Who really blew up Nord Stream pipelines? The 4 key theories
Six months after the explosions, fragments of clues have emerged but the whodunnit is far from being solved
Six months on, this audacious act of apparent sabotage is turning into one of the great geopolitical whodunnits of the 21st century. Suspicion has been variously cast on the Ukrainians, the Russians, the Americans and fleetingly, on the British and the Poles. Fragments of clues have given rise to many theories, each seemingly stranger than the last.
The unusual Danish manoeuvres in the days before the blasts, first noted by Oliver Alexander, an independent Danish researcher, and verified by The Times through navigation records provided by MarineTraffic, the ship-tracking database, suggest there may be a few twists left in the story yet.
“It does appear that this Danish surveillance vessel went around the explosion sites for a reason,” said Jacob Kaarsbo, a former Danish intelligence officer who is now a senior analyst at Think Tank Europa in Copenhagen.
Curiouser and curiouser
The bombings, which tore gaping holes in both strands of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and one of Nord Stream 2’s, are a detective’s nightmare. Firstly, there were near-simultaneous naval exercises by Poland, the Baltic states and Russia in the southern Baltic days before the incident, as well as Nato’s vast Baltops 22 wargame two months earlier.
Secondly, there are at least three concurrent national investigations by Denmark, Sweden and Germany, which appear to be patchily co-ordinated, and US navy ships have also been spotted loitering around the scene of the crime.
Sources briefed on the German inquiry, which is led by the country’s top prosecutor with only a relatively small number of police officers believed to be dedicated to the case full time, say it is still nowhere near reaching a conclusion. “We genuinely don’t know who did it,” one official said.
Out of this profusion of potential suspects and half-clues, four main theories have emerged in the public domain: one probably wrong, one possible but perplexing, and two tantalisingly incomplete.
The first of these is by far the shakiest. In early February, Seymour Hersh, the veteran American investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre and the horrors of Abu Ghraib, published a long essay based on interviews with a single anonymous source. The bombs, Hersh claimed, had been planted by CIA divers with assistance from Norway. On closer inspection, however, much of the story disintegrated as Alexander and other researchers exposed numerous inaccuracies.
Six men in a boat
The second and most widely discussed theory emerged earlier this month after a low-key meeting in Washington between President Biden and Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor.
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Initially, a vaguely worded report in The New York Times claimed there was intelligence pointing to a Russian or Ukrainian-speaking culprit, possibly a Russian opposition group or a network supporting Ukraine but acting without the knowledge or approval of its government. Hours later Die Zeit and two German public broadcasters released their own version of events, apparently founded on leaks from the German investigation.
It began with a Polish company chartering a yacht from the northeast German port of Rostock. The six crew members — a captain, a doctor, two divers and two diving assistants — were said to have travelled into the country on professionally forged passports, possibly Bulgarian in at least one case, to obscure their true nationalities.
The yacht was subsequently identified as the Andromeda, a 15m (50ft) Bavaria 50 Cruiser with several cabins and 75 sq m of space below decks, available for €3,000 a week. It set sail on September 6, first mooring at Wiek on the nearby island of Rügen, returning several days later by way of the Danish island of Christianso. When German investigators finally searched the boat on January 18, they are said to have found traces of explosives on board.
While the Ukrainian government insists it had nothing to do with the bombing, the paper trail behind the company that rented the yacht is alleged ultimately to lead to a Ukrainian citizen. The business magnate’s identity is an open secret among European diplomats and security officials.
A Baltic red herring?
Christianso, a speck of rock so minute that the surrounding archipelago is known as the “pea islands” in Danish, is 11 nautical miles to the northeast of Bornholm.
Besides some handsome 17th-century fortifications once used to fend off the British and an impressively self-sufficient community of 90 with its own pub and one of the smallest schools in Denmark, the island’s chief attraction is its marina.
Yachts can simply turn up, moor and pay for their berth electronically without booking ahead or notifying the authorities of their presence.
Danish police made their first inquiries about these payment records in mid-December, according to Soren Thiim Andersen, the head of administration on Christianso. He said they had turned up in person on January 18, coincidentally the same day the Germans began searching the yacht.
With no surveillance technology in the marina, it is hard to identify individual yachts that have stayed there, particularly as there were up to 50 boats moored there in September. A Facebook appeal asking the islanders if they had seen anything out of the ordinary seems to have yielded results, although the post has since been deleted and Andersen said he could not reveal any more information until the Danish authorities were ready to go public.
It appears entirely plausible, then, that Andromeda was indeed in roughly the right place at the right time. However, Kaarsbo believes this is a red herring, if not an ingenious attempt to throw investigators off the scent.
There are, he notes, many puzzling questions. Is it really possible to schlepp half a tonne of TNT around on a pleasure yacht? Would it be a realistic base of operations for two divers to shepherd the explosives down 80m (260ft) to the sea bed in three manoeuvres, each of which must have taken many hours?
