The operation to blow up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022 was allegedly approved by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. After the US CIA found out about the operation and opposed it, he tried to cancel it.
This is stated in the article of the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal.
At the same time, Ukraine denies any involvement in the explosions and claims that Russia was involved. "Such an act can only be carried out with large technical and financial resources... And who had all this during the bombing? Only Russia had it," said Mykhaylo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, the Telegraph reports.
Yesterday, German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diver on suspicion of sabotage on the pipelines.
WSJ Investigation
The newspaper writes that the plan for the operation emerged at a meeting of Ukrainian top military and business leaders in May 2022.
The newspaper's sources note that the operation cost about $300,000, and there were agreements that it would be financed by business. To implement the plan, a small rented yacht was used with a crew of six people, including a military officer who was an experienced skipper and experienced civilian divers. Among them was a civilian woman who helped create the illusion of a "group of friends on a pleasure cruise".
The newspaper spoke to four senior Ukrainian military officials who "either participated in the plot or had direct knowledge of it". Part of the newspaper's story was allegedly confirmed by an investigation by German police, who obtained evidence including emails, mobile and satellite phones, as well as fingerprints and DNA samples.
According to the sources, Zelenskyy initially approved the plan. All agreements were reached verbally, leaving no paper trail.
However, the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD later learned of the plot and reported it to the CIA. According to U.S. officials, the CIA warned Zelenskyy's office to stop the operation. The President of Ukraine ordered the then Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyy, who was leading the process, to stop it, but the general allegedly ignored the order and his team changed the original plan.
"The general who was tasked with commanding the operation involved several of Ukraine's best special operations officers with experience in organising high-risk covert missions against Russia in coordinating the attack. One of them was former intelligence officer Roman Chervinskyy.
In a text message with the WSJ, Zaluzhnyy said he was unaware of any such operation and that any suggestion to the contrary was "a simple provocation". He noted that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are not authorised to carry out foreign missions and therefore he could not have participated in them.
More about the operation
The WSJ, detailing the plan, says that in September 2022, the conspirators rented a 50-foot pleasure yacht called Andromeda in the German port city of Rostock. The vessel was rented through a Polish travel agency that Ukrainian intelligence had set up as a front for financial transactions almost a decade earlier.
The four divers worked in pairs. "Working in pitch black, icy water, they were handling a powerful explosive known as HMX, which was connected to timed detonators. A small amount of the light explosive would have been enough to rupture the high-pressure pipes," the article says.
The newspaper adds that bad weather forced the crew to make an unscheduled stop in the Swedish port of Sandhamn. One diver accidentally dropped an explosive device on the seabed. The crew briefly discussed whether to abort the operation due to bad weather, but the storm soon subsided.
The WSJ adds that Zelenskyy criticised Zaluzhnyy, but the general said that the sabotage team did not contact him after departure and could not be recalled because any contact with them could compromise the operation.
German investigations after the attack
According to German and Dutch officials, a few days after the attack, in October 2022, German foreign intelligence received a second tip-off about the Ukrainian plot from the CIA, which again passed on a report to the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD. It contained detailed information about the attack, including the type of ship used and the possible route taken by the crew.
German investigators interviewed dozens of potential witnesses, scanned the seabed around the bombing sites and analysed a wealth of data, including digital communications, travel records and financial transactions.
"They were lucky. In their haste to leave Germany, the sabotage team forgot to wash the Andromeda, allowing German detectives to find traces of explosives, fingerprints and DNA samples from the crew," the WSJ writes.
The newspaper adds that investigators later identified their mobile phone numbers and an Iridium satellite phone. This data allowed them to reconstruct the entire journey of the boat, which docked in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. The US authorities demanded that the court obtain from Google the email addresses used by the Ukrainian businessman to rent the boat and hand them over to the Germans. The Ukrainian businessman had been in contact with a number of boat rental companies in Sweden and Germany since mid-May 2022.
At some point, investigators tried to establish cooperation with the Polish authorities, despite the fact that the saboteurs partially used Poland as a logistics base and stopped at the Polish port of Kolobrzeg. A port employee who suspected the yacht's crew informed the police. The Polish Border Guard checked the documents of the crew members, who provided passports of EU countries. They were allowed to continue north, where they planted the rest of the mines, people familiar with the investigation said.
They found that the entire port was under video surveillance. However, despite a history of close cooperation between law enforcement in Warsaw and Berlin, Polish officials initially refused to provide CCTV footage of the port. This year, they informed their German counterparts that the recordings were routinely destroyed shortly after the Andromeda's departure. Poland's internal security agency ABW told the WSJ that "no such footage exists".
"Until November 2022, German investigators believed that Ukrainians were behind the explosion," the publication concludes.