The identity of those behind last September’s sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, which transported natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, continues to occupy Western intelligence agencies.
Pursuing new leads, German investigators have searched the flat of a woman whose former partner, a Ukrainian man, is suspected of having been involved in the sabotage.
According to WDR, NDR, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, federal investigators have identified the woman as a witness and have seized her cell phone. The federal prosecutor confirmed that the woman’s residence in Frankfurt an der Oder, in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, had indeed been searched on May 25th. At present, she is however not deemed a suspect.
It has been confirmed that the witness has a child with the unnamed Ukrainian man.
A DNA sample from that child was compared with DNA found on the Andromeda, the yacht from which Germany’s federal intelligence service, the BND, believes last September’s attacks were carried out.
To German investigators, the yacht has become somewhat of a lodestone. According to them, the leisure boat was chartered by a pro-Ukrainian group to transport the explosives used to cripple the Nord Stream pipelines, which are majority-owned by Russian gas company Gazprom.
Meta-data from an email sent from the boat’s location is said to point to Ukrainian involvement.
According to Exxpress, Der Spiegel, in its current issue, reported that the BND’s regional office in Pullach is investigating whether the attack could possibly have been carried out by a rogue Ukrainian unit or if Kyiv had officially sanctioned such an operation.
Following the explosions on September 26th, 2022, a deliberate act of sabotage was suspected, with both Russia and Ukraine—as well as the U.S.—being designated as potential culprits.
Despite several criminal investigations by Germany, Sweden, and Denmark being underway, the perpetrators’ identities remain unknown. On May 25th, Russia’s Foreign Ministry summoned these nations’ ambassadors to decry the “complete lack of results,” while accusing them of deliberately dragging their feet and trying to conceal who was behind the act of sabotage.
In the West, too, the Andromeda narrative has its skeptics. Foremost among them is American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh.
On February 8th, Hersh published a Substack article in which he claimed that U.S. Navy divers, on U.S. President Joe Biden’s orders, had executed the operation.
Using a NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, held in June, as cover, “these planted remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines,” Hersh claimed, citing a source who had “direct knowledge of the operational planning.”
In a later piece, published April 8th, he called into question the Andromeda lead, calling it a “cover story,” which he said the CIA had fed to the New York Times and two “major German publications.” It was also “shared with and supported by” Germany’s federal intelligence service, he added.
