The pipeline attack was the largest act of sabotage in recent European history as well as an environmental disaster. But in spite of its scope and significance, two years on, official investigations have been marked by a notable lack of urgency. To date, there have been no arrests, and no interrogations of, or charges against, suspects.

In early June, German prosecutors issued a European arrest warrant for Volodymyr Zhuravlov, a Ukrainian citizen resident in Poland. But Warsaw’s unwillingness to provide administrative assistance enabled Zhuravlov to escape without even being interviewed (1). Showing uncharacteristic casualness about counterterrorism, Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk, darling of European liberals, took the German authorities to task on 17 August on X: ‘To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2. The only thing you should do today about it is apologise and keep quiet.’

Soon after the explosions, the Swedish and Danish authorities took the view that only a state actor could have pulled off such an attack, but later they unexpectedly closed their investigations without publishing any results. Immediately after the attack, the US also announced it was launching investigations, which seemed particularly promising as their intelligence services have comprehensive oversight of the Baltic. Yet they too have divulged no findings.

At the same time, Western countries have systematically declined Russia’s repeated offers to participate in the investigation. Germany’s investigations are ongoing, but in response to parliamentary questions, the government has said any disclosure of information would be detrimental to the ‘wellbeing of the state’ (Staatswohl) – a coded way of intimating that friendly countries or intelligence services might be implicated.

A wall of silence

Investigative journalists and members of the German parliament have said that their inquiries have encountered a wall of silence. Holger Stark, from the weekly Die Zeit, spoke of ‘brutal pressure on all authorities not to talk to any journalists’ (2). In an interview with Le Monde diplomatique, Social Democratic deputy Ralf Stegner expressed surprise that two years on from such a serious crime, committed in one of the world’s most closely monitored seas, investigations have produced so little information. And Andrej Hunko of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) has spoken of a ‘provocative disinterest in shedding light on’ what happened.

There are three theories about who carried out the attack. In the immediate aftermath, some government politicians and leading Western media blamed Russia. ‘They’re the only ones with a motive who’re capable of doing it,’ France Inter’s geopolitics specialist Pierre Haski said on the country’s most-listened-to radio station (28 September 2022). However, the German and Swedish authorities have repeatedly stated that they have no evidence corroborating Russian involvement. CIA director William Burns, who is unlikely to give Moscow the benefit of the doubt, agrees, as did the Washington Post after a lengthy investigation (3). Among the obscure motives that might have driven Russia to destroy a costly infrastructure project in which it holds a 51% stake, the suggestion that Moscow might have been trying to avoid penalties for suspended deliveries is unconvincing: given the sanctions and seized Russian assets, it’s unlikely to have paid up.

If Russia invades again, then there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. I promise we can

Joe Biden

A second theory was put forward on 8 February last year by journalist Seymour Hersh, known for his revelations about US war crimes in Vietnam and Iraq. Hersh posted a detailed article on Substack blaming the US and Norway; according to his single source, the Biden administration commissioned the attack (4).

A month later, on 7 March, the New York Times presented a third theory, based on anonymous testimony from ‘US officials who have been briefed on … classified intelligence and matters of sensitive diplomacy’ (5): the sabotage was the work not of the US but of a ‘pro-Ukrainian group’. Simultaneously, a consortium of German media led by Die Zeit dug deeper, taking as their starting point information from Germany’s federal prosecutor among others. Their investigation identified a yacht allegedly chartered by the saboteurs. Since then, major Western media publications have almost exclusively focused on this narrative: the 15-metre Andromeda supposedly set sail from the German port of Rostock in September 2022 with five men and one woman on board, heading towards Bornholm. There, the divers supposedly mined the pipelines at a depth of 80 metres. German investigators reported that in January 2023 they had detected residues of the explosive HMX – a substance also found at the site of the explosion – on the yacht’s table, which the crew had failed to clean.

When this story broke, it immediately raised questions: could such a small vessel have carried out an operation on this scale and transported the tonnes of explosives that initial expert reports said would have been needed? Wouldn’t diving so deep have required a decompression chamber, which the Andromeda could not accommodate? Since then, a private expedition to the scene of the attack by Swedish engineer Erik Andersson and journalist Jeffrey Brodsky (6) has answered some of these questions.

Answers… and still more questions

First, analysis of detailed underwater photographs shows it might have needed less than 50 kilos of explosive to destroy the pipeline. Second, highly trained professionals could undertake such dives without a decompression chamber, though this would make it a riskier and lengthier operation. But why, Brodsky wondered, would divers without a decompression chamber choose to mine the pipes at a depth of 80 metres when a nearby section of Nord Stream lies at less than 40 metres? And why was one of the explosive devices placed 75km from the other three (7)? Despite many remaining unanswered questions, the Andromeda cannot be ruled out of involvement in the operation.

But whether due to diabolical ingenuity on the part of the culprits or a European desire not to know, traces of the presumed saboteurs are still lost in the fog. False passports used to rent the Andromeda led to a Ukrainian soldier and a Polish shell company funded by a Ukrainian entrepreneur known as Rustem A. Other leads point to Ukrainian diving instructor Volodymyr Zhuravlov and other suspects. But none have been questioned, and German investigators have not requested judicial cooperation from Ukraine.

Worse still, the German authorities even indirectly facilitated the suspect’s escape by failing to add his name to the Schengen register, which lists individuals subject to European arrest warrants. ‘Polish border guards neither had the information nor the reason to arrest him since he was not listed as wanted,’ a spokesperson for the Polish prosecutor’s office said (8).

According to a CIA report quoted in the Washington Post (11 November 2023), the pipeline attack was masterminded by Ukrainian special operations officer Roman Chervinsky and former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi, currently Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK. This document emphasised that President Zelensky was unaware of the project. However, this August the Wall Street Journal, using anonymous Ukrainian sources, reported that Zelensky had given his approval before attempting – unsuccessfully – to stop the operation in response to US pressure (9).

The West’s lack of concern over whether Ukraine, armed and financed by the US and Europe, might have launched a terrorist attack against one of its own allies raises questions: are political forces stalling the investigations for fear they might reach geopolitically unpalatable conclusions that could weaken support for Ukraine?

One step further

James Bamford, a renowned American investigative reporter and intelligence specialist, has taken this line of reasoning one step further. He believes it’s almost inconceivable that such a complex operation could be carried out without the knowledge of the US intelligence services (10). First, because the US and Ukrainian services are just as closely intertwined as their military structures. And second, because the US maintains comprehensive surveillance of the Baltic Sea through the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS), set up in tandem with Sweden. The National Security Agency’s signals intelligence system (SIGINT) closely monitors Ukrainian military and government communications. Despite announcing its own investigation, Washington has so far provided no data.

According to Die Welt (14 December 2023), US citizens – presumably working for the intelligence services – took part in the inspection of the Andromeda by local border guards during a stopover in Kòlbrzég, Poland, on 19 September 2022. The Polish authorities have refused to say more and claim that surveillance footage from the port no longer exists. The lack of cooperation from Poland, a staunch opponent of Nord Stream, raises questions about whether it’s actively involved in a cover-up or even took part in operation planning.

According to the Washington Post (6 June 2023), the CIA knew about Ukraine’s plan to blow up the pipelines as early as June 2022 and informed some of its European partners, including Germany. If these sources are reliable, Western governments knowingly concealed from the public that their ally was the prime suspect in the largest act of industrial sabotage in recent history. The Wall Street Journal (14 June 2023) cites anonymous US officials alleging the CIA tried at the time to dissuade Ukraine.

No independent source supports this claim. Andersson sees it as an attempt by Washington to establish so-called ‘plausible deniability’. He and Brodsky believe that if the Andromeda was indeed involved in the crime, the US gave the green light for the operation at very least; otherwise, the Ukrainian saboteurs would have run too great a risk of being detected by US surveillance – with potentially disastrous consequences for relations with the West. Andersson and Brodsky do not rule out active US participation in the planning. Previous plots to blow up the pipelines, dating back to 2014 and allegedly involving ‘Western experts’, according to the Wall Street Journal (14 August 2024), seem to support their view.

