this time implicating the highest levels of government and military command. Not only that, but the new reports suggest that the US knew about the plot.
Ukraine in the spotlight
A Wall Street Journal article, titled ‘A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage’, allegedly details exactly how the sabotage was carried out, in the words of those responsible. How the WSJ gained an audience with the culprits is anyone’s guess.
The article initially paints the sabotage as an alcohol-fueled whim by a handful of “senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen”, costing a mere $300,000. It cites one officer “involved in the plot”, apparently directly refuting the sophisticated operation detailed by Hersch:
“I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites. 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.”
However, what follows sounds like a well-planned and orchestrated attack, involving the upper echelons of Ukraine’s military brass. Indeed, the WSJ names then commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, as the main mastermind.
According to the WSJ, it was agreed that private businessmen would finance the sabotage, handily preventing a financial paper trail leading to the Ukrainian state. The report claims President Volodymyr Zelensky “initially approved the plan”, before the CIA got wind of it via the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD, and demanded he pull the plug.
However, Zaluzhniy allegedly had other ideas, and forged ahead. According to the WSJ, Colonel Roman Chervinsky, who previously served in Ukraine’s security and intelligence service, SBU, helped coordinate the operation. He was linked to the Nord Stream bombing in 2023 by the Washington Post and German paper Der Spiegel and is presently on trial for “abuse of power”, likely as a result of faction fighting in the Ukrainian state.
According to the WSJ, the saboteurs deployed a team of six, including “a mix of seasoned active duty soldiers and civilians with maritime expertise” to blow up the pipelines, sitting 260 feet below the sea’s surface.
The report claims the team rented Andromeda in Germany’s Baltic port town of Rostock, “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”. Despite almost abandoning the operation due to bad weather, the team pressed ahead and managed to place and later detonate mines on the pipelines.
The report says that Zelensky rebuked Zaluzhniy for his defiance, who according to a “senior officer familiar with the conversation”, simply replied:
“[I]t’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.’”
The WSJ also claims European intelligence services got a good idea of who was behind the attack as early as October 2022, when “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.”
At this point, the ruling classes of Europe and the US were still publicly blaming Russia, while knowing Moscow was innocent. If any of this is true, the imperialists apparently weren’t prepared to let facts interfere with good propaganda.
As reported last year, German investigators claimed to have found trace amounts of explosives, fingerprints and DNA samples in Andromeda, a breadcrumb trail that led back to Ukraine. When this came to light in 2023, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius warned against “jumping to conclusions,” saying the likelihood was “equally high” that it could have been a “false flag operation staged to blame Ukraine”.
The WSJ claims that the German investigators managed to locate the crew by analysing mobile phone traffic and emails to the Polish company that leased Andromeda. Indeed, Poland indirectly assisting the saboteurs and frustrating the German investigation comes up repeatedly.
The WSJ states that the “saboteurs used Poland partly as a logistical base and stopped in the Polish port of Kolobrzeg.” It further claims the Polish border guard allowed the crew to sail north after they produced EU passports, and that Polish authorities refused to hand over CCTV footage from Kolobrzeg to the Germans, eventually destroying it.
In June, the German federal prosecutor’s office quietly issued an arrest warrant against a Ukrainian professional diving instructor. According to reports in ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and Die Zeit, the man in question, ‘Wolodymyr Z’ (no relation to the actor currently at the head of the Ukrainian state), was believed to have been living in Warsaw when he was snapped by a speed camera.
However, the Polish authorities did not pick him up, claiming that this was due to him not appearing in its shared wanted persons database with Germany. They claim he then fled across the border to Ukraine, which does not extradite its own citizens. German media have identified two other suspects, a married couple, both Ukrainian diving instructors – but no further arrest warrants have been issued.
The German outlet Tagesschau managed to interview the couple, who denied all involvement, with the woman claiming she was on vacation in Bulgaria in September 2022.
