Nord Stream Probe Hampered by Resistance From Poland
Investigators hope Warsaw’s new government will shed light on gas-pipeline attack after previous administration’s reluctance to disclose potentially crucial evidence
By Bojan Pancevski Jan. 8, 2024
BERLIN—Polish officials have resisted cooperating with an international probe into the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural-gas pipelines and failed to disclose potentially crucial evidence, according to European investigators working on the case.
Those Polish officials have been slow to provide information and withheld key evidence about the alleged saboteurs’ movements on Polish soil, investigators said. They are now hoping the new government in Warsaw, which took office in December, will help shed light on the attack.
European investigators have long believed the attack was launched from Ukraine via Poland. But they say Warsaw’s failure to fully cooperate has made it hard to establish whether the attack happened with or without the former Polish government’s knowledge, according to senior officials.
Some senior European officials say they are considering approaching the office of Donald Tusk, Poland’s new prime minister, for help in investigating the biggest act of sabotage on the European continent since World War II.
The Nord Stream pipelines, connecting Russia to Germany underneath the Baltic Sea, were blown up in September 2022. This added pressure on Germany and others to make themselves independent from Russian fuel supplies.
Any suggestion that Poland, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, might be concealing information about an attack on an ally could undermine trust in an alliance that is facing one of the biggest tests since its creation. For Moscow, any behavior by Poland hinting at an involvement in the sabotage may be seen as an aggressive act by NATO.
Investigators haven’t offered evidence linking the Polish government to the explosions and say that even if some Polish officials were involved, it could have been without the knowledge of the political leadership. Yet they say efforts by Polish officials to hinder their investigation have made them increasingly suspicious of Warsaw’s role and motives.
Most Western security officials believe that a Ukrainian crew, operating with or without sanction from Kyiv, was behind the sabotage. Ukraine has denied any involvement. Russia said it thought the U.S. was responsible for the attack, which the U.S. denied.
Days after taking up office, Tusk fired the heads of all the intelligence services, including those involved in the Nord Stream probe. European officials hope he will retain some police executives they think might have been under political pressure not to cooperate but might now be inclined to do so.
Polish prosecutors, who oversee the domestic investigation, said that they were cooperating with other countries but found no evidence of Polish involvement. The border guard and the internal security service declined to comment.
An investigation by Germany, Denmark and Sweden has so far found that the pipeline was blown up by a crew of six, including deep-sea divers, traveling on a leisure yacht called Andromeda. On its voyage, Andromeda stopped in all three countries, as well as Poland, according to investigators. The boat, leased in Germany via a Polish company, contained traces of octagon, the same explosive that was found at the underwater blast sites, they said.
After mining parts of the pipelines, the crew docked in Poland’s Baltic port of Kołobrzeg, where they spent a full day, according to investigators who tracked the boat by analyzing its navigation system data, the crew’s mobile-phone communications, satellite imagery and witnesses’ accounts.
A port official suspicious about the five men and one woman, all of whom spoke a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, alerted police. On Sept. 19, Poland’s border guard checked the identification of the crew, who produced European Union passports and were allowed to continue their trip, sailing back up north, where they laid the rest of the mines, investigators say.
Polish authorities didn’t share this information with European investigators until March 2023—and they only did so after being contacted by their German counterparts. Berlin was tipped off in January about the yacht’s stay in Poland by the Dutch military intelligence service, whose information came from someone in Ukraine.
A number of Polish agencies declined to share with European investigators footage of the suspects taken by CCTV cameras while the yacht was moored there, those investigators said. The investigators have established that the boat and its crew were exposed to security cameras throughout their stay in the port.
While prosecutors and the border guard, two of Poland’s agencies investigating the case, appeared cooperative, officials from other branches including the internal security agency ABW, failed to answer queries, obfuscated or gave contradictory information, European officials said.
In one instance, Polish prosecutors told their European counterparts that no explosives were found on the Andromeda, although no forensic investigation had taken place. Yet the Polish internal security service told European investigators that the border guard officers who had checked the crew never boarded the boat, contradicting the prosecutor’s claim.
Polish prosecutors first said the Andromeda arrived in the port of Kołobrzeg around 4 p.m. on Sept. 19 and then left around 12 hours later. But investigators later found that the boat actually moored at 9 a.m. after traveling overnight from Denmark.
German investigators waited at least two months before obtaining a meeting with their Polish counterparts in mid-May last year, according to the European officials. They left the meeting with the impression that some Polish colleagues were unwilling or unable to cooperate.
Polish and German police otherwise cooperate closely. Officers from both countries even have police jurisdiction on each other’s territories near the border.
In September, Stanislaw Zaryn, a senior Polish official then involved in overseeing Poland’s security services, dismissed the findings that the Andromeda crew was behind the sabotage, saying the crew had no military training and were merely tourists “looking for fun.”
Around the same time, Poland’s internal security service circulated with European investigators alleged intelligence that the Andromeda had links with Russian espionage, which they alleged was behind the attack. Some investigators said they considered this to be disinformation.
Zaryn, who left office following the election, said in a recent interview that any Polish involvement was unlikely as Russia was plausibly behind the sabotage.
Drew Hinshaw contributed to this article.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com
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Appeared in the January 9, 2024, print edition as 'European Investigators Say Poland Hinders Nord Stream Sabotage Probe'.