The question of the role the US might have played brings us back to the second theory, put forward by Hersh. In December 2021, he claims, US president Joe Biden tasked the CIA with developing a plan to destroy the pipelines in the event of Russia invading Ukraine. In June 2022, his theory goes, specialist US Navy divers placed explosives, using the annual NATO manoeuvres in the Baltic (Baltops) as cover. In September, Biden allegedly gave the order to detonate the devices remotely by acoustic signal.

After its publication in February 2023, Hersh’s article was either ignored or dismissed as a conspiracy theory by the Western press. The main criticism levelled by the few journalists who bothered to assess it was that it relied on a single anonymous source – like most of his major revelations. In the case of Nord Stream, he was even able to present a key piece of testimony: on 7 February 2022 President Biden told a joint White House press conference with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz that ‘if Russia invades again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’ He added with a smile, ‘I promise you we will be able to do it.’ And after the attacks, US Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told a Senate hearing, ‘The US government is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now … a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea’ (11).

US interest in disabling the pipelines

Both geopolitically and economically, it’s beyond doubt that Washington had an interest in putting these pipelines out of action. The US disapproved of increasing Eurasian integration, especially the liaison between Germany’s high-tech industries and Russia’s vast resources. Furthermore, according to Hersh, Washington was concerned that Russia could use the natural gas as leverage to restrict German support for Ukraine. The sabotage was intended to remove that option. On the economic front, the US had long been pressuring the Europeans to buy liquefied US gas instead of Russian gas.

Some politicians and Western media blamed Russia for the attack. ‘They’re the only ones with a motive for doing it,’ says Pierre Haski

But is there any evidence supporting Hersh’s narrative? It was specifically to answer this question that Andersson undertook his expedition. While he at first subscribed to Hersh’s theory, he now finds the Andromeda hypothesis equally plausible, though he has not ruled out that Hersh may ultimately be proved right. Andersson’s detailed analysis of open-source intelligence (OSINT), for example, discovered that the positions of US warships and aircraft were consistent with Hersh’s account (12), contrary to earlier OSINT analyses. Andersson also rejects the accusation that Hersh was wrong about the type of explosive. The C-4 explosive mentioned by Hersh can actually contain the chemical derivative HMX in addition to the main component RDX. Hersh’s theory that two bombs were placed on each tube – a total of eight – might also be confirmed: in their legal dispute with the Nord Stream AG consortium, the insurers Lloyd’s and Arch argue that a fifth explosion took place in addition to the four previously known blasts (13). This could indicate that there were actually two bombs on each tube, contrary to previous assumptions, but only five of them went off (14).

Even though Hersh’s theory has not been disproved, Holger Stark, who heads Die Zeit’s investigation team, believes he is wrong, as no investigation results have so far corroborated his claims. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of news platforms The Intercept and Drop Site News, has suggested two possible links between Hersh’s scenario and the Andromeda one. First, Hersh’s source may have known of a plan that was ultimately abandoned and replaced by another – a theory that Andersson also considers plausible. Another possibility: the Andromeda’s journey was part of a complex diversion operation. Steven Aftergood, who led the Federation of American Scientists’ research programme on covert US government operations from 1991 to 2021, calls the dissemination of false narratives to mask an operation an ‘established practice in military operations and intelligence activities, where it is often known as “cover and deception” ’ (15).

The intent to deceive?

Scahill notes that leaving explosive residue on the table is ‘either unbelievably sloppy tradecraft, evidence of total amateurism, or an intentional “clue” left with the intent to deceive’. That the perpetrators of the attack didn’t have time to erase their traces from the boat, as Stark supposed, seems unlikely given that its voyage lasted several weeks. And the Andromeda had not been used for four months before it was examined by investigators, long enough to erase clues – or plant them. But at this stage, there’s no tangible evidence supporting the ‘cover and deception’ hypothesis, which is also defended by Hersh.

The Nord Stream attack thus remains an unsolved crime. This being so, German parliamentarians from Die Linke and other parties are demanding an independent commission of inquiry, which could operate under the auspices of the UN Security Council. However, a resolution calling for this, presented by Russia with backing from China and Brazil, failed to gain the support of the US and its partners. Germany and Sweden have consistently rejected the idea of such a commission, purportedly so as not to interfere with ongoing investigations. Their desire to avoid disclosure is understandable: if evidence established that the Ukrainian president or even the US government was responsible for the attack, the geopolitical consequences would be unpredictable and potentially disastrous, including for NATO. And so the game of hide-and-seek around the most explosive criminal act of our time goes on.

Fabian Scheidler is a journalist and the author of The End of the Megamachine: a Brief History of a Failing Civilization, Zer0 Books, 2020.

Translated by George Miller

Germany boasted 10,702 corporate insolvencies in the first quarter of 2024, rather an indictment of its Russophobic foreign and economic policy. After all, had Berlin okayed using the one remaining and functioning Nordstream pipeline, cheap Russian gas would have prevented many of those businesses from going bust. But prime minister Olaf  “Liver Brain” Scholz cut off his country’s nose to spite its face: No cheap energy from Moscow, even for the flagship German car corporation Volkswagen, currently mulling up to 30,000 job cuts, when it closes several German plants. The company also ended its longstanding job security arrangements with the country’s unions. And what has caused this manufacturing debacle? Abrupt withdrawal from cheap Russian energy. And other sundry imbecilic sanctions. Europe, with the Teutonic nation leading the way, decided to commit economic suicide.

Germany’s economy shrinks steadily, as RT reported October 14: Its growth for 2024 will likely be minus .2 percent, and this is “the new, miserable German normal.” It’s not a blip, not an aberration, but the way things are gonna be for quite some time. As RT observes, gone are the halcyon, pre-Russia sanction days of the mid-2000s with 24 percent cumulative growth. And things aren’t better elsewhere in the European Union. France is on track for 57,000 to 62,000 corporate insolvencies in 2024. Italy is predicted to suffer a 22 percent increase in such bankruptcies this year, while in Spain thousands of businesses shuttered. Meanwhile thousands of U.K. companies went belly up in 2024, and officials estimate 147 percent insolvencies over pre-pandemic levels.

This is not the rosy picture of a thriving region. It has the whiff of the funeral parlor, especially when these lousy bankruptcy stats combine with a long-term, declining birthrate. Europe depended vitally on cheap Russian energy. In truth, Moscow subsidized European industry and protected it from American economic predation – who knew? Evidently not the Europeans, who apparently in their degraded arrogance just took this sweet deal for granted. Now that they’ve spurned it for their so-called principles (what principles? That they should be allowed to expand a murderous military alliance right onto Russia’s doorstep, without a peep of objection from the kremlin? Or that they should aid Ukro-fascist slaughter of ethnic Russians in the Donbass?), they find their companies closing up shop and many relocating, where? Dum, da, dum, dum: to the United States, thanks to the American Inflation Reduction Act, a deliberate affront to its so-called allies in Europe, designed to steal their businesses. Washington’s vassalization project for Europe is complete, and demonstrating Germany’s abject submission, its president recently awarded Joe “Nordstream Bomber” Biden a medal. I mean, is this the height of masochism or what?

Meanwhile, in other dismal EU news, Moldova’s recent referendum was manipulated October 20 so that it can join this gang of suicidal masochists, aka the EU. The election was a disgrace for democracy; according to political scientist and East European expert Ivan Katchanovski on twitter October 21, many pro-Russian citizens in Transdniestria could not vote, while only two polling stations in Moscow opened for the 400,000 Moldovan citizens living in Russia. That meant maybe as few as 10,000 out of 400,000 Moldovans in Russia could vote. This was a decision of the pro-EU Moldovan government, which, by the way, only won an even 50 percent of Moldovans living in country for its EU membership bid…Welp, that’s it for Moldova, in all likelihood the next Ukraine, self-immolating on a western altar of spurious openness to troublemaking groups like NATO and whatever idiotic fad of the day comes along.

