Nord Stream Sabotage – Pro-Ukrainian group? Kiev denies any guilt

“While I enjoy collecting entertaining conspiracy theories about the Ukrainian government, I have to say this: Ukraine has nothing to do with it. What happened to the Nord Stream pipelines? They sank,” wrote presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak Tuesday on his Twitter page.

Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said at an informal meeting of EU defense ministers on Wednesday: “It is a kind of compliment that the Ukrainian special forces are credited with such an operation. But that is not our field of activity.”

According to anonymous US officials, intelligence now shows that the perpetrators are opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to the New York Times, the officials would not provide any further information about the members of the group or how the operation was managed or paid for. While there are no clear conclusions, it is possible that the operation was carried out unofficially by a proxies associated with the Ukrainian government or its security services.

Moscow: “Distractions from real masterminds”
Criticism of this image also came from Moscow. There it is seen as an attempt to distract from the ‘real masterminds’. Such information would be spread by those “who do not want to conduct investigations within the legal framework and try by all means to divert the public’s attention,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her Telegram on Tuesday night. -channel.

“It is simply a means of diverting suspicion from those in official government positions who ordered and coordinated the attacks in the Baltic Sea to an abstract person,” the Russian embassy in the United States said on the Telegram news platform. “We cannot and will not believe in the impartiality of the conclusions of US intelligence agencies,” it said.

In this context, the government in Moscow also criticized the fact that all countries involved in the pipeline project – with the exception of Russia – were involved in the investigation. “It’s not just weird. That smacks of a gigantic crime,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and her government colleague, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, reacted cautiously to the reports. First, the competent authorities should complete their investigation. Then you can draw conclusions from it.

Berlin warns of “false flag action”
It remains to be seen what will actually be confirmed. After all, it might as well be a “false flag action” to blame pro-Ukrainian groups, Pistorius warned. “The chance of one is just as great as the other. It does not help us to think about how this would affect our support to Ukraine on the basis of such research, which must have been carried out painstakingly and meticulously,” the minister continued.

Operation with a yacht owned by a Ukrainian businessman?
Meanwhile, the German federal prosecutor’s office announced that a suspicious ship had been searched in January during the investigation. This would have been used to transport explosives to the pipelines. However, there is still no reliable evidence or explanations.

According to a report in the weekly magazine “Die Zeit”, which investigated this together with the two German broadcasters ARD and SWR, the alleged group of saboteurs consisted of a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor. They would all have had fake passports with them. The yacht allegedly used belongs to a Ukrainian businessman.