Germany has asked Poland to arrest a Ukrainian diving instructor who was allegedly part of the team that blew up the NordStream gas pipeline almost two years ago, three German media outlets have reported. The latest investigations point to Ukrainian responsibility for the sabotage, which consisted of several underwater explosions on 26 September 2022, seven months after Vladimir Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which blew up the pipeline transporting gas between Russia and Germany.
Berlin has issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen, identified as Vladimir S., who is believed to be living in Poland. Investigators consider two other Ukrainian citizens, including a woman, to be suspects who are believed to have participated in the attacks as part of the team of divers who placed the explosives in the pipelines, according to a joint investigation by public television ARD, the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the weekly The Time.
German authorities have been very cautious and have revealed few details about the investigation into the attack, but recent media reports point to a pro-Ukrainian group. Responsibility for the attack on the deep-sea gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea is one of the biggest questions of the first year of war in Ukraine. Russia, the power targeted by the first investigations, has always denied responsibility.
The attack on NordStream 2, a gas pipeline heavily criticised by the United States and Poland, among others, for increasing dependence on gas from Moscow, shocked the world with its spectacular nature. Its perpetrators placed high-powered explosive charges on the bottom of the Baltic Sea and detonated them undetected in an area of busy maritime traffic. Experts have not seen such a sabotage since World War II.
The pipelines, installed on the seabed at a depth of around 70 metres, ran on a 1,200-kilometre route through the territorial waters of five countries: Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. NordStream 2 was the most recent gas pipeline (NordStream 1 was inaugurated in 2011 by the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel). Its construction was completed in 2021 and it had not yet come into operation: Berlin halted it when Russia invaded Ukraine.
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The silence of the countries that have or had investigations underway is almost absolute. The governments of Germany, Denmark and Sweden limited themselves to assuring that they were continuing to work, that the investigations were in the hands of independent bodies and that they would make public the conclusions when they reached them. Sweden and Denmark stopped investigating at the beginning of this year. Meanwhile, months without official data have been fuelling hypotheses and conspiracy theories, such as that of the well-known American journalist Seymour Hersh, who blamed the United States for what happened with the collaboration of Norway.
German media have published the most details about the alleged perpetrators and the operation. It is known that a group of six people – five men and one woman – set sail from the northeastern German port of Rostock on 6 September 2022 on a sailing ship called Andromeda. The equipment to carry out the detonation of the gas pipelines had previously arrived at the port by truck. The next day the ship was located in Wieck, near Rostock, and later on the Danish island of Christianso, northeast of Bornholm.
The team consisted of a captain, two divers, two assistant divers and a doctor, and their nationality was initially unclear because they used false passports to rent the yacht. According to the new information, the origin of the participants has been clarified, who returned the boat without cleaning it, which led to the discovery of explosive residues on a table. A white van that appeared on September 8, 2022 on the northern German island of Rügen, where the Andromeda also made a stopover, also played a prominent role. The driver transported several Ukrainians and identified the now suspect in a photograph. Vladimir S. was identified as one of the passengers in that van.
The development reported by German media on Wednesday shows that the German Attorney General’s Office and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) are keeping the case open and are continuing with the investigation. Neither of the two authorities wanted to comment on the news. The arrest warrant against the Ukrainian suspect was issued in June to the Polish authorities, who did not execute it within the 60-day period stipulated by European regulations. The man’s last known residence was in a town west of Warsaw, but he had recently gone into hiding again and may have returned to Ukraine.
The journalistic investigation says it is still unclear to what extent Ukrainian government agencies may have been involved in the preparation and execution of the sabotage. In the case of the man now wanted and the other two suspects, the investigation has not revealed direct links to the military or the secret services. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has denied his government’s involvement in the attacks. The head of the Ukrainian intelligence service, Kirilo Budanov, also denies this: “I am more than sure that none of the Ukrainian officials could have had anything to do with this,” he told German public television ARD a few months ago.
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