One incident involving the presidential election, tweeted out by Peacemaket October 21, was especially egregious. “A Moldovan citizen arrived in Moldova, went to vote in the country’s presidential election and found that the UK had already voted for him. The incident occurred with a man called Alexander Nikolaevich in the town of Tvarditsa in the Taraclia region of the republic. This is known as election fraud.”

So from this you can conclude that the presidential vote, like the EU referendum one, was not exactly on the up and up. But hey, U.S. officials helped actual Nazis to overthrow the Kiev government back in 2014, so they’re old hands when it comes to such funny-business in this corner of Europe. I don’t know if there was any American involvement in this shady Moldovan election, but U.S. preferences there are no secret. And those preferences, of course, come with ideologically doctrinal anti-Russian blinkers. No dissent allowed. As we also see in Georgia, where the overwhelming late October vote to remain, well, Georgian instead of joining the EU’s kamikaze mission for it to open a second front against Russia may yet lead to a western-backed coup against the legally elected government.

Back in Berlin, one can say that overall, American behavior toward its EU ally has been atrocious. Calling for destroying an ally’s critical infrastructure – Nordstream – then actually bombing it, then cravenly lying about it and expecting its victims to swallow these lies, literally rubbing their faces in this humbug – what are the words for such behavior? Treacherous, wicked, arrogant, violent, feckless, stupid? You pick. But however many you pick, don’t forget stupid. Because Washington needs a healthy European ally. Joe Biden may not have thought so, if thought can be attributed to his actions, but without a healthy Europe, who does the U.S. have? Canada, Japan, South Korea, Israel and Australia. That’s about it. Compare it to the number of countries in or clamoring to join BRICS. And make no mistake, Washington has induced decline in Europe. This, after embarking on its disastrous Ukraine proxy adventure, which has left western defense cupboards nearly bare.

When photos first appeared of the effects of the Nordstream explosion in the sea, Polish minister of foreign affairs, Radek Sikorski tweeted: “Thank you, America.” Thank you for nothing is more like it. Thank you for robbing us, he should have said. And when the history of this disgraceful and disgusting episode comes to be written, it will be noted prominently that this was Washington’s first shot at its closest ally’s head and, ultimately, its own.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website.

From the start, the investigation was a textbook cover-up. The Swedish government rushed to secure evidence, citing their putative rights under international law, consciously boxing out any sort of independent, UN-backed inspection. Of course, after gathering all the evidence, the Swedish authorities studiously did exactly nothing, only to then belatedly admit that it actually had no legal right to monopolise the information in the first place.

The Germans, for their part, were also supremely uninterested in figuring out who pulled off the worst act of industrial sabotage in living memory against their country. In fact, over the course of a year-long non-investigation, we’ve mostly been treated to leaks and off-the-record statements indicating that nobody really wants to know who blew up the pipeline. The rationale here is bluntly obvious: it would be awfully inconvenient if Germany, and the West, learned the true answer.

Thus, the recent revelation that the true mastermind behind the ongoing deindustrialisation of Germany was none other than a Ukrainian by the name of “Volodymyr Z.” must have come as an unwelcome surprise. For not only is the idea that the authorities have suddenly cracked open the Nord Stream case not credible in the slightest, but the sloppy way in which the entire country of Ukraine is now being fingered is likely not an accident. Indeed, at the same time as the ghost of Nord Stream has risen from the grave, the German government announced its plans to halve its budget for Ukraine aid: whatever is already in the pipeline will be sent over, but no new grants of equipment are forthcoming. The German government is hunkering down for increased austerity, and so it is cutting Ukraine loose.

“The German government is hunkering down for increased austerity, and so it is cutting Ukraine loose.”

Germany, of course, is hardly alone. Even if there were enough money to go around, Europe is increasingly not just deindustrialising but demilitarising. Its stores of ammunition and vehicles are increasingly empty, and the idea of military rearmament — that is, creating entirely new military factories and supply chains — at a time when factories are closing down across the continent due to energy shortages and lack of funding is a non-starter. Neither France, the United Kingdom nor even the United States are in a position to maintain the flow of arms to Ukraine. This is a particular concern inside Washington DC, where planners are now trying to juggle the prospect of managing three theatres of war at the same time — in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific — even though US military production is arguably insufficient to comfortably handle one.

And so, in an effort to save face in this impossible situation, Ukraine is now being held solely responsible for doing something it either did not do at all, or only did with the permission, knowledge, and/or support of the broader West. This speaks to the adolescent dynamic that now governs Western foreign policy in a multipolar world: when our impotence is revealed, find someone to blame.

The war in Ukraine, after all, was already supposed to be won, and Russia was supposed to be a rickety gas station incapable of matching the West either economically or militarily. Yet here we are: our own economies are deindustrialising, our military factories have proven completely incapable of handling the strain of a real conflict, and the Americans themselves are now openly admitting that the Russian military remains in a significantly stronger position. Meanwhile, Germany’s economic model is broken, and as its economy falls, it will drag many countries such as Sweden with it, given how dependent they are on exporting to German industrial firms.

10 years ago, during the 2014 Maidan protests, the realist John Mearsheimer caused a lot of controversy when he began warning that the collective West was leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and that our actions would lead to the destruction of the country. Well, here we are. At present, our only saving grace is the continuing offensive in Kursk — a bold offensive that will surely be remembered as a symptom of Ukraine’s increasing desperation.

Indeed, a far better guide of things to come can be found in the fingering of “Volodymyr Z.” as the true culprit behind the Nord Stream sabotage. Here, rather than accept responsibility for the fact that Ukraine was goaded into a war it could not win — mainly because the West vastly overestimated its own ability to fight a real war over the long haul — European geopolitical discourse will take a sharp turn towards a peculiar sort of victim-blaming. No doubt it will be “discovered” that parts of Ukraine’s military consisted of very unsavoury characters waving around Nazi Germany-style emblems, just as it will be “discovered” that journalists have been persecuted by oligarchs and criminals in Kyiv, or that money given by the West has been stolen, and that arms sent have been sold for profit to criminal cartels around the world.

All of these developments will duly be “discovered” by a Western political class that will completely refuse to accept any responsibility for them. Far easier, it seems, to calm one’s nerves with a distorting myth: it’s the Ukrainians’ fault that their country is destroyed; our choices had nothing to do with it; and besides, they were bad people who tricked us!

Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden

The immediate consequences were enormous. In terms of environmental damage, all too often overlooked now, the pipelines were filled with methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes enormously to global warming. According to the UN, its heating effect is 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Also, methane “is the primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas, exposure to which causes one million premature deaths every year.”

The exact amount of this toxic gas that the Nord Stream saboteurs made bubble up into our shared atmosphere is hard to quantify, but there is no doubt that it was large, and we would all be much better off if it had stayed in the pipelines. Initial estimates pointed to five times the volume released in a 2015 methane disaster in California. That was “the largest known terrestrial release of methane in US history.” Its impact was compared with driving seven million cars per day, and it displaced thousands of people.

Put differently, the Nord Stream attack set a milestone not merely in European but also the global history of man-made ecological disasters. But the California leak was, at least, an accident – the Baltic one, so much larger again, was the result of a deliberate act of eco-terrorism. It’s no wonder that Rob Jackson, a Stanford climate scientist, quickly – and correctly – concluded that “whoever ordered this should be prosecuted for war crimes and go to jail.”