“It’s really hard to see divers doing it without decompression tanks, which certainly couldn’t fit on a yacht,” Kaarsbo said. “Two guys swimming, say, 200m to 500m with hundreds of kilos of explosives at 70 plus metres depth isn’t possible. You can’t just drop it or steer it with two divers from a yacht to that depth with any kind of precision. Impossible. It would take highly specialised equipment that you couldn’t fit on a yacht.”
Other details seem odd if a Ukrainian was really behind the attack. Why go to the logistical trouble of carrying it out through Germany? Why in Denmark and Sweden’s maritime exclusive economic zones? Above all: why would a Ukrainian risk jeopardising German public and political support for his country?
The tanker and the submarine
That leaves two more pieces of the puzzle. One is the Minerva Julie, a Greek-flagged tanker shipping out Russian oil through the Baltic. On September 2 it set off from Rotterdam. Four days later it rounded Bornholm and then simply drifted around the two Nord Stream pipelines, occasionally firing up its engines whenever it came too close to Danish waters. Eventually it set a course for Tallinn before docking in St Petersburg.
The tanker’s operator, Minerva Marine, has insisted that it was waiting for its next instructions to come through: “Drifting in a sea area awaiting voyage orders is standard shipping practice and there was nothing unusual in this instance.” Yet the Minerva Julie does not appear to have done so on any of its previous journeys in the months leading up to the attack.
The last clue is the movements of the P524 Nymfen, the Danish patrol vessel, and the Swedish warship. There is no obvious evidence of unusual Russian naval activity in the area around that time. Perhaps, though, it was hidden.
Kaarsbo said he believed the likeliest explanation was a Russian submarine, or a ship that had switched off its electronic identifiers for the sake of stealth.
Poisoned lake
Besides the balance sheets of several German energy companies, the main casualty of the bombings is the Baltic sea itself. While scientific attention has chiefly focused on the 100,000 tonnes of methane that boiled to the surface, a more serious problem may lurk below. After a century and a half of industrial pollution the sea bed off Bornholm is a toxic sludge of heavy metals, interspersed with 7,000 tonnes of mustard gas shells dumped by the Soviets in 1947 on a site in between the two Nord Stream pipelines.
Several weeks ago Hans Sanderson, an environmental scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark and a leading authority on this chemical weapons graveyard, published a preliminary analysis of the bombing along with a dozen colleagues from German and Polish institutions.
The modelling, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that the explosions churned up a quarter of a million tonnes of this sediment into two giant plumes of pollution, each about 15 miles in diameter, containing 14 tonnes of lead and a smaller but deadlier quantity of TBT, an intensely noxious pesticide once used to keep the hulls of ships clean. “This is an important breeding area for cod . . . and this exposure was just at the end of their spawning season,” Sanderson said.
Marie Helene Miller Birk, a marine biologist and co-founder of the Ivandet environmental education charity in Tejn, an old fishing village on the north coast of Bornholm, believes the impact could be even worse than the study suggests. She notes that the explosions coincided with the peak of the area’s twice-yearly algal bloom, a bonanza of the micro-organisms that provide the foundation for an already ailing ecosystem. In other words, the toxins may have crept into the Baltic food chain from the bottom up.
Elegy for a pipeline
Whoever carried out the sabotage and however they did it, one thing is certain: the once-monumental energy bridge between Russia and Europe is in ruins.
It is not quite finished: Moscow is still quietly piping a little more gas into the European Union than is generally thought, with buyers ranging from Finland to Latvia and Hungary. Yet Russia’s total share of EU gas imports has collapsed from 40 per cent to 9 per cent. Bills went up across the Continent but the much-prophesied winter shortages failed to materialise. Germany’s gas storage facilities are 64 per cent full, 22 percentage points higher than normal for this time of year.
“This was always a narrative that Gazprom [the Russian state gas exporter] was pushing, that Europe cannot survive without Russian gas,” Agnia Grigas, a Lithuanian-American energy analyst at the Atlantic Council, said. “But the fact is we have seen this past winter that there was no energy crisis. We’re talking about an energy realignment here.”
Worries persist, particularly about whether Germany and other energy-hungry EU countries will be able to repeat last year’s gas storage feat without the residual Russian pipeline gas supply they had last summer. Nor is the Nord Stream project necessarily dead. One strand of Nord Stream 2 remains intact and could at least in theory be reactivated. The cost of repairing the other pipelines has been estimated at half a billion euros, cheap enough to be be fixed if Germany really wanted to.
However, Heiko Borchert, a strategic affairs consultant based in Switzerland, said the days of the Kremlin’s gas leverage over Germany were over for the foreseeable future and Russia would become even more dependent on China as an ersatz market for its hydrocarbons.
“I just can’t imagine the Germans saying [to Russia] a couple of years later: ‘Friends, the big fuss is over, we’re taking a sober look at the matter and the thing has to be brought back into business,’ ” Borchert said. “I really struggle to imagine that the current German government would really entertain that as an option.”