Nearly two years after the 21st century’s perhaps biggest sabotage operation shocked the world while fueling the U.S.-Russian conflict, investigative reporter Bojan Pancevski published the first truly detailed account of what happened in the months preceding the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022.
Based on the testimonies of four people who took part in the conspiracy, as well as on several subsequent investigations, the The Wall Street Journal report, published on Wednesday, August 14th, details:
- how the idea of blowing up one of the most critical pieces of European infrastructure to hurt Russia was carefully planned by a close circle of Ukrainian businessmen and intelligence officials;
- how President Zelensky authorized it and then tried to call it off at the request of the CIA;
- how his commander-in-chief ignored him and went ahead with the operation anyway.
What’s more, the CIA warned Germany about the plot beforehand. The agency also shared details about the Ukrainian scheme with the German foreign secret service after the sabotage, including what kind of boat was used and what route it was believed to have taken.
Germany could easily have considered the attack an act of war. Yet, Berlin’s political leadership chose to stay silent in order not to compromise the relationship with Kyiv, nor risk losing the German people’s willingness to help the Ukrainian cause.
A senior German official told the WSJ:
An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO [Article 5], but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash.
According to the report, the idea was first conceived at a party in May 2022, where senior Ukrainian military officials and some of the country’s biggest businessmen gathered to toast Kyiv’s success in halting the Russian invasion. It was there that somebody suggested blowing up the Nord Stream’s twin pipelines, crippling one of Russia’s biggest sources of revenue—even at the expense of Germany and other European countries.
One officer who was part of the plot said
I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones, and satellites. The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country.
No funds were available for expensive covert operations at a time when the war was just shifting into an attritional phase. It was up to businessmen to finance the mission, which allegedly cost over $300,000. Once they knew they’d have the funds, they pitched it to President Zelensky, who is said to have signed off on the sabotage “within days.”
Then, over the course of a few months, the military and intelligence (SBU) officials involved in the plot put together a six-person team of field agents and professional navy divers, which also included one 30-year-old woman specifically to help them look like a group of friends on vacation.
The group would be coordinated by a decorated SBU special ops officer, Roman Chervinsky, who had a lot of experience in orchestrating high-risk clandestine missions, including trying to kidnap Wagner Group officials from Belarus and recruit Russian fighter jet pilots in exchange for EU citizenship.
Chervinsky—who had been arrested in Kyiv last year for “exceeding his authority” in an allegedly unrelated case and released on bail last month—reported directly to Valerii Zaluzhnyi, a four-star general and Zelensky’s commander-in-chief at the time, who was subsequently (and conveniently) appointed as Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, giving him diplomatic immunity.
All went well until the Dutch intelligence agencies somehow learned of the plot and alerted both Berlin and Washington. WSJ’s report claims that the CIA immediately stepped in and asked Zelensky to call off the mission lest he risk ruining his relationship with Europe. The WSJ’s Ukrainian sources say that’s what the president did, promptly instructing Zaluzhnyi to cancel the plans. But the general decided otherwise and went ahead with slight modifications without telling Zelensky.
The president allegedly confronted Zaluzhnyi after the attack, but the general shrugged it off saying that it was too late to call back the operatives. “It’s like a torpedo—once you fire it at the enemy, you can’t pull it back again,” Zelensky was told, even though the sources indicate that Zaluzhnyi had ample time to stop the mission—only that he didn’t want to.
Under the command of Chervinsky, who used Poland as a logistical base, the six operatives posed as a group of friends on vacation and rented a small German yacht—the Andromeda. Equipped with professional diving gear, explosives, and sonar, they sailed out and rigged the pipelines: the Nord Stream 1 south of the Swedish town of Sandhamn sometime between September 13th and 19th, and then the Nord Stream 2 just off the coast of Bornholm island (Denmark) in the next two days, before returning the yacht to Rostock, Germany, on September 23rd.
Between the two dives, the team had to stop and refuel at the Polish port of Kolobrzeg. A port official found the group suspicious and alerted the police. The border guards eventually let the crew be on their way after they produced EU passports.
Poland initially rejected handing over the security footage of the Andromeda’s crew at Germany’s request, then, months later, claimed the recording had been “routinely” deleted after the yacht left the port,. Last month, Poland also failed to arrest the single crewmember identified by the Germans to date, while claiming it was Berlin’s fault for not completing the necessary paperwork, letting him slip back into Ukraine.
Nonetheless, on September 26th, three days after the yacht was returned, simultaneous explosions tore three holes in the twin pipelines, marking the operation’s success—at least for Kyiv. The economic damage to Germany and neighboring European countries was—and still is—enormous. Energy companies that handled the Russian gas coming through those lines all but collapsed in a few weeks. Germany, meanwhile, has failed to completely replace the lost gas with (much more expensive, mostly American) LNG, for which it still leases floating terminals, costing the country $1 million a day.
Although many high-level military and political officials in Berlin were willing to look the other way—despite being alerted to the operation both before and after the fact by the Dutch—the information now becoming public could lead to a major shift in relations between Germany and Ukraine. After all, Germany is second only to the U.S. in terms of the financial and military aid that it has consistently provided to Ukraine, so the Nord Stream sabotage is viewed by many as an unprecedented stab in the back.
Of course, Kyiv and the persons named in the report all deny involvement. But all eyes are on Berlin now as Europe waits to find out what Olaf Scholz’s government will do now that most of the story is out in the open.
