The sabotage of the Nord Stream submarine gas pipelines at the end of September 2022, which according to US intelligence sources cited by the New York Times was the work of a “pro-Ukrainian group”, was carried out using a yacht that sailed from the German port of Rostock, according to German media in a joint report. The boat was rented by a company based in Poland “apparently belonging to two Ukrainians,” according to the weekly Die Zeit and the public televisions ARD and SWR, invoking sources from the investigation of the sabotage of this infrastructure.
A group of six people, made up of five men (the captain to navigate, two divers and two diving assistants) and one woman (a doctor), would have left aboard the yacht on September 2, 2022 from the port of Rostock, in the German Baltic coast, to place the explosives in Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. The German media that publish this information attribute it to interviews “with sources in several countries” who are carrying out judicial investigations into the event, which They are Germany, Denmark and Sweden.
However, “the nationality of the perpetrators is not clear,” add these German media, since they used false passports to rent the boat. According to Die Zeit, the scientific police found traces of explosives “on the cabin table” of the yacht, which was returned to its owner “uncleaned” after the rental. Investigators were able to verify that the yacht had sailed near the Danish island of Christiansø.
However, the German weekly insists, “even if the clues lead to Ukraine, investigators have not yet been able to determine who commissioned” the operation. Kiyv denied any involvement on Wednesday. “Ukraine is not at all involved in the incidents on the gas pipelines; It doesn’t make the slightest sense,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky, said in a statement. The sabotage “does not come from our action,” said Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov.
Speaking from Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the reports of the attacks were an effort to divert attention. “Obviously, the attackers want to divert attention; Obviously, this is a coordinated padding in the media,” Peskov told the state news agency RIA on Wednesday, referring to the two reports, the one from the New York Times and the one from the German media.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned on Wednesday against hasty conclusions in the Nord Stream case. “It could well have been a false flag operation organized to blame Ukraine, an option that is also mentioned in the reports published by the media; the probability of one or the other is equally high,” Pistorius told German public radio Deutschlandfunk.
