2024-08-15 11:41:30
The American Wall Street Journal, citing its sources in Ukraine and in the US intelligence services, wrote that the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea on September 26, 2022 was carried out by a group of Ukrainian professionals.
“Ukraine has nothing to do with it,” Zelenskyy claimed about the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipeline Video: Reuters
“The operation cost about 300,000 dollars. They rented a yacht and one of the six passengers on it was a woman, so that the crew gave the impression that they had set sail for fun,” the newspaper writes in its investigative reporting. The saboteurs chartered a yacht called the Andromeda in Rostock, Germany.
The idea is said to have originated in May 2022 at a boisterous party of several Ukrainian army officers and businessmen who were celebrating the successful defense of Kyiv. “I have to laugh when I read or hear the reasoning that it was some super-difficult action with drones, submarines and millions of dollars. In fact, it was carried out by a few people who had the courage to do something for their country,” Wall Street quotes a Ukrainian who attacked participated.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy initially approved the plan, but somehow the Dutch military intelligence MIVD found out about it. She passed that message on to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They called Zelensky from Washington to call off the operation. According to Wall Street Journal sources, Zelenskyy actually gave the order to do so, but Valery Zaluzhny, then Chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Army, disobeyed him.
So the sabotage took place – and successfully. The pipeline is out of order. “It was a perfectly legitimate target in our war against Russia,” Ukrainians who participated in the attack either through planning or personally told the American newspaper.
Zaluzhny, who now serves as Ukraine’s ambassador to Great Britain, said when asked by the Wall Street Journal that he was not aware of any such action and did not approve of it.
German prosecutors this week issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen they suspect of placing explosives under the surface of the Baltic Sea. The person in question lived in Poland, but according to the Polish authorities, he has already left the country. German investigators asked their Polish colleagues for industrial camera footage from the Polish Baltic port of Kolobrzeh, where the yacht was moored. The Poles at first refused to release the footage and then told the German side that they had been destroyed, writes the Wall Street Journal.
Zelenskyi’s adviser Mychajlo Podoljak told Reuters that Kyiv had nothing to do with the attack on the gas pipeline. According to him, the Russians are behind the explosion.