Yet apart from eco-terrorism, the Nord Stream attack was also, of course, an act of aggression against Germany as a state. And against the whole of the EU, too, as Mikhail Podoliak, the habitually dishonest top adviser to Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, underlined at the time of the sabotage. He was right, of course. Indeed, it was such a severe act of aggression that it should have led Germany and the EU to quickly identify the perpetrators and take drastic action against them. Moreover, if the terrorists had state backing, as is likely given the complexity of the attack, then those actions should have ranged from sanctions and severing diplomatic relations – as a minimum – to military retaliation. And since Germany is a NATO member, the alliance’s famed Article 5 – treating an attack on one member as an attack on all of them – could easily have been applied as well.

At the time, Podoliak was, of course, brazenly lying about an important detail. Against rhyme and reason, he blamed the attacks on Russia, which had zero conceivable interest in destroying pipelines that it had heavily invested in to facilitate energy trade with the EU, that afforded some geopolitical influence (although propagandists in the West and especially Poland have always greatly exaggerated that factor), and that, while dormant at the time of the attack, could have been activated again.

In short, someone trying to make you believe that Russia blew up Nord Stream is – and has always been – the guy with a bridge to sell you. Like the comedian in Kiev who, with the help of Western impresarios, such as Tim Snyder and Anne Applebaum, has been hawking Ukrainian “democracy,” “civil society,” and the great cosmic struggle for “Western values.”

But, as with these other Zelensky regime lies, Podoliak’s fib about the big bad Russians shooting themselves in both feet at once, deliberately and just for fun, was special in that it combined being perfectly implausible with being widely believed, at least in the West and especially in Germany. Absurd as it is, two things followed the Nord Stream attack: It took ages for any Western officials to officially point to any perpetrators; and Western politicians, mainstream media, and so-called experts kept peddling the insultingly silly story about Russia as the culprit.

Since many of them will now try to cover their tracks, let’s recall two examples. By spring 2023, the American icon of investigative journalism Seymour Hersh had exposed Washington as a likely Nord Stream bomber, while other reports started suggesting that – somehow – Ukrainians had been involved. Yet even then Carlo Masala, an academic from the German Army’s very own university, who has made a media career out of opportunistically regurgitating Western infowar talking points, still tried to recast the emerging picture as a “false-flag” operation. In other words, according to Masala, while you may think you see Americans and Ukrainians right in front of your eyes, in reality, it’s – drumroll! – the Russians, again. So much for tin-foil hats and conspiracy theories being very welcome in the Western mainstream as long as they toe the line.

Similarly, Janis Kluge, a regional “expert” at a major Berlin think tank has just admitted on X – with astounding if unintentional self-discreditation – that his nonsensical initial assessment of blaming Russia was – wait for it! – wrong. He feels “new information” has just emerged. The fun fact is, of course, that information excluding Russia as a possible perpetrator was available from day one, and specific information about the US and Ukraine as much more plausible suspects emerged not much later. Yet, for Kluge, being so much slower in shedding an obvious piece of Western and Ukrainian information warfare than a decent reputation allows is, it seems, still a reason for pride.

That is because he now relies on what, to his mind, seems to be an authoritative source, namely the Wall Street Journal and German prosecutors. This brings us to how and why the Nord Stream attack has made it back into the news. At very long last, German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant – yes, you read that right: one single warrant – for a suspect, namely a lowly Ukrainian diver called Volodymyr.

Never mind, they’ll probably never get hold of him, because Poland has shielded the attackers and helped them escape. Warsaw, by the way, is proud of its sponsorship, literally, of terrorism against Germany, as a breathtakingly arrogant X post by Polish PM Donald Tusk has rubbed in. In essence, he blamed the victims, that is the Germans, and told them to shut up, if not just apologize for being there in the first place. Congrats… Clearly German-Polish relations will flourish, again.

At the same time, the Wall Street Journal has published a sensational and sensationally unpersuasive article explaining two things: How it was, after all, Kiev that did it; and – how convenient – it was not Washington. Indeed, according to this touching tale of American righteousness, the CIA – well-known for never ever supporting or staging underhanded, insane, and violent schemes – tried to prevent the Ukrainians from going ahead with one of their very own. And that is, the WSJ tells us, the “real story.” This is the moment where you may feel free to cry in view of so much goodness and honesty.

Let’s put it like this: Remember the guy trying to sell you the bridge? He now admits that he doesn’t really own it, but he has a new offer: He is about to inherit it soon and if you believe this one, he’s ready to sell you a first-dibs option on bidding for it when the time comes. In other words, we are now invited to move on from believing a lie so moronic that even telling it should have made people sink into the ground with shame to one that has been fine-tuned with a few tiny fragments of truth. And yet, it’s still a lie.

Let’s take a closer look. The first thing that makes the WSJ story highly suspect is that it’s packed with politically convenient details. Readers learn that Zelensky initially okayed the scheme but then was against it, when the saintly Americans told him to stop being so naughty. But the then commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s forces, Valery Zaluzhny – a man Zelensky has always hated and who has been relegated to the status of another inept Ukrainian diplomat in London – was, of course, in on the attack all the way. Another Ukrainian officer mentioned by name – one of the very few – in the WSJ piece is already on trial anyway. Oops, no great loss either, it turns out. Need we continue? This is a parade of fall-guys, carefully tailored to exempt Zelensky, for now, and, of course, the US and everyone else in the West who may very well have been involved (Hi, MI6 and, of course, Poland again, we see you).

Then there is the manner in which both the German prosecutors’ move and the WSJ article are being reinforced and exploited rapidly by other mainstream outlets, trying to make sure that everyone gets the new infowar memo. German Spiegel, for instance, is blunt about getting the correct – and rather imbecilic – propaganda message across. Readers are in effect admonished that, with the naming of one Ukrainian suspect, “all speculation about Russian or US participation” in the attack can now be “curbed.”

What can one even say? Let’s try: First, a Russian participation never made any sense to any reasonable and unbiased observer. Shame on self-censoring and war-mobilizing media like Spiegel to have ever treated it as an even remotely possible explanation. Second, therefore, pretending that suspecting Moscow and Washington has been equally plausible or implausible is ludicrous. Third, because the US actually has always made perfect sense as suspect number one. And it still does.

Here is the real upshot of this combined political-media information war circus: Yes, it’s nice that someone finally, officially acknowledges that it was not Russia and that, to one extent or the other, it was, actually, sacrosanct-can-do-whatever-it-wants-and-tell-any-lie Ukraine. But trying to sell us the new idiocy that therefore it was not the US – indeed that Washington tried to stop this attack – is about as believable as Hunter Biden’s laptop not mattering to his dad’s Ukraine policy, or the Epstein operation not being about entrapping and blackmailing the US elite. It’s yet another piece of nonsense we are invited to swallow. No, thank you. Enough already.

What is more interesting, however, is what this all implies and why it is happening now. Regarding the implications, even if, for the sake of argument, you pretend to believe the whole WSJ/German prosecutor story, Germany’s, the EU’s, and NATO’s positions emerge as untenable and discredited. As an anonymous German official noted, “an attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country” – that is, Ukraine, not Russia – “that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash.” That is, Berlin’s policy has been so perverse as to qualify as treasonous. It has literally fought the wrong country. Thereby, it has failed to defend Germany from a massive attack and instead has bent over backwards to reward the aggressor, Ukraine. In a normal country, the government would have fallen already, and not just faced questions like ‘What about Germany’s intelligence services and military? Where have they been napping? Under a rock on a Baltic beach?’

And things don’t look much better for the EU and NATO as a whole. Many who refuse to be fed moronic propaganda anymore will conclude that these organizations are, in essence, conspiracies, systematically acting against the interests of the countries and populations they pretend to protect. Regarding the US, what’s even left to say? It was, of course, involved in the attack, as President Biden had openly threatened in advance. Putting about a silly tale now blaming it all on Kiev and Kiev alone just makes it look stupid and callous.

