Poland was the operational logistics center of the sabotage group that blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. This conclusion stems from the evidence reviewed by investigators from the German Federal Criminal Police Office, writing The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing sources familiar with the investigation.
According to the interlocutors, German experts came to the conclusion that the yacht Andromeda, which was allegedly used to deliver explosives to pipelines, entered the territorial waters of Poland. According to the interlocutors, this happened in the interval between the times of laying explosives on both gas pipelines.
WSJ sources note that it is not yet possible to say with certainty whether “the yacht reached the coast of Poland or encountered another ship in its territorial waters”. Investigators establish the reason for the ship’s entry into Polish waters, the article says.
According to new evidence, the yacht was leased to a Warsaw travel agency believed to be part of a “network of Ukrainian front companies suspected of having links with Ukrainian intelligence services”.
The documented evidence indicates that Poland was the “logistics and financing hub” of the Nord Stream sabotage, the WSJ notes. The publication says reports that have emerged in recent months “increasingly reinforce the investigators’ view that the Ukrainians are behind the sabotage.”
As the WSJ notes, the German side hid from the Polish authorities information about the ongoing investigation into the movements of the Andromeda and its crew, they learned about it from media materials. This is an unusual situation for relations between Germany and Poland, since Berlin and Warsaw have common legal instruments for carrying out cross-border investigations, the publication explains. After the news of Andromeda broke, Polish authorities held a meeting with German officials.
A representative of the German attorney general’s office declined to comment to the WSJ on reports that the saboteurs who blew up Nord Stream were using Poland as an operating base. Meanwhile, “other German officials” familiar with the investigation said they had no evidence of Warsaw’s involvement in the sabotage.
A senior Polish national security official assured that “no Polish state institution is involved in this case”.
“I cannot exclude that a Polish company or another company is involved in this,” he added.
Another senior Polish official said Poland’s own investigation had so far turned up no suspects.
In early June, the Washington Post reported, citing intelligence, that three months before the Nord Stream sabotage, the United States had received information about Ukrainian authorities’ plans to carry out a “secret attack” on gas pipelines involving a group of divers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy assured that he “would never do that”, and Kyiv did “no such thing”.
Western media have repeatedly reported on the possible involvement of Ukraine in the sabotage of the Nord Stream. In particular, an investigation carried out in May by the media companies NDR, WDR and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung showed that a Ukrainian soldier could be implicated in the affair. The New York Times wrote about US intelligence findings that a pro-Ukrainian group was behind the explosions. Russian authorities say Ukraine is not involved in the weakening of the Nord Streams. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed the opinion that the sabotage was carried out at the state level. According to him, claims of a connection to the incident by some pro-Ukrainian activists are “absurd”. Before that, Putin had blamed the “Anglo-Saxons” for the explosion.
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