In June 2022, three months before unknown actors sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency already knew of a Ukrainian plot to execute such an operation.
As Dutch public broadcaster NOS revealed on Tuesday, June 13th, the CIA had in fact been tipped off by its Dutch counterpart, the MIVD.
Through a Ukrainian source, the MIVD had learned that an attack on the pipelines, designed to deliver Russian gas to Europe, was imminent, according to investigations by NOS, Nieuwsuur, German weekly Die Zeit, and German public broadcaster ARD.
Based on leaked Pentagon documents, last week The Washington Post reported on the CIA’s knowledge of the plan. The Post noted that the information had come from a European intelligence agency. That would now appear to have been the MIVD.
The leaked intel made mention of the original plan, said to have been devised under the direction of General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, chief of staff of the Ukrainian army.
With Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky being left in the dark, the operation was then entrusted to a small team of professional divers, which could be connected to the theory advanced by German, Swedish, and Danish investigators—that a pro-Ukrainian group had chartered the Andromeda, a leisure yacht used to transport them and their explosives to their targets.
The intent was for the plan to be executed after NATO had concluded its Baltic Sea exercise on June 17th.
Interestingly, Zaluzhnyi has not yet addressed the allegation, nor has Kyiv declared any intention of investigating its army chief.
Warned by the Dutch, Washington, in an attempt at dissuasion, is said to have then brought the matter to Kyiv’s attention. It remains unknown whether they did so before the time attack or after.
It remains unclear, NOS reports, whether the Ukrainians called off the initial plan because of the American warning or for some other reason. One source however does say that the plan was put “on hold” after June, which led the CIA to assume it might have been shelved indefinitely.
When the Nord Stream pipelines were eventually sabotaged on September 26th, this bolstered intelligence agencies’ suspicions that Ukraine might have been behind it.
At the time, despite a division within (global) media opinion on whether Russia or the U.S. was the culprit, U.S. President Joe Biden did not point fingers in any specific direction. He condemned the “deliberate act of sabotage,” which the U.S. and its European allies would “get to the bottom of.”
Then and now, Russian President Vladimir Putin blames the U.S. and its allies for sabotaging the two pipelines. Nord Stream 1 is 51% owned by Gazprom, the St. Petersburg-headquartered energy giant, while Nord Stream 2 is owned by a Swiss subsidiary of the same company.
As recently as a week ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denied any personal involvement. “I am president and I give orders accordingly,” he told Axel Springer of Politico’s parent company: “Nothing of the sort has been done by Ukraine. I would never act that way,” insisting that he did not “know anything, 100%,” and to “Show us proof. If our military is supposed to have done this, show us proof.”
In the meantime, Western intelligence agencies continue to stress a lack of total certainty about the planners’ as well as the perpetrators’ identities and say that several possibilities are being considered.
