Denmark has recovered from the seabed a cylindrical object located near the site of the sabotage of the NordStream 2 gas pipeline that has turned out to be a smoke buoy, the Danish Energy Agency announced on Wednesday.
“The recovery was carried out with the participation of a representative of the company that owns NordStream 2 AG,” of which the Russian gas consortium Gazprom is the majority shareholder, the agency said in a statement.
The operation, carried out under the leadership of the Danish Defense at a depth of 73 meters, ended on March 28.
“Investigations indicate that the object is an empty smoke buoy, used for visual marking,” the note says. The discovery of this object, sighted by Gazprom and which does not pose any security risk, was revealed by Vladimir Putin himself two weeks ago, evoking the Russian president a possible role in the sabotage. “The specialists believe that it may be an antenna to receive a signal to activate an explosive device, which could be placed in this (part) of the gas pipeline,” the Russian head of state told the Russia 24 television channel.
Almost six months after the explosions that seriously affected the NordStream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, the authorship of the submarine attack remains a mystery despite criminal investigations in the countries of the region (Germany, Sweden and Denmark). In early March, Germany announced that it was investigating a ship suspected of having transported the explosives to the site, without being able to draw any conclusions about the identity of the perpetrators.
A “pro-Ukrainian group” was behind the sabotage, The New York Times published in early March, based on information consulted by US intelligence, but without the participation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This version appeared weeks after the independent North American journalist Seymour Hersh affirmed in a long investigative report that the sabotage had been a covert operation of the United States Government.
