The Nord Stream 1 and 2, the two gas pipelines that connect Russia with Germany through the Baltic Sea for the shipment of Russian natural gas, have suffered three mysterious leaks, Denmark and Sweden, whose waters have noticed the leak, warned on Tuesday. Object of the geopolitical pulse, the double infrastructure operated by a consortium dependent on the Russian giant Gazprom was not operational due to the war in Ukraine. Nord Stream 2 never came on stream, and Nord Stream 1 continued to pump gas until, in various tense phases, Putin turned off the tap this summer. But both pipes – technically there are actually four, as the two pipelines are double-branch – still contain gas under pressure.
The Kremlin was “extremely concerned” about the damage suffered in three pipes of the gas pipelines and estimated that no hypothesis could be ruled out, including sabotage. “No version can be ruled out,” said the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, in his daily telephone press conference when asked if it is sabotage, reports AFP. “Until we have the results of the investigation, we can’t rule anything out,” he said.
Previously, the possibility of sabotage in the Nord Stream gas pipelines was expressed by the German newspaper Tagesspiegel, citing information from security circles in Germany that many indications point to the fact that the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines have been deliberately damaged in an act of sabotage. According to the Tagesspiegel, the chronological sequence of the defects detected in the gas pipelines is the main reason for this assumption.
“Our imagination can no longer conceive of a scenario that is not a targeted attack,” an anonymous source from government circles and federal authorities is quoted as saying by the newspaper. The operator said that the damage to the three pipes of the two infrastructures is unprecedented and that it is impossible to predict when they will be restored.
The Danish authorities initially reported a leak in Nord Stream 2 in Danish waters in the Baltic, and subsequently two others in Nord Stream 1, one in the waters of this Nordic country and another in those of neighboring Sweden, near the island of Bornholm.
“It is too early to say anything about the causes of the incidents,” said Danish Minister for Climate and Health, Energy, Dan Jørgensen. For its part, the operator of the gas pipelines, Nord Stream AG, based in Switzerland, described as “unprecedented” the damage that three threads of the two infrastructures have suffered simultaneously, and said that it is impossible to predict when they will be restored.
Russia slashed gas supplies to Europe via Nord Stream 1 before halting flows entirely in August and blaming Western sanctions for causing technical difficulties. European politicians say it was a pretext to stop gas supplies. The Nord Stream 2 never got off the ground, because Germany suspended the approval process shortly before the Russian military intervention in Ukraine.
“Pipeline breaks rarely occur, so we see reason to increase the level of emergency as a result of the events that occurred last day. We want to ensure careful monitoring of critical infrastructure to reinforce security of supply,” he says in a statement. Statement from the Danish Directorate General for Energy, after declaring an emergency in the electricity and gas sectors.
The announcement supposes the rise to the orange level, the second highest on a scale of five, which implies that “concrete measures” will be communicated that companies in the gas and electricity sectors must implement “to increase the safety of, for example, plants, buildings and facilities”.
Vessels sailing within the 5-nautical-mile exclusion zone may experience loss of buoyancy as well as risk of ignition above water and in the air, according to the Danish energy agency. As for the environmental damage, the leak will only affect the area where the gas plume is inside the water as well as the methane gas leaking into the air.