The Ukrainian-Polish collusion implied in the WSJ report was made explicit by August Hanning, former chief of the German intelligence agency BND. He claims there was an “agreement between the highest officials in Ukraine and Poland” to facilitate the sabotage of Nord Stream, and that the German government should seek damages.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, hit back angrily on Twitter: “To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2. The only thing you should do today about it is apologise and keep quiet.” Polish deputy prime minister, Krzysztof Gawkowski added: “I think this is Russian disinformation resonating through the words of German politicians.”
Terrorism? An act of war?
Let us be clear about what we are discussing here. After the USA, Germany has contributed the most money and arms to Ukraine’s war effort. The German government was also a major investor in Nord Stream, which makes landfall on their territory, and suffered huge economic damage from the sabotage.
As pointed out by the WSJ, “[e]ven 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 channelled by Nord Stream.”
If the suspicions of the German prosecutor are true, then Ukraine’s high command approved an operation that amounts at the very least to an act of terrorism, and at worst an open act of war against one of its most important allies – and a NATO member state. As stated by a senior German official, cited in the WSJ:
“An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defence clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash.”
Czech President Petr Pavel took a different view, saying in a podcast (reported in the pro-Kiev press) that even if Ukraine was responsible, Nord Stream was a “legitimate target”! This is an incredible stance for the leader of a NATO member state, effectively giving Ukraine a free pass to attack civilian energy infrastructure. Not to mention Czechia suffered one of the worst rates of energy inflation in Europe in 2022, which Pavel simply waves off, saying: “It certainly caused some complications, but not complications we could not cope with.” Apparently, frigid homes and poverty for millions of his countrymen amount to mere “complications.”
We should add that, if the WSJ is to be believed, the CIA knew in advance that Ukraine was responsible, meaning the Americans protected Kiev, while benefiting from Europe being dragged closer to its sphere of influence through the severance of a key economic string previously connecting it to Russia. We recall there was a top-secret meeting between President Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on 3 March 2023, following the publication of the first allegations of Ukraine’s involvement in the press. We can only speculate about what was discussed, but perhaps some uncomfortable admissions were made.
You would think a scandal on this scale would be splashed across the front page of every German newspaper and television screen. You would perhaps expect Olaf Scholz to rebuke the Kiev regime in the strongest terms. One can only imagine the furore had the imperialists even a shred of evidence that Russia was to blame.
And yet, while there have been a few articles in the German press discussing these revelations, the official reaction has been muted. Indeed, it is clear that the Germans are doing their utmost not to cause a fuss, having discretely issued their arrest warrant months ago. The German government has also cited the “independence of the federal police”, and reaffirmed its continued commitment to supporting Ukraine in the future.
In reality, Scholz is struggling to maintain unity in the Reichstag over continued aid to Ukraine. The fact that Germany is spending billions on the Ukraine War, while implementing massive budget cuts on everything from hospitals to kindergartens, has been a major sticking point in months-long wrangling over the new federal budget. At the same time, the government is staring defeat in the face in upcoming state elections.
This political and economic crisis wracking the German ruling class is no doubt the government’s main guiding concern. However, it’s certainly interesting that, at the same time as the allegations about Ukraine’s involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage hit the press, an internal letter by Finance Minister Christian Lindner (obtained by FAS) said there would be no new spending on military aid to Ukraine. Existing commitments will be fulfilled with dividends on frozen Russian assets, though nobody knows when this cash will become available. Already, military aid in the 2025 budget has been slashed to half of last year, with plans to cut it to just a tenth by 2027.
“The pot is empty,” said one official cited in FAS – rather conveniently, we note, at precisely the moment that Ukraine is on the hook for Nord Stream.
What do we believe?
But now we must ask ourselves, how credible is this new narrative? Certainly, Ukraine has a sophisticated intelligence service, with a history of conducting overseas operations, including sabotage of civilian infrastructure and assassinations.
But is it truly possible that a small, semi-amateur crew carried out such a daring and complex operation, under the noses of so many NATO governments, without the cooperation or at least buy-in of one major imperialist power or another? This is the least plausible part of the story.
