Der Spiegel: Evidence confirms Ukraine’s involvement in the Nord Stream bombing
The German Der Spiegel said on Friday, that there is new evidence in the investigation indicating Ukraine’s involvement in sabotage operations targeting the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
A reported published by Der Spiegel, revealed that the metadata of e-mails, which were sent during the rental of the boat, indicate the involvement of Ukraine, pointing to the finding in the yacht of traces of the explosive “HMX” substance, which is very widespread in the west as in the previous block in the east.
Der Spiegel’s report stated that all the evidence consistent with the assessments of several intelligence services, according to which the perpetrators will be searched for in Ukraine.
The report continued, “We now wonder whether what happened could have been carried out by unsupervised commandos, or the Ukrainian intelligence services, and to what extent certain elements of the Ukrainian government apparatus were aware of this”.
This comes at a time when police investigations are focusing, in particular, on the “Andromeda” yacht, which is likely to be used to transport explosives, which led to the detonation of the pipelines in September 2022, in the Baltic Sea.
It’s likely that the yacht set off from the port of Rostock, in northern Germany, on September 6, with 6 people on board, including divers and a doctor.
It turned out that one of the passengers on the boat holds a Romanian passport, and he’s also a Ukrainian citizen who previously served in an infantry unit.
At the beginning of this week, other German media traced the file of the boat rental by a Polish company owned, in fact, by Ukrainians.
Investigators are looking into the evidence of Ukrainian military services.
It’s worth noting that on the 8th of last February, Seymour Hersh published a journalistic investigation into the pipeline bombing incident, based on intelligence information, which he said he had obtained from one of those directly involved in preparing the bombing.
In his lengthy investigation, Hersh said the operation was disguised under the cover of a widely publicized NATO mid-summer exercise known as Operation Baltic 22, which took place this past June.
According to Hersh in the report, the American divers in the deep sea used NATO military exercises as a cover, and planted mines along the pipelines, which were later detonated remotely.
The famous American journalist added that the black operation was ordered by President Biden, and the attack was carried out by the CIA, in cooperation with Norway.
Hersh pointed out that the US President, Joe Biden, decided to conduct the operation, after 9 months of discussions with national security officials in his administration.
Days after the publication of his report, the Hersh stated in an interview with a German newspaper that the White House was afraid that Germany and Western Europe would stop supplying the weapons that Ukraine wanted, and that Germany might restart the pipeline.
According to him, this was a major concern in Washington, noting that the president of the United States would rather see Germany freeze than Berlin stop supporting Ukraine, and this, for me, is devastating for the White House.
For his part, the White House denied the validity of the information contained in the investigation, and a spokesman for the US National Security Council, Adrian Watson, said, “This information is a fabricated and mythical lie”.
There was on September 26, 2022, a gas leak was detected from four large points, preceded by underwater explosions, on the two gas pipelines linking Russia with Germany, which are located in international waters.
An attack was soon suspected, which led to speculation about the perpetrators of this logistically complex, diplomatically very sensitive operation.
About 6 months after the explosions that affected the Nord Stream lines 1 and 2, responsibility for the underwater attack remains ambiguous, despite the ongoing criminal investigations in Germany, Sweden and Denmark.