This brings us to the question of why all of this is happening now. Callous is the key term here. The best explanation of the timing of these new revelations is that they are part of dropping the Ukrainian proxy. What better way to introduce a policy of abandoning Kiev than by making it the sole scapegoat for an attack on the West? This operation may take a while, but it has clearly started. No, it is not a coincidence that Berlin has just announced that it will greatly reduce its military support for Ukraine. As others before, Kiev is about to learn about American and Western gratitude, the very hard way.  

By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory

The sabotage in September 2022 of the Nord Stream pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe has become one of the central mysteries of the war in Ukraine, prompting extensive finger-pointing and guesswork. But until Wednesday, there were very few answers.

The Polish prosecutors office said it had received the warrant, issued by Germany, in June for a suspect who was living in Poland at the time. The suspect — identified only as Volodymyr Z., in keeping with German privacy laws — left the country before Polish authorities could detain him, according to Anna Adamiak, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office in Warsaw.

The German federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the warrant, whose existence was first reported by a trio of German news outlets.

The warrant marks the first significant development toward potentially solving who was behind an act of sabotage that has sown political distrust among Western allies and raised the geopolitical stakes in Europe’s Baltic region.

The sabotage was first detected on Sept. 26 when a vast swirl of bubbles appeared on the surface of the Baltic Sea in international waters between Denmark and Sweden.

There was initial speculation that Russia was behind the explosions, but to some that made little sense — the Russians were deeply invested in both major lines of the pipeline, known as Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II.

Reports that a pro-Ukrainian group could have been behind the sabotage first emerged last year. That raised concerns in Berlin and Washington that supporting Ukraine could become more complicated. Germany is the European Union’s leading contributor of weapons to Ukraine.

U.S. officials said at the time that they had no evidence that the attack was done at the direction of the Ukrainian government, and Kyiv has flatly denied any responsibility.

Sweden and Denmark had both opened investigations into the blasts, but closed them earlier this year.

The German authorities, however, continued their investigation into the explosions, which rendered three of the four strands that make up Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines inoperable. Even before the blasts, though, Russia had severely curtailed the amount of natural gas it was sending to Germany via Nord Stream 1, citing problems with a turbine that had been sent to Canada for repairs. Nord Stream 2 had never come online.

Experts have said that divers could have been responsible for planting the explosives on the subsea pipes, and German news reports identified Volodymyr Z. as a professional diver. When the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reached a man who identified himself by that name by telephone, he denied having any involvement with the attacks or knowing about the warrant.

A person briefed on the matter confirmed that German prosecutors had issued a warrant for a Ukrainian diver believed to be a member of the team that planted explosives on the pipelines. The diver was living in Poland but was able to escape before being apprehended, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The Süddeutsche, along with the Die Zeit newspaper and the German public broadcaster ARD, reported that the German authorities had tracked down the suspect after a speed camera recorded a van with Ukrainian license plates on the northeastern German island of Rügen on Sept. 8, 2022.

One of the passengers in the van was the suspect sought by German prosecutors, according to the German media outlets. The suspect lived in a suburb of Warsaw and worked as an instructor for a diving school in Kyiv, the media outlets reported.

Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.

Melissa Eddy is based in Berlin and reports on Germany’s politics, businesses and its economy.

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.

I won’t dwell on the failure of the mainstream media to follow up on that story—some reporters, as I learned decades ago, have inside sources and others do not. But I will relate a lesson I learned about presidential signaling of the sort that is going on now against the Houthis in Yemen; against the Iranians, who are believed to be behind much of the anti-Americanism in the Middle East; and, of course, against Moscow in the Ukraine war.

It’s a Cold War story I was told by someone who was steeped in the history of the early days of American intervention in Vietnam. After the Second World War, the United States backed the wrong side in China, and the communist forces led by Mao Zedong declared victory in 1949. This was seen as yet another setback for America’s effort to contain worldwide communism. Containment was the overriding US policy then, and there was worry about Mao’s support for Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese leader who defeated the French in 1954, in the battle at Diem Bien Phu, despite much off-the-books American help for France. A little-noted international peace conference that year in Geneva concluded, in a triumph for rational diplomacy, that Vietnam would be divided, with Ho dominating the North and a non-communist regime to be set up in the South.

American fear of communism determined what happened next in the South, as the Eisenhower administration, buttressed by support from the Catholic Church and many in the US Congress, including newly elected Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, as well as his powerful father, businessman Joseph Kennedy, installed the French-speaking devout Catholic southerner Ngo Dinh Diem as president. Diem had little in common with the Buddhists and Catholics in the South who hated the French, but his installation as president was a signal to Ho Chi Minh and the Chinese that America was in the South to contain the spread of communism throughout the peninsula, to Laos and Cambodia.

We think we understand what happened in the next nineteen years as America fought its war of containment, but mostly we do not. After the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and more than 58,000 Americans, Saigon fell to the North on April 30, 1975. The brutal scene of desperate Vietnamese clinging to the landing gear of the last American helicopter fleeing the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon is an image my generation will never forget. Cambodia, whose various regimes had been supported by thousands of American bombs, fell to the communist Khmer Rouge in the last days of April, with a new government in place by the end of May. And in August the communist Pathet Lao consolidated a victory won months earlier in the battlefields by formally taking over the government.

And what happened next?

We lost a war, shrugged it off, and moved on.  

Cambodia was taken over by the fanatical Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, that initiated a wave of murders and atrocities that horrified the world. The communist winners in South Vietnam began a purge of thousands who were deemed, fairly or not, to be Western sympathizers, many of them southerners who had been drafted or dragooned into the South Vietnamese army. They were flung into re-education camps that combined physical labor with mental torture. The jailed included many members of North’s loyal allies known to Americans as the Viet Cong who were not communists but nationalists.

Today consolidated Vietnam is non-communist and America is its largest trading partner, and it is a major tourist stop for Americans and Europeans. The same can be said for Cambodia’s Ankor Wat, with its array of thousand-year-old temples. I played golf at a resort there a few years ago and went sightseeing with my family. Communist Laos remains relatively remote, but is modernizing rapidly and is a major trading partner of China.

All that America fought, died, and killed for was gone within a few months. So much for containment. And so much for signaling. It was a lesson not known, or not interesting, to the Biden administration in early 2022, when it seemed clear that Vladimir Putin was going to lead Russia to war with Ukraine. Biden had long been a strong opponent of Russia, and before that Soviet communism, throughout his political career, and he especially reviled Putin. 

It is now widely accepted that Putin would have delayed or canceled the invasion if Secretary of State Antony Blinken had assured him that Ukraine would not be permitted to join NATO. That promise was not made. Instead, Biden publicly warned Putin two weeks before the Russians attacked that America would destroy the newly constructed pipeline, Nord Stream 2, that was prepared to funnel Russian gas to Germany. Putin had already slowed down and then cut off the earlier pipeline, Nord Stream 1, that began delivering gas to Germany a decade earlier.

The cheap gas helped propel Germany into becoming the dominant manufacturing entity in Western Europe. Since the late 1950s, the United States and its Western European allies had worried about the political impact of Russian energy.

The idea of blowing up Nord Stream 1 and 2 had come from the American intelligence community, spearheaded at the time by the CIA. The community had been asked in late 2021 for options—American actions—that could convince Putin to back off. It was with this understanding that a most secret CIA unit was organized to find a way to do what President Biden wanted: to present Putin with a threat that could stop the Russian president from going to war. Bolstered by the CIA’s confidence, Biden stunned the intelligence community by threatening to blow up Nord Stream at a White House news conference on February 7, 2022, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz standing at his side.

