Washington had received detailed European intelligence about a Ukrainian plan to sabotage the Nord Stream gas pipelines three months before the attacks took place. This is set out in a previously unknown intel report, recently obtained by The Washington Post, which was leaked to the chat platform Discord in April along with dozens of other classified documents, the Post reported on Tuesday, June 6th.
The document, which was shared with the CIA by a European intelligence agency in June 2022, details Kyiv’s plan to use a small, six-person team of deep-sea divers, who reported directly to the Ukrainian high command, to covertly attack the pipeline network under the Baltic Sea.
Although not every aspect of the plan exactly corresponds with those of the eventual attack in September of last year, there is more than enough proof to “provide some of the most specific evidence to date” to implicate Ukraine above all other possible culprits, the Post wrote.
According to the document, the intelligence was obtained from an individual in Ukraine. Although the CIA could not immediately confirm the validity of the information at the time, it believed it was reliable enough to share the report with Germany and other important European allies.
The pieces of information provided by the document that do match previous evidence produced by German and Scandinavian police relate to the initial plan that details how the six-person diving team—made up of Ukrainian special forces—would rent a boat, pack it with explosives, and escape undetected after damaging the pipeline after the NATO’s BALTOPS naval exercise, which ended on June 17th.
In fact, the international criminal investigation did find a yacht in March, named Andromeda, which was apparently rented by Ukrainian individuals through a Polish front company, containing explosive residue matching that found on the pipelines. The authorities also confirmed before that they believe the attack was carried out by six people in total, at least one of whom they suspect to be a Ukrainian service member.
A few details of the June plot, however, differ from the September attack. Most notably, the initial plan involved embarking from a different location, and not from the German port town of Warnemünde, where the Andromeda was rented. Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean the leaked plan and the attack are not connected, as slight details could easily change in the months in between, especially given that even the intelligence summary mentions that, for unknown reasons, the sabotage operation was “put on hold” at the time.
Besides the fact that this information makes Ukraine’s innocence in the Nord Stream bombing harder to prove than ever, the other angle of the story is the U.S. (and several European countries) knew about it beforehand and could not—or chose not to—prevent the attack. At the moment we don’t know whether the Biden administration even tried to stop the mission, since, after being contacted by the Post, the White House, the CIA, and Kyiv all declined to comment on the findings.
This revelation is perhaps the greatest twist in the entire Nord Stream saga, as public consensus about the most likely perpetrators swung back and forth in the past eight months between (mainly) Russia and the U.S. While the former’s guilt was taken at face value by Western officials at first, the latter started attracting attention after an investigative report was published by the veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who pieced together motivations and opportunities that pointed to possible American involvement.
Later, however, the joint criminal investigation conducted by German, Danish, and Swedish authorities began to uncover pieces of evidence that increasingly linked the saboteurs to Kyiv In turn, the whole Nord Stream mystery started to seem like a taboo subject to discuss among NATO officials, who adopted a new strategy to cope with the embarrassment: “Don’t talk about the Nord Stream,” a senior European diplomat told the Post a few months ago.
The wariness to touch the issue is understandable, given the time and effort invested into cultivating Ukraine’s (and President Zelensky’s) heroic image in the West, a narrative that is feared will collapse if Europe digs too deep into the circumstances of the largest attack on its critical infrastructure in recent decades. “It’s like a corpse at a family gathering,” the unnamed diplomat said, implying that everyone seems to suspect what happened but pretends things are normal. “It’s better not to know.”
