2023-06-10 19:35:15
© Reuters.
(Reuters) – German investigators are examining evidence that suggests a sabotage team used Poland as an operational base to damage Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in September last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
Investigators reconstructed the two-week journey aboard the “Andromeda”, a 15-metre yacht suspected of being involved in the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2, the newspaper reported.
The Wall Street Journal spoke to people familiar with the voyage and indicated that the sabotage team may have placed high-sea explosives on Nord Stream 1, before steering the boat towards Poland. The report also revealed that Germany is trying to match the DNA samples found on the ship “with at least one Ukrainian soldier”.
Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office and Poland’s government spokesman did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment, but a senior Polish government official suggested the newspaper’s report was the result of Russian propaganda.
“Information about Polish or Ukrainian leads in the destruction of NS1 and NS2, repeated in the press, is consistently used by the Russian apparatus of influence to create the impression/presumption that Warsaw and Kiev were behind this incident,” wrote Stanislaw Zaryn, port Spokesperson for Special Services Poland on Twitter.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 put Europe’s reliance on Russian in the political spotlight. The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines has accelerated the region’s need to look for other energy suppliers.
Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, each consisting of two pipelines, were built by Russian state-owned Gazprom to pump 110 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year to Germany.
(Reporting by Shivani Tanna in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Karol Badohal in Warsaw)
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