The CIA team, ensconced in secrecy in Norway, continued to work on its assignment, and found a way to get the complicated job done by early spring. The understanding then, in the view of some of the planners, was for Biden to pull the trigger and publicly tell Putin that he had done what he threatened to do and he, Putin, had to understand that he was dealing with an American president whose words were to be taken seriously. But Biden changed his mind at the last minute—a time had been set for the underwater detonation of bombs that had been planted  earlier—and the operation was put on hold. The CIA team was given no explanation, and the American bombs were left in place, to be triggered whenever Biden chose to do so.

The American team was disbanded, with some of them angered by the president’s refusal to do what they were told was the purpose of their mission was: to show Putin that his actions would have immediate consequences. The mines were detonated remotely at Biden’s request on September 26, six months into the Ukraine war, for reasons never made clear—because the Biden White House insisted then, and to this day, that it had nothing to do with the detonations.

After the explosions, which became an international sensation, it took four days for a White House correspondent to bring up the Nord Stream issue. Biden called the bombings “a deliberate act of sabotage” and claimed that the Russians were “pumping out [dis]information and lies about it.” A reporter subsequently asked National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at a news conference whether he and others in the press corps should take the president’s statements to mean that “the US now believes that Russia was likely responsible for this act of sabotage?”

Sullivan—who, as I reported last February, was the major player in generating a secret potential pre-war threat to Russia—provided an answer that was breathtaking in its obfuscation. “First,” he responded, “Russia has done what it frequently does when it is responsible for something . . . which is to make accusations that it was really someone else who did it. We’ve seen that repeatedly over time.” He said that the president was also clear—which he was not –that “there is more work to do on the investigation before the United States government is prepared to make an attribution in this case.” The White House, he said, would not make a “definitive determination” until its allies in the region concluded their work. 

Sullivan said that Russia’s suggestion that the US was involved in the bombing was “flat out false. Russian know they’re false. But, of course, that is part of their playbook.”

Sweden and Denmark, whose governments had every reason to know what had taken place, announced within days of the explosions that they would work together to investigate the explosions. On October 2, Germany said it would work with Sweden and Denmark on the inquiry. Twelve days later the Russian foreign ministry expressed its “bewilderment” at being excluded from the inquiry. On that day, too, Sweden said it would not join in the inquiries because it would involve the transfer of information related to Sweden’s national security. 

Nothing more about the cause of the underwater bombings has been heard since from either Sweden or Denmark, although both nations knew, as I have written, that the US was practicing underwater diving in the Baltic Sea for months before the explosions. The failure of the two nations to complete their inquiry may have stemmed from the fact, as I was told,  that some senior officials in both countries understood precisely what was going on.

The United States has since vetoed at least one attempt by Russia to get an independent United Nations investigation into the explosions. And the US intelligence community has provided support, along with German officials, to journalists writing alternative accounts of the pipeline bombing. Such stories invariably cite a 49-foot yacht said to be the vessel for the high-risk technical diving involved. 

There is no evidence that President Biden, in the sixteen months since the pipelines were destroyed, has “tasked”—a word of art in the American intelligence community—its experts to conduct an all-source investigation into the explosions. And no senior German leader, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is known to be close to President Biden, has made any significant push to determine who did what. A subsequent investigation sought by some members of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, was undertaken but its conclusion has been withheld from the public for what are said to be security reasons.

The last word on all of this belongs to Emmanuel Todd, a French demographer and political scientist who became widely known in Europe in 1976, when he was twenty-five years old, for his prediction, based in part on increasing rates of infant mortality, that the Soviet Union was doomed to fail. He has become more and more critical of American foreign policy, especially its continuing support for Ukraine, which he has caustically described as “a defeat for the West without being a victory for Russia.”

He argued in a recent interview that “one of the great goals of American politics, and therefore of NATO, was to stop the inevitable reconciliation of Russia and Germany” as Russia, despite American sanctions, was winning the war in Ukraine and once again “evincing economic stability.”

“This was a great source of fear,” Todd said, “and that is why the Americans”—he cited my Nord Stream exposé—“blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.” 

At the time Biden ordered the destruction of the pipelines, the American fear was that Chancellor Scholz, who at the request of Washington had shut off 750 miles of Russian gas in the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was ready in the fall of 2021 to be delivered to a port in Germany, might change his mind and let the gas flow, easing German economic worries and reinstating an important energy force for German industry. That would not be allowed to happen, and Germany has been in economic and political turmoil since.

In reply to a question about compensation, RIA quoted Dmitry Birichevsky, the head of the ministry’s economic cooperation department, as saying: “The probe is not over yet, we are waiting for its results to be presented to the (United Nations) Security Council, then we will decide what to do.”

Russia has blamed the United States, Britain, and Ukraine for the blasts which largely cut it off from the lucrative European market. Those countries have denied involvement.

The United Nations Security Council has refused to carry out its own investigation into the incident, leaving it to the governments of Sweden, Denmark and Germany.

“Everything is pointing to Russia,” blared a POLITICO headline two days after the explosions. Quoted in the piece were a number of foreign commentators including the former president of the German Federal Intelligence Service, saying that only Russia had the means and motives to do it.

“We still don’t know 100 percent that Russia was responsible,” said Olga Khakova, deputy director for European energy security at the Atlantic Council. “But everything is pointing to Russia being behind this.” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told BBC on Sept. 30 that it “seems” Russia was was behind the sabotage.

By October the Washington Post Editorial Board was raising the alarms about more attacks against “the West.”

“This is the kind of capability usually wielded by a state actor, though NATO did not say officially what everyone suspects unofficially: The author of this strike against Europe’s stability and security was Russia. Now, the United States and its allies must meet a new challenge: threats to critical infrastructure, just as they are about to try to get through winter without Russian oil and gas.”

Aside from a Twitter-impulsive former Polish foreign minister gleefully suggesting the U.S. did it, the mainstream media commentariat had no inhibitions about openly blaming Russia through the fall of 2022.

A year later, however, the world still does not know “who done it.” Some critics suggest the probes may be getting into politically uncomfortable territory, with recent German reports pointing to a Ukrainian military connection to the blasts.

“Whether it’s instinctive or by direction, there is a clear attempt to simply bury this story completely,” said Anatol Lieven, the director of the Quincy Institute’s Eurasia Program, comparing the seeming lack of U.S. media interest to George Orwell’s “memory hole” in the novel “1984.”

“Obviously that is because the main theories that have been advanced for the responsibility of the sabotage, if true, would be imminently embarrassing for Western governments.”

Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have been conducting separate investigations. In a joint statement on Sept. 30, Denmark and Sweden told the United Nations Security Council in a letter that the leaks were caused by at least two detonations with “several hundred kilos” of explosives. By late last year, however, European sources were quietly dismissing Russia’s role in what was being deemed as a sabotage, saying there was “no conclusive evidence” that would lead to Moscow.

Since then there has been reporting by Sy Hersh that the United States coordinated the attacks, using a secret expert U.S. Navy diving team. This was largely ignored, refuted and scoffed at by the mainstream media and officials in the West. Soon after, it was revealed that German investigators were pursuing a second theory: that it was the work of a pro-Ukrainian outfit, either rogue or Ukrainian government-connected. Swedish investigators believe, by the way, that the attack could only be the work of a state actor.

Leaked CIA documents earlier this year show that the U.S. had intelligence that the “Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces,” at least three months before the actual explosions. What we don’t know is if the Ukrainians actually went through with it, though at least one unnamed U.S. official said the CIA “warned” Ukraine not to.

Most recently, an exhaustive investigation by 19 Der Spiegel writers reported that all roads were indeed leading to Ukraine. At least that is what German investigators are telling them. From their report Aug. 28:

Investigators from the BKA (Federal Criminal Police Office), the Federal Police and the Office of the Federal Prosecutor have few remaining doubts that a Ukrainian commando was responsible for blowing up the pipelines. A striking number of clues point to Ukraine, they say.

