Ukrainian military officer coordinated Nord Stream pipeline attack
Washington PostNov 12, 2023
A senior Ukrainian military official with ties to the country's intelligence services is said to have allegedly played a key role in the bombing of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines in September last year, according to a joint investigation published in the Washington Post and the German newspaper Der Spiegel on Saturday.
Drawing on a number of unnamed officials from Ukraine and across Europe, as well as sources reportedly with direct knowledge of the operation, the outlets claimed that the decorated colonel Roman Chervinsky was the "coordinator" of the attack. He allegedly managed logistics and support for a six-person team that rented a sailboat with false identities to lay explosive charges on the pipelines using deep-sea diving equipment.
The evidence suggests that the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was carried out by a six-person Ukrainian crew under the coordination of Chervinsky who was likely taking orders from more senior officials. Though the Dutch military intelligence agency had reported a similar operation months earlier, the US had thought it had been called off after contacts with Ukraine's top general.
Mainstream media was never really interested in finding out who was responsible for the Nord Stream attacks. However, after Seymour Hersh's bombshell story blaming the US, American officials started to spread the inadequate sailboat narrative as a cover for the real perpetrator.
There's a 2% chance that a NATO member’s investigation will conclude that the US was involved in the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline before 2025, according to the Metaculus prediction community.