Did a group of Ukrainians blow up Nord Stream?

In this video, I look at the Nord Stream sabotage and the story about how a group of Ukrainian divers was behind the operation. I raise some questions that journalists need to address before it is meaningful to say that the explanation makes sense.

Watch the video here or read the transcript below.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

A Ukrainian citizen has been charged in Germany in connection with the Nord Stream explosions in 2022. Also, there is a new book out that describes the details of how a group of Ukrainians committed this act of sabotage. So I thought this might be a good occasion to talk about the story of how this group of Ukrainians apparently destroyed this Russian pipeline, especially because I think much of the Western media tends to focus on the wrong questions. I also think it can offer an interesting glimpse into how military planning processes actually work, how you would approach such a task as destroying this pipeline, and how, as analysts, we can approach the challenge of trying to make sense of the things that happen. So let's talk about it.

Nord Stream is probably one of the most requested topics that I get. It's also one of those things that the trolls in the comment section of my videos like to bring up when they want to question my credibility because I was quick to point to Russia back when the incident happened.

Since then, there is now a lot of information that points to this story about how a group of Ukrainians did it instead. So many people think I should just admit that I was wrong and that actually Ukraine, or a group of Ukrainians, did it.

Let me just say right away, I don't know who did it, and I also don't have any inside information on this. But I will say that I think there is a tendency among Western journalists and also people in the general public to consider this case solved when, in reality, that's not really warranted. That's also the impression you get if you read the new book that's come out. It gives the impression that it's now an established fact that this group of Ukrainians blew up the Nord Stream pipelines and that we can treat it as a fact rather than as a mystery.

This is where things go wrong, because I think if you start looking at the story, then you pretty quickly run into some quite dramatic unknowns or big unanswered questions. You have to accept some quite wild assumptions in order to consider this a solved case.

What I want to do in this video is to first highlight some of those questions that I think we still need answers to and that I think the media should focus more on. Then I am going to finish up with some comments about why I think it's so difficult to speculate meaningfully on what actually happened with the Nord Stream pipelines back in 2022, given the information gaps that are still out there.

If we start looking at what we know now, then I think we can say for sure that this group of Ukrainians was actually in the area. That's pretty much an established fact. They rented a yacht. They were sailing around in the area. We know pretty much who they were. It was a group of people specializing in these types of diving operations, and they also had knowledge of how to work with explosives.

So I think the presence of these people in the area is an established fact. What I think is less certain is what their role was in the mission. This is where we get into the more interpretive part of the analysis.

If you look at how a military operation is conducted, then you can say quite a bit about what the purpose was and what the attackers were trying to achieve. So you can do a bit of forensics on the operational design.

If we look at Nord Stream, it is a pipeline that runs from the St. Petersburg area all the way to Germany across the Baltic Sea. The attackers could have chosen any place along the entire stretch of the pipeline for the sabotage. They chose exactly this place east of the Danish island of Bornholm. So what's special about this place? What can we say about it?

I think there are two things that jump to mind. The first one is that the water is very deep. It's about 80 meters deep, and there's also a very strong current in this area. That means that it's a very complicated dive to conduct. It is possible for a human to do such a dive, but it requires special equipment. It takes a long time. It's very complicated. You have very limited time on the seabed to actually do the work because you spend most of the time transiting between the surface and the seabed and then back up to the surface again in order to avoid decompression sickness.

The other thing that I think jumps to mind about this area is about maritime borders. What you see here is that the solid borders are the territorial borders, and the dashed lines are the economic zones of the countries. This is something that confuses many people, but economic zones are actually international waters. It just means that the country has certain rights to extract resources from those areas.

So what we can see is that the explosions happened in international waters, but as close to Danish territorial waters as possible. Also, most of the explosions happened just on the border between the economic zones of Sweden and Denmark. So choosing this location meant that the attack would get maximum exposure and also that it was guaranteed that both the Swedish and the Danish authorities would get involved.

So why did the attackers choose this place? What are the advantages of choosing this place? Why didn't they go about 100 kilometers further east where the water is only half as deep?