And the possible motives also seem clear to international security circles: The aim, they say, was to deprive Moscow of an important source of revenue for financing the war against Ukraine. And at the same time to deprive Putin once and for all of his most important instrument of blackmail against the German government.

How far up the chain it goes nobody yet knows, or if other state actors were involved. After the story of the CIA leaks, Zelensky vehemently denied the charges.

“I am president and I give orders accordingly,” he said. “Nothing of the sort has been done by Ukraine.”

But the mystery continues and there seems to be no urgency — save for Der Spiegel’s intensive reporting — to push the issue further, at least in the U.S. press. That’s likely because, as Lieven and others contend, there is no political gain, only embarrassment if the U.S. is behind the attack, as Hersh alleges, or Ukraine is, as the German inquiry seems to be unraveling. For his part, Russian President Putin believes the U.S, not Ukraine, is the culprit. Others, including the German defense minister have suggested the Kyiv theory is a “false flag” to blame Ukraine.

“It seems very strange” that NATO governments, with their massive intelligence capabilities — particularly Washington’s global reach — “seem unable to get to the bottom of this,” Jacobin reporter Branko Marcetic tells RS.

“But even stranger still is the seeming lack of Interest and discussion from these countries’ various media establishments and politicians, about an attack that destroyed a major piece of a NATO ally’s infrastructure.”

To be fair, as Der Spiegel notes, the German investigators “cannot conduct investigations in Ukraine, and it isn’t expected that Kyiv will provide much support. The German authorities have also shied away from submitting a request to Ukraine for legal assistance because doing so would require that they reveal what they know.”

Meanwhile, who has benefited from the permanent shutdown of Nord Stream 1 (the EU was importing 35 percent of its natural gas from this pipeline until it was shut off after the invasion) and Nord Stream 2 never going online (which the U.S. had swore would never happen)?

“The United States without a question (has benefited),” asserts Lieven. “It made it much more difficult for Germany to ever move back into an intensive energy relationship with Russia and made German and other European countries even more permanently dependent on imports of liquified natural gas from the United States.”

Nord Stream pipelines, which run from Russia to Germany, are majority owned (51 percent) by Russian Gazprom, along with German, Dutch and French stakeholders. In 2022, Europe became the primary destination for U.S. LNG exports in 2022, according to the Energy Information Association, accounting for 64 percent of total exports. Four countries — France, the U.K., Spain, and the Netherlands — accounted for a combined 74 percent of those exports.

Aside from the U.S., Germany is also getting gas supplies from Norway and the Gulf States. Meanwhile the West’s break from Russian energy beyond the Nord Stream rupture has done serious damage to the German economy.

But the torrent of responses after the Sept. 26 attack blamed Russia because, as was the line, Moscow wanted to strike fear into the West. President Putin did it because Moscow was “weaponizing energy” and that it was “desperate.” None of that has been walked back and without any real attention to what really happened, no one truly feels the need to.

In fact, in its own anniversary recollections, the Washington Post barely mentions that this narrative was repeated for another month after the explosions.

“Whether or not that’s the full story is hard to say at this point,” Marcetic said, pointing to the Ukrainian connection, “but the fact that a state that is receiving unprecedented levels of military and financial support from NATO has been accused of carrying out an attack on a NATO ally is obviously significant. Yet this is another data point in this war that many clearly would rather not discuss or acknowledge even as it pertains directly to burning issues like Ukraine’s possible entry into the alliance.”

The mystery, as they say, remains unsolved.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute.

Deniability, as an option for President Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers, was paramount. No significant information about the mission was put on a computer, but instead typed on a Royal or perhaps a Smith Corona typewriter with a carbon copy or two, as if the Internet and the rest of the online world had yet to be invented. The White House was isolated from the goings-on near Oslo; various reports and updates from the field were directly provided to CIA Director Bill Burns, who was the only link between the planners and the president who authorized the mission to take place on September 26, 2022. Once the mission was completed, the typed papers and carbons were destroyed, thus leaving no physical trace—no evidence to be dug up later by a special prosecutor or a presidential historian. You could call it the perfect crime.

There was a flaw—a gap in understanding between those who carried out the mission and President Biden, as to why he ordered the destruction of the pipelines when he did. My initial 5,200-word report, published in early February, ended cryptically by quoting an official with knowledge of the mission telling me: “It was a beautiful cover story.” The official added: “The only flaw was the decision to do it.” 

This is the first account of that flaw, on the one-year anniversary of the explosions, and it is one President Biden and his national security team will not like.

Inevitably, my initial story caused a sensation, but the major media emphasized the White House denials and relied on an old canard—my reliance on an unnamed source—to join the administration in debunking the notion that Joe Biden could have had anything to do with such an attack. I must note here that I’ve won literally scores of prizes in my career for stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker that relied on not a single named source. In the past year we’ve seen a series of contrary newspaper stories, with no named first-hand sources, claiming that a dissident Ukrainian group carried out the technical diving operation attack in the Baltic Sea via a 49-foot rented yacht called the Andromeda. 

I am now able to write about the unexplained flaw cited by the unnamed official. It goes once again to the classic issue of what the Central Intelligence Agency is all about: an issue raised by Richard Helms, who headed the agency during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War and the CIA’s secret spying on Americans, as ordered by President Lyndon Johnson and sustained by Richard Nixon. I published an exposé in the Times about that spying in December 1974 that led to unprecedented hearings by the Senate into the role of the agency in its unsuccessful attempts, authorized by President John F. Kennedy, to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Helms told the senators that the issue was whether he, as CIA director, worked for the Constitution or for the Crown, in the person of presidents Johnson and Nixon. The Church Committee left the issue unresolved, but Helms made it clear he and his agency worked for the top man in the White House. 

Back to the Nord Stream pipelines: It is important to understand that no Russian gas was flowing to Germany through the Nord Stream pipelines when Joe Biden ordered them blown up last September 26. Nord Stream 1 had been supplying vast amounts of low-cost natural gas to Germany since 2011 and helped bolster Germany’s status as a manufacturing and industrial colossus. But it was shut down by Putin by the end of August 2022, as the Ukraine war was, at best, in a stalemate. Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021 but was blocked from delivering gas by the German government headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz two days prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Given Russia’s vast stores of natural gas and oil, American presidents since John F. Kennedy have been alert to the potential weaponization of these natural resources for political purposes. That view remains dominant among Biden and his hawkish foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, now the acting deputy to Blinken.

Sullivan convened a series of high-level national security meetings late in 2021, as Russia was building up its forces along the border of Ukraine, with an invasion seen as almost inevitable. The group, which included representatives from the CIA, was urged to come up with a proposal for action that could serve as a deterrent to Putin. The mission to destroy the pipelines was motivated by the White House’s determination to support Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sullivan’s goal seemed clear. “The White House’s policy was to deter Russia from an attack,” the official told me. “The challenge it gave to the intelligence community was to come up with a way that was powerful enough to do that, and to make a strong statement of American capability.”

I now know what I did not know then: the real reason why the Biden administration “brought up taking out the Nord Stream pipeline.” The official recently explained to me that at the time Russia was supplying gas and oil throughout the world via more than a dozen pipelines, but Nord Stream 1 and 2 ran directly from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany. “The administration put Nord Stream on the table because it was the only one we could access and it would be totally deniable,” the official said. “We solved the problem within a few weeks—by early January—and told the White House. Our assumption was that the president would use the threat against Nord Stream as a deterrent to avoid the war.”

It was no surprise to the agency’s secret planning group when on January 27, 2022, the assured and confident Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, stridently warned Putin that if he invaded Ukraine, as he clearly was planning to, that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The line attracted enormous attention, but the words preceding the threat did not. The official State Department transcript shows that she preceded her threat by saying that with regard to the pipeline: “We continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies.”

