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GAS

Russian gas pipeline ‘unstoppable’: report

Swedish objections to a controversial pipeline to deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany along the Baltic Sea floor fell on deaf ears in Russia, according to US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

Published: 7 March 2011 08:27 CET
Russian gas pipeline 'unstoppable': report

Russia’s president at the time, Vladimir Putin, and other power brokers in Russia had no intention to listening to criticisms or protests coming from any direction when it came to the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline, the WikiLeaks documents show.

The pipeline was going to be built no matter what, according to confidential US embassy documents made available by the whistleblower website, the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper reports.

In a report from the US embassy in Moscow, the EU coordinator with Russia’s foreign ministry, Dmitri Polyanski, said back in 2007 that the pipeline would be built regardless of noisy protests from Poland, Estonia, and Sweden.

“It can’t be stopped. Not even by a big EU country like Poland,” he said.

Sweden approved the Nord Stream project in November 2009. It is projected to supply 25 million European households with natural gas from Russia.

The most vociferous protests to the 1200 kilometre long Nord Stream pipeline had to do with the project’s potential environmental impact on sensitive marine environments along the Baltc Sea floor.

By shutting off gas supplies through Ukraine in 2009, Russia was able to show how things might be without the Nord Stream supply line, other documents show.

Officially, however, the gas supplies were shut down due to theft taking place in Ukraine.

“The Kremlin obviously has a commercial goal in the dispute, among them the secure European support for Nord Stream,” one analyst to the US ambassador in Moscow in 2009.

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NORD STREAM

Nord Stream: Investigators link Ukrainian-owned yacht to sabotage, reports claim

German investigators have identified the boat they believe was used in the sabotage attack on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea, according to a report in the Die Zeit newspaper, based on a joint investigation with the broadcasters ARD and SWR. 

Published: 8 March 2023 08:33 CET
Nord Stream: Investigators link Ukrainian-owned yacht to sabotage, reports claim

According to the report, a group of five men and one woman rented the yacht from a Polish-based company with Ukrainian owners. The group all used false passports and their true nationalities are unknown.

Traces