That would have been much easier. It would have been a much safer dive, and you could perform it without special equipment and with much greater certainty of success. That is a weird choice, unless the purpose of the operation actually is not just to destroy Nord Stream, but to gain maximum exposure about destroying Nord Stream. Because doing it over there would have meant that it would have happened in a much more remote area of the Baltic Sea and it would have reduced the number of countries that were involved because it would only have led to an investigation by the Swedish authorities.

So just by looking at the location that the attackers chose, I think we can say that they did not just want to destroy Nord Stream. What they were after was maximum publicity about the destruction of Nord Stream.

Then we get to the question about the yacht. The group of Ukrainian divers rented the yacht and they sailed from Rostock in Germany on September 6th, 2022. They spent the next two and a half weeks sailing around the area. In those days, they visited the harbors of Wiek, Christiansø, Sandhamn, and also this city in Poland whose name I cannot pronounce, before they returned the boat to Rostock on September 23rd.

They were, of course, not going in a straight line between those harbors. They were sailing around in the area where the explosions happened. But they also managed to visit every country in the area, and they were not trying to be particularly discreet about it. They were flying the Ukrainian flag on the boat, and they were speaking Ukrainian. So it was noticed in these harbors that there is this group of Ukrainians here on this yacht.

Now, a yacht is a strange choice of platform for a diving operation. It's difficult to maneuver and to keep in position for several hours while you conduct a very precise dive on a very specific location. It's puzzling that they picked this platform and not a more suitable one. I mean, they could have just rented a motorboat and that in itself would have been a step up, but they chose a sailing yacht.

So there are some things here that also raise questions that I think journalists could meaningfully ask. Like, why did they rent a sailing yacht and not a more suitable diving platform? Why did they visit so many different harbors in so many different countries? Why were they flying the Ukrainian flag? Why did they not stay at sea and anchor instead of going to port? These are all operational choices that somebody made while planning and conducting this high-level military operation.

Then when they returned the boat in Rostock, they had not cleaned it. There were traces of explosives. They also managed to get a speeding ticket in Germany, so their presence was documented that way.

All this points to a strange combination of skills and behavior. On the one hand, these people had to be top professional operators in order to execute these extremely complicated dives under such difficult conditions. But then on the other hand, they also made some very weird choices and they behaved in a strangely amateurish way.

So these are some of the questions that I think the media should be asking instead of just uncritically reporting that it is now established that Nord Stream was destroyed by a group of Ukrainians. Why did they choose this place and not an easier one? Why did they choose an operational design that would guarantee maximum exposure and would make sure that the trails would point toward Ukraine? What was the purpose of that? And why did they deliberately decide to make the sabotage operation more complicated in order to achieve this goal?

That leads to the more strategic questions that I also think are still unanswered, because what did Ukraine actually get out of this? And why did they choose to go through with the operation? In the reporting, it's a bit unclear if this was something that was sanctioned by the Ukrainian government or if this group supposedly acted independently. But regardless, I think there are many unanswered questions here or strange decisions that journalists could try to uncover instead of just assuming that things are kind of self-evident.

The first one is that I see many people saying that Ukraine had an interest in blowing up Nord Stream because they wanted to prevent Germany from returning to using Russian gas. But how is that supposed to work?

If we go back to 2022, the situation was that Ukraine was extremely dependent on Germany to provide equipment for the war. The Nord Stream pipeline was already closed because Russia had done that. Surely the Ukrainians did not want the Germans to start making concessions to Russia to get cheap gas again. But on the other hand, having a good relationship with Germany at that time was a matter of survival for Ukraine. Blowing up critical infrastructure in Germany seems like something that the German government might get angry about.

So if this Nord Stream sabotage was sanctioned by the Ukrainian government, then why did Zelensky decide to run the risk of potentially losing the war in order to close a pipeline that was already closed? It seems like an extreme chance to take and just very bad judgment. Definitely this is something that journalists should ask themselves instead of just assuming that, well, obviously Ukraine would do it.

