one year after the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, where is the investigation?

The waters of the Baltic Sea have not yet revealed their mystery. A year after the explosions caused on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, those responsible for one of the biggest sabotages of the century have still not been identified. This complex operation was carried out in the economic zones of Sweden and Denmark, where investigations were opened. At the end of June, Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said he had met his German counterpart, and that the investigation was nearing completion. “its final phase”. The hope was then to conclude the investigations “in autumn”with first indictments.

Two months earlier, Mats Ljungqvist had already declared that the investigators’ main hypothesis was an action by a state or a group supported by a state. At that time, several media outlets had already suggested a Ukrainian operation, citing anonymous sources. According to information from the Dutch public audiovisual group NOS, in collaboration with the German media ARD and Die Zeit, the Dutch military intelligence services had become aware of a possible operation carried out by a small team of divers, from a sailboat, under the direct command of General Valeri Zaloujny. Warned by the Netherlands, the United States then expressed its disapproval to kyiv. In vain.

A suspicious sailboat

Several media, including Release, also released in June exclusive images of the exploded Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This gas pipeline project linking Russia to Germany, heavily dependent on Russian gas, was completed at the end of 2021 but was never put into service . Several elements then challenged the experts interviewed by the daily. Observation of the damage, in particular, suggests a more localized and precise attack than that carried out on Nord Stream 1 approximately 80 km away. Which implies two distinct sabotage techniques. To add to the mystery, the explosion of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was recorded seventeen hours before those which cut Nord Stream 1. Why such a lapse of time between these two events?

The theory of a sabotage operation took on greater significance with an investigation by German media ZDF and Der Spiegel who retraced the astonishing journey of a sailboat named Andromeda. The latter was rented on September 6, 2022 in Rostock (Germany) with the funds of an opaque company run by a resident of kyiv. One of the crew members then presented a Romanian passport, the number of which corresponds to an old document of a Moldovan citizen, now expired. Except that the sixty-year-old in question was taken aback when he received a visit from journalists. This one does not have the profile, in fact, of the twenty-year-old photographed in Rostock. Der Spiegel claims that this man, Valeri K., is a soldier of the 93rd mechanized brigade of the Ukrainian army.

L’ Andromeda then docked in Wiek, on the German island of Rügen, and the crew consisted of five men and one woman, according to the port director. He then disappeared “for a long period”according to information from Der Spiegel, before reappearing ten days later towards the Danish island of Christianso, close to the site of the detonations, then stopping for around twelve hours in Kolobrzeg (Poland). The explosions occurred a few days later, on September 26. The German daily mentions the possible use of a delayed or remote detonator.

Many hypotheses

In recent months, several countries have been accused of having sponsored the operation. In February, an American journalist, Seymour Hersh, accused the United States of being behind this operation. This version met with wide resonance in Russia, but the author relied on a single anonymous source, and several parts of his story later turned out to be erroneous.

Media from several Nordic countries also reported movements of Russian ships in the Baltic Sea, near the sabotage zone, shortly before the explosions. An SS-750 ship, which includes a small submarine, would have been identified east of the island of Bornholm, four days before September 26, the Danish daily assured in April Informationwho cites a source within his army.

Moscow recently again accused Swedish, Danish and German investigators of not sharing the information they have. At the end of 2022, the Nord Stream consortium, of which Russian Gazprom is the majority shareholder, sent a civilian vessel under the Russian flag to the Swedish and Danish zones for an inspection. Russia submitted a request for an independent investigation to the UN last February, but the resolution was rejected.

The issue is highly sensitive, as Ukraine’s future partly depends on Western arms deliveries. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, has always maintained that he was not involved in the pipeline explosion, nor does he believe that other Ukrainian officials played a role.