Russia, for its part, continues to blame the USA, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stating on 19 August: “It is clear that to carry out such a terrorist attack, there was a command from the very top, as they say. The very top for the West is, of course, Washington.” He further described “attempts to blame everything on a group of drunken officers” as “not serious”. Another Russian diplomat in Berlin dismissed the German investigation’s findings as “fairy tales worthy of the Brothers Grimm.”
Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov said in a statement that even if the US was not the main actor, it must have at least given a “wink” to Kiev that the operation should go ahead. While it is true that the US has previously complained of Kyiv conducting risky operations against its wishes, Ukraine is wholly dependent on western military and financial aid. It seems questionable that it could carry out such an audacious attack if Washington was serious about preventing it.
Even if Hersh’s original account of US involvement turns out to be largely or entirely fiction, Washington is not necessarily absolved. Biden is on record saying in February 2022 that, should Russia invade Ukraine, Washington would “bring an end” to Nord Stream. US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland similarly warned that: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski publicly ‘thanked’ the USA on Twitter on the day of the bombing, and US imperialism benefited most from the pipelines’ destruction, by forcibly cutting economic ties between Europe and Russia, and thus cementing Europe’s dependence on the US.
We note this new account grants both Washington and Zelensky plausible deniability. Yes, they knew about the operation – but they tried to stop it. The German probe is apparently focusing on Zaluzhniy and his aides, which is also rather convenient as A) he has fallen out of favour with Zelensky and B) he is immune from prosecution as Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain.
It also seems incredible that the WSJ was able to obtain such detailed, first-hand accounts from some of the alleged perpetrators of the attack. How did they get this information if not through government and military connections? And if so, why was the information leaked?
It is possible, as we speculated last year, that these reports are intended to put pressure on Ukraine to stop kicking the hornets’ nest and acting recklessly.
Despite all the triumphalism in the media about Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, the hubris of the war’s first year is long gone. The facts are beginning to penetrate even the densest skulls in the West. From a military standpoint, the war is lost for Ukraine. But Zelensky, who is getting ever more desperate, is resorting to ever-wilder adventures, like in Kursk and the Kerch bridge attack before it.
This means that huge sums of money and tens of millions of dollars of advanced military hardware have gone up in smoke, and for what? Putin’s regime has only been strengthened, while NATO has been left bruised and humiliated. Should Trump win the 2024 US election, it is expected that he will call time on American support for Ukraine.
Ukraine’s western backers may be looking for a way to cut their losses in the future. If it can be established (truthfully or otherwise) that Ukraine was solely responsible for the Nord Stream sabotage, it will offer a handy lever against Zelensky if the imperialists want to steer him to the negotiating table.
Lies and cynicism
We may never know the full truth behind the Nord Stream bombing, but one thing this endless ‘whodunit’ clearly exposes is the reckless cynicism and hypocrisy of the imperialists.
It is not Biden or Scholz who suffer the direct consequences of soaring energy bills, but ordinary working-class people in Europe, who have endured years of freezing homes and collapsing living standards. Not to mention the massive ecological damage caused by the Nord Stream sabotage, which killed marine life for miles around and contributed greenhouse gas emissions comparable to approximately 15 million tons of CO2, about one-third of Denmark’s annual CO2 emissions.
The imperialist warmongers helped provoke and prolong a conflict that Ukraine never had any hope of winning, allowing countless men and women to die on their behalf, bathing the senseless carnage in a thick fog of propaganda. They waste no time condemning Russia in the most hysterical terms for every act of violence and destruction (with or without proof) while committing and covering up crimes that are every bit as bad, or worse.
Special mention must be made of the craven ruling classes of Europe, who have abandoned every shred of political independence, to serve as Washington’s lapdogs in its failing bid to deal Putin a bloody nose. The credibility of the European bourgeoisie lies in ruins, like Nord Stream itself.
Joe Attard is a writer specialising in Marxism and a regular contributor to marxist.com. His work focuses on Marxist theory and its relevance to contemporary political and economic issues.
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