The Russian Navy was allegedly operating with a mini-submarine near the Nord Stream pipelines shortly before the explosions. This raises questions about the investigation.
For many years, the scene of the Nord Stream attacks northeast of the island of Bornholm was no more than a random spot in the Baltic Sea. Located just outside the Danish and Swedish radar zones, there is nothing but water as far as the eye can see. And underneath, at a depth of almost 80 meters, is a gas pipeline whose exact location is known only to insiders.
Alert before the attacks
Danish patrol boats almost never went there. Every morning at about the same time, a Swedish radar plane took off from the Malmen military airfield to fly over the Baltic Sea. Above all, the crew secured the strategically important island of Gotland. Apparently there was little to control north-east of Bornholm.
That changed shortly before the explosions on September 26, 2022, which tore apart the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines and thus sealed the end of German-Russian energy cooperation. From the evening of September 21, something extraordinary happened there.
The Royal Danish Navy’s patrol boat “Nymfen” surprisingly left Rødbyhavn at 19.50 and set course for Bornholm. More precisely: on the spot that would become known only five days later as the crime scene of the Nord Stream sabotage. Something there obviously needed urgent checking.
hunt a ghost
When the ship reached its destination on the morning of September 22, it was soon joined by the Swedish air and sea forces. The course of one of the Swedish ships in the coming days: the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
The patrols were believed to be pursuing Russian military ships. As t-online learned from security circles, an association of the Russian Navy is said to have operated under strict shielding in the area of the later crime scene. “Like a ghost,” it says, without sending its position data. The ships would have had exactly the equipment needed to place explosive devices on the pipelines. Publicly available data indicates that the information is correct.
The activities of the Russian Navy in the days leading up to the blasts could be an important lead in a mysterious criminal case: the gas pipeline attack amid Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. At the same time, they would question theories about other possible culprits that have caused a stir in recent weeks.
One was: the USA had been the mastermind behind the sabotage. Many details of the report have now been refuted. Recently, however, joint research by ARD, SWR and “Zeit” brought another sequence of events into play: the Federal Public Prosecutor is following the tracks of a possibly pro-Ukrainian group that could have carried out the attacks with the “Andromeda” sailing yacht and two divers. In fact, the Federal Criminal Police Office searched the suspicious boat.
Experts suspect “false flag”
However, the theory of a terrorist sailing trip on a private Ukrainian contract has caused heads to shake in specialist circles. It is said that this is not very plausible. There is much to be said for a “false flag operation” – for traces that are to be found and are intended to disguise the real masterminds. Most likely submarines or underwater drones were used, hundreds of kilograms of military explosives. All of this speaks for a state actor.
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Some members of the Bundestag on the Parliamentary Control Committee, who were only recently briefed by the German investigators, believe that too. You have to be “maximally careful” with the evidence that has so far become known in the media, said the chairman of the committee, Konstantin von Notz (Greens). Deliberately misleading information is also conceivable.
Research by t-online now suggests that there could be more to the operation than a sailing yacht.
