In June-July 2022, a few months before the Nord Stream explosions, the CIA transmitted to the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), as well as to European intelligence agencies, information on the preparation of a sabotage on the one of the pipelines. On this Wednesday, March 8, informed The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing unnamed senior US officials.
According to the newspaper’s interlocutors, the document contained information that three Ukrainian citizens tried to rent ships in countries bordering the Baltic Sea, including Sweden.
Sources familiar with the content of the US intelligence report said that the conclusions on the organization of the sabotage of the gas pipelines by the pro-Ukrainian group are preliminary. At the same time, the possible involvement of Ukraine in the Nord Stream explosions was not ruled out from the start of the investigation, the WSJ article points out.
According to WSJ interlocutors, CIA director William Burns and assistant to the president of the United States for national security Jake Sullivan in October 2022 are considered a working version of Kiev’s responsibility in organizing sabotage gas pipelines. However, as of early spring, there was no information indicating the involvement of Ukrainian authorities in the sabotage, the newspaper writes.
An unnamed U.S. official has raised White House concern that findings of Kiev’s possible involvement in the gas pipeline sabotage could infuriate NATO and negatively impact Germany-Germany relations. ‘Ukraine. At the same time, as the article says, by February the German authorities had almost completely ruled out the version of Russian involvement in the explosions, which initially appeared as the main suspect.
In early March, Western media including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Die Zeit published documents containing information about the involvement of a certain pro-Ukrainian group in the September 2022 Nord Stream explosions. In particular, as Die Zeit wrote, German investigators discovered that the ship allegedly used to undermine the Nord Stream was rented in Poland by a company owned by two Ukrainians. Mikhail Podolyak, adviser to the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, said Kiev “has nothing to do with the Baltic Sea incident and has no information about ‘pro-Ukrainian groups to undermine'”. The Kremlin, commenting on publications in Western media, called it a “coordinated farce” and said “clearly the perpetrators of the attack want to distract.” In turn, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, accused “Western regimes” of involvement in sabotage. She urged them to respond to official requests from Moscow and “at a minimum, to take into consideration” the elements of the investigation by American journalist Seymour Hersh, who claimed that the explosion had been organized by American divers with the participation of Norway. Washington and Oslo denied any involvement in the sabotage.