Then this group of Ukrainians, if they acted without Zelensky's approval, then why is it that the Ukrainian government has not cracked down on them afterwards? Is this really something that Zelensky would accept, that private Ukrainians go around waging their own foreign policy and blowing up stuff in allied countries?

And also, why are they now allowed to talk about it to Western journalists and brag about their actions without the Ukrainian government stepping in? You'd think that Zelensky would want these people to shut up and stop damaging Ukraine's relationship with Germany, but he doesn't seem all that bothered by it. That's weird.

That also leads to the logical question. Why is it that the German government did not actually get angry at the Ukrainians about blowing up Nord Stream? Sure, we have the German law enforcement authorities that are investigating the case and they're pressing charges. But the German government has almost entirely ignored it.

In fact, after the sabotage, Germany moved on to become one of Ukraine's strongest supporters and one of the largest donors in the world. That's remarkable because it's just an astonishingly tolerant attitude from the German government. How can that be? Again, a good question for the journalists.

Now, I don't know the answers to all these questions. My purpose here is entirely to complicate things by highlighting some of the questions that are still unanswered, even with all the information that has come out about these Ukrainians on a sailing yacht, and why I think it is a mistake to now consider this case solved. We need better explanations for some of these questions because otherwise we can't really say that the story makes sense.

This is where we get to the question of why I also don't think it's necessarily all that productive for me to start speculating about what the answers to all these things will be and what might actually have happened with Nord Stream. Because the thing is that I'm pretty confident that if Western governments have information that points in a totally different direction than this story about the Ukrainians in a sailing yacht, then we're not going to hear about it. Because they don't want to tell us.

Many people mistakenly think that it is inconvenient for Western governments if the trails point toward Kyiv, but the reality is that it's not. It's super convenient. It is the best thing possible for Western governments. The last thing anyone wants is for the trails to point toward Russia. If you're interested in knowing why that is the case, then I have a separate video about that. I'm going to link to it in the description.

But that also means that trying to figure out what's actually up and down in the whole Nord Stream case, it's a bit like shadowboxing. There is a lot of information coming out about one story that has a lot of weaknesses in that there are so many unanswered questions that need answers in order to be credible. But at the same time, we pretty much know that if there is any information that points in a different direction, then we're not going to be told about it.

So it may be true that Nord Stream was blown up by this group of Ukrainian divers. But I think we need the journalists to start answering some of the questions I've mentioned in this video because there are too many gaps in the explanations for the story to be truly credible as it stands today.

Before I finish, I just also want to correct an error that I've often seen in the reporting. That is that the Nord Stream sabotage is supposed to have permanently halted gas supplies from Russia to Germany.

Allegedly this was the motivation for this group of Ukrainians to make sure that Nord Stream was destroyed once and for all and that Germany would never again be able to resume purchasing Russian gas through this pipeline.

That's just not true. The pipeline can be fixed. Sections of the pipeline are destroyed, but those sections can be replaced. It would cost some money, but compared to the money that Russia is spending on the war in Ukraine, we're talking about peanuts here. It's a rounding error.

The reason Nord Stream has not been repaired is not that it's impossible to do, but that Russia and Germany have just not decided to do it. That's, of course, also important to keep in mind when we're talking about what Ukraine would have gotten out of sabotaging Nord Stream. We're talking about a temporary interruption of gas supplies between Russia and Germany, not a permanent destruction. That, of course, also means that the benefit for Ukraine in destroying this pipeline is much smaller than it would have been if it were impossible to repair.

Before I finish up, I also just want to make a quick channel announcement. I recently created a new YouTube channel for long-form interviews and conversations. The first video is an interview I made with Anthony Scaramucci. Whenever I participate in long-form things, I'm going to put it there instead of on this channel because I really want to keep the format separate. So if you're interested in longer conversations with me, then be sure to head over to my conversations channel and also subscribe there. I'll put a link in the description.

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Thank you very much for watching, and I will see you again next time.