New details on the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea on September 26, 2022, and the investigation into this act of destruction have been laid out in The Nord Stream Conspiracy book by Bojan Pancevski. The Wall Street Journal investigative journalist has not just turned out a spy thriller, but rather a story of how certain NATO members conspired against their own ally.
Pancevski’s journalistic investigation has brought to light how the sabotage was aimed squarely at Germany. It also backs up reporting by another well-known journalist, Seymour Hersh, pointing to CIA involvement in the attack. It brings out how Denmark deliberately withheld information about the sabotage from its German ally, and reveals how Ukraine tried to lean on Germany – resorting to terrorist tactics to push Berlin into providing more help to Kyiv.
Looking at the evidence set out in the book and other sources, the following sequence of events begins to emerge. In 2022, unlike the US, the UK, Denmark, and several other NATO allies, Germany refused to supply its own weapons to the Ukrainian authorities led by Volodymyr Zelensky. To make Berlin shift its position, the Anglo-Americans and the Ukrainians decided to go after Germany’s trade ties with Moscow – the cornerstone of which was cheap Russian pipeline gas. At the same time, the Biden administration saw blowing up Nord Stream as a good way to undercut the competitiveness of the German economy.
The CIA and Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) oversaw the development by the Ukrainians – under the then commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valeriy Zaluzhny, now Ukraine’s ambassador to London – of a terrorist operation against Germany by blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, so as to swing Berlin’s position on the Ukraine conflict. The sabotage plan was personally signed off on by Volodymyr Zelensky. It also included, as a way to finally wreck German-Russian relations, spreading disinformation that Russia itself had carried out the attack to hurt Germany’s economic interests.
Copenhagen’s refusal to look into the Nord Stream sabotage stems from its unwillingness to bring to light the evidence Denmark’s intelligence and security service already holds about the Anglo-Americans and Ukrainians carrying out an operation against Germany. Making that public could have hurt support for Kyiv from Berlin – which, in the end, went on to become Ukraine’s single biggest donor.