Was Nord Stream Sabotaged with Germany’s Approval?

By Nauman Sadiq Global Research, August 22, 2024

On August 14, German public broadcaster ARD, the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the weekly Die Zeit claimed in a joint report that federal prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant in June against a Ukrainian diving instructor believed to have resided until recently in Poland. The reports identified the alleged saboteur as Volodymyr Z.

The Polish prosecutor’s office confirmed it had received a German arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man. It said it received the warrant in June, but the suspect left for Ukraine last month. The prosecutor’s office offered a lame excuse that the authorities failed to prevent him from leaving because the relevant information had not percolated down to the country’s border guard.

Clearly, there was a collusion between German and American establishment media, because the very next day, on August 15, The Wall Street Journal published a bizarre scoop, claiming the Nord Stream gas pipelines, providing Russian natural gas to European countries before the war, were blown up by a six-member Ukrainian sabotage team of skilled deep-sea divers in an operation that was initially approved by Vladimir Zelensky and then called off, but which went ahead anyway.

German reports, published only a day before the WSJ scoop, were evidently meant to create a media hype and lend credence to an otherwise asinine report, clearly meant to tarnish the reputation of Ukraine’s former top military commander, who was sacked in February for defying Washington’s diktats of committing more cannon fodder for Ukraine’s much-touted albeit easily foiled counteroffensive last year, while simultaneously attempting to exonerate Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

The WSJ report claims the subversive operation was allegedly directed by a serving army general, who reported to Ukraine’s then commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny. Zelensky initially approved the plan, but later backtracked after the CIA found out about it and asked Kyiv to call it off. Nonetheless, Zaluzhny pressed ahead with the mission, claiming once dispatched, a sabotage team goes incommunicado and cannot be withdrawn.

Nord Stream pipelines were ruptured by blasts under the Baltic Sea in September 2022. Early the following year, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh conclusively proved with irrefutable facts and incontrovertible evidence that explosives were planted on the Nord Stream pipelines by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise, and detonated on orders from Washington in order to wean Germany off Russian energy amidst the Ukraine War.

Seymour Hersh, however, elided over the obvious fact that the sabotage operation was tacitly approved by the German government. For a heavily industrialized nation like Germany, energy security is the lifeline of economy dependent on industrial production. Hence, how is it possible that a six-member team of amateur divers, as claimed by WSJ, or professional US Navy divers, as stated by Hersh, blew up one of the world’s largest natural gas pipeline network without the knowledge of German maritime security forces?

Following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in February 2022, German political establishment, under tremendous pressure from Washington, was itself looking for a pretext to stop importing natural gas from Russia. But violating the international contract was a controversial issue because East Germany, which until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was in the Soviet sphere of influence, has a significant political constituency that shares historical and cultural ties with Russia, and favored cordial relations and energy reliance on Russia despite the war.

The US security establishment, however, persuaded the Scholz government behind the scenes that its notorious saboteurs would do the dirty work and Germany would simply have to acquiesce or maybe point fingers at banana republics like Poland and Ukraine for orchestrating the Nord Stream sabotage.

Despite being an industrial powerhouse of Europe, Germany might have been a sovereign state at liberty to pursue independent foreign policy during the reign of the Third Reich, but since the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War, it has become a virtual colony of the imperial United States, where 50,000 US troops are currently deployed in sprawling Ramstein Air Base and several other military bases.

After the United States, Germany is one of the largest contributors of military assistance to Ukraine, and has provided billions of dollars economic aid during the course of two years. During Ukraine’s Kursk incursion inside Russia, besides British Challenger battle tanks, German Marder infantry vehicles, donated by Berlin to Kyiv, took the lead in mounting the assault.

Ukrainian conscripts and pilots are being trained by German and American military personnel at military bases in Germany. It’s ironic that Germany still claims to be the torchbearer of pacifism and idealism while simultaneously pandering to Washington’s diktats and adding fuel to the fire in the Ukraine War.

Immediately following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced plans in April 2022 to spend an additional €2 billion ($2.16 billion) on military needs, most of which was aimed at providing weapons to Ukraine. Scholz also pledged €100 billion ($112.7 billion) of the 2022 budget for the German armed forces and committed to reaching the target of 2% of GDP spending on defense that was requested by NATO.

Image is from Flying Camera/Shutterstock

In addition, German government announced financial support allowing Kyiv to directly buy tanks from German defense companies like Rheinmetall. Germany specifically provided substantial number of Marder light tanks, armored vehicles equipped with anti-tank missiles, to Ukraine that are now being deployed by Ukraine’s forces in the Kursk battlefield inside Russia. Berlin similarly provided heavy-combat Leopard tanks to Ukraine, though in smaller number.

Despite desperate German attempts to assuage American patrons, a diplomatic furor erupted in May 2021 after it was revealed the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) used a partnership with Denmark’s foreign intelligence unit to spy on senior European officials, including then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel. European diplomats complained that it was “grotesque and unacceptable” that friendly intelligence services were keeping tabs on allies, even though Washington’s policy toward servile client states has always been “trust but verify.”

The Wall Street Journal, the official mouthpiece of establishment Republicans, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, that has taken the lead in publishing insider scoops during the four-year tenure of the Biden admin while the Democratic shills, the New York Times and Washington Post, took a backseat out of deference for self-styled “progressives” in the White House, has a history of publishing fabricated reports.

In the aftermath of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal published a misleading report in April 2022 that German chancellor Olaf Scholz had offered Volodymyr Zelensky a chance for peace days before the launch of the Russian military offensive, but the Ukrainian president turned it down.

Then newly elected German chancellor told Zelensky in Munich on February 19, days before the Russian invasion,

“that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia,” the Journal revealed. The newspaper also claimed that “the pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.”

However, Zelensky rejected the offer to make the concession and avoid confrontation, saying that

“Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO.”

While making the preposterous allegation that the intransigent Ukrainian leadership vetoed NATO’s “flexible and conciliatory approach” to peacefully settle the dispute in order to exonerate the transatlantic military alliance for its confrontational approach toward Russia since the inception in 1949, the Journal report conveniently overlooked the crucial fact that in November 2021, the US and Ukraine had already signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership.

The agreement unequivocally confirmed “Ukraine’s aspirations for joining NATO” and “rejected the Crimean decision to re-unify with Russia” following the 2014 Maidan coup. Then in December 2021, Russia, in the last-ditch effort to peacefully resolve the dispute, proposed a peace treaty with the US and NATO.

The central Russian proposal was a written agreement assuring that Ukraine would not join the NATO military alliance and, in return, Russia would drawdown its troop buildup along Ukraine’s borders. After the proposed treaty was contemptuously rebuffed by Washington, it appeared the die was cast for Russia’s inevitable invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research. 

Featured image: Half a million tons of methane rise from the sabotaged Nord Stream pipeline. Photo: Swedish Coast Guard

The original source of this article is Global Research