Asked by a reporter how she could say with certainty that the Germans would go along “because what the Germans have said publicly doesn’t match what you’re saying,” Nuland responded with an astonishing bit of doubletalk: “I would say go back and read the document that we signed in July [of 2021] that made very clear about the consequences for the pipeline if there is further aggression on Ukraine by Russia.” But that agreement, which was briefed to journalists, did not specify threats or consequences, according to reports in the Times, the Washington Post, and Reuters. At the time of the agreement, on July 21, 2021, Biden told the press corps that since the pipeline was 99 percent finished, “the idea that anything was going to be said or done was going to stop it was not possible.” At the time, Republicans, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, depicted Biden’s decision to permit the Russian gas to flow as a “generational geopolitical win” for Putin and “a catastrophe” for the United States and its allies. 

But two weeks after Nuland’s statement, on February 7, 2022, at a joint White House press conference with the visiting Scholz, Biden signaled that he had changed his mind and was joining Nuland and other equally hawkish foreign policy aides in talking about stopping the pipeline. “If Russia invades—that means tanks and troops crossing . . . the border of Ukraine again,” he said, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Asked how he could do so since the pipeline was under Germany’s control, he said: “We will, I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”

Scholz, asked the same question, said: “We are acting together. We are absolutely united, and we will not be taking different steps. We will do the same steps, and they will be very very hard to Russia, and they should understand.” The German leader was considered then—and now—by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines. 

By this point, the CIA team had made the necessary contacts in Norway, whose navy and special forces commands have a long history of sharing covert-operation duties with the agency. Norwegian sailors and Nasty-class patrol boats helped smuggle American sabotage operatives into North Vietnam in the early 1960s when America, in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was running an undeclared American war there. With Norway’s help, the CIA did its job and found a way to do what the Biden White House wanted done to the pipelines. 

At the time, the challenge to the intelligence community was to come up with a plan that would be forceful enough to deter Putin from the attack on Ukraine. The official told me: “We did it. We found an extraordinary deterrent because of its economic impact on Russia. And Putin did it despite the threat.” It took months of research and practice in the churning waters of the Baltic Sea by the two expert US Navy deep sea divers recruited for the mission before it was deemed a go. Norway’s superb seamen found the right spot for planting the bombs that would blow up the pipelines. Senior officials in Sweden and Denmark, who still insist they had no idea what was going on in their shared territorial waters, turned a blind eye to the activities of the American and Norwegian operatives. The American team of divers and support staff on the mission’s mother ship—a Norwegian minesweeper—would be hard to hide while the divers were doing their work. The team would not learn until after the bombing that Nord Stream 2 had been shut down with 750 miles of natural gas in it.

What I did not know then, but was told recently, was that after Biden’s extraordinary public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2, with Scholz standing next to him, the CIA planning group was told by the White House that there would be no immediate attack on the two pipelines, but the group should arrange to plant the necessary bombs and be ready to trigger them “on demand”—after the war began. “It was then that we”—the small planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project—“understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command.”

After Biden’s order to trigger the explosives planted on the pipelines, it took only a short flight with a Norwegian fighter and the dropping of an altered off-the-shelf sonar device at the right spot in the Baltic Sea to get it done. By then the CIA group had long disbanded. By then, too, the official told me: “We realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war”—Putin was in the process of annexing the four Ukrainian oblasts he wanted—“but was part of a neocon political agenda to keep Scholz and Germany, with winter coming up and the pipelines shut down, from getting cold feet and opening up” the shuttered Nord Stream 2. “The White House fear was that Putin would get Germany under his thumb and then he was going to get Poland.”

The White House said nothing as the world wondered who committed the sabotage. “So the president struck a blow against the economy of Germany and Western Europe,” the official told me. “He could have done it in June and told Putin: We told you what we would do.” The White House’s silence and denials were, he said, “a betrayal of what we were doing. If you are going to do it, do it when it would have made a difference.”

The leadership of the CIA team viewed Biden’s misleading guidance for its order to destroy the pipelines, the official told me, “as taking a strategic step toward World War III. What if Russia had responded by saying: You blew up our pipelines and I’m going to blow up your pipelines and your communication cables. Nord Stream was not a strategic issue for Putin—it was an economic issue. He wanted to sell gas. He’d already lost his pipelines” when the Nord Stream I and 2 were shut down before the Ukraine war began. 

Within days of the bombing, officials in Denmark and Sweden announced they would conduct an investigation. They reported two months later that there had indeed been an explosion and said there would be further inquiries. None has emerged. The German government conducted an inquiry but announced that major parts of its findings would be classified. Last winter German authorities allocated $286 billion in subsidies to major corporations and homeowners who faced higher energy bills to run their business and warm their homes. The impact is still being felt today, with a colder winter expected in Europe.

President Biden waited four days before calling the pipeline bombing “a deliberate act of sabotage.” He said: “now the Russians are pumping out disinformation about it.” Sullivan, who chaired the meetings that led to the proposal to covertly destroy the pipelines, was asked at a later press conference whether the Biden administration “now believes that Russia was likely responsible for the act of sabotage?”

Sullivan’s answer, undoubtedly practiced, was: “Well, first, Russia has done what it frequently does when it is responsible for something, which is make accusations that it was really someone else who did it. We’ve seen this repeatedly over time.

“But the president was also clear today that there is more work to do on the investigation before the United States government is prepared to make an attribution in this case.” He continued: “We will continue to work with our allies and partners to gather all of the facts, and then we will make a determination about where we go from there.”

I could find no instances when Sullivan was subsequently asked by someone in the American press about the results of his “determination.” Nor could I find any evidence that Sullivan, or the president, has been queried since then about the results of the “determination” about where to go. 

There is also no evidence that President Biden has required the American intelligence community to conduct a major all-source inquiry into the pipeline bombing. Such requests are known as “Taskings” and are taken seriously inside the government.

All of this explains why a routine question I posed a month or so after the bombings to someone with many years in the American intelligence community led me to a truth that no one in America or Germany seems to want to pursue. My question was simple: “Who did it?” 

The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas—and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe.

German authorities also suspect that a Poland-registered van – which was spotted in a German port – was used to supply the saboteurs, the WSJ also reported.

“The probe by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office is examining why the yacht they believe was used to carry out the operation journeyed into Polish waters,” the WSJ wrote.

“Other findings suggest Poland was a hub for the logistics and financing of last September’s undersea sabotage attack that severed the strongest bond tying Berlin to Moscow,” the US newspaper also wrote.

The Polish government reportedly did not know about the German probe into the attack and only found out about it from the media.

Not informing Warsaw about the investigation could increase tension between Poland and Germany, the latter being accused by the radical right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government of long-term appeasement of Russia.

Poland and Germany are also allies within Nato, which has been on high alert since Russia attacked in Ukraine in February 2022. Bordering on Ukraine, Russia (via the Kaliningrad region), and Russia’s ally Belarus, Poland is the alliance’s strategic member state.

Polish investigators into the Nord Stream blowups say that it is highly unlikely that Andromeda was in any way linked to the attack, the newspaper Rzeczpospolita reported in late May.

“The people on the yacht didn’t look like professionals who could carry out such a task. They were partying and loud … no professional would have attracted attention in this manner,” a Polish investigator told Rzeczpospolita.

Poland also says that the Warsaw-based travel agent – called Feeria Lwowa – that Germans linked to the attack appeared too conspicuous to have been used in the operation.

The travel agent – which does not have a phone number or website – saw its revenue multiply from PLN1mn (€230,000) in 2019 to nearly PLN14mn in 2020, the year of the tightest travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Rzeczpospolita.

Warsaw has suggested instead that the Nord Stream attack might have been a false flag operation carried out by Russia.

Ukraine has denied involvement in the attacks.

“I believe that our military and our intelligence did not do it, and when anyone claims the opposite I would like them to show us the evidence,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the German newspaper Bild newspaper, as cited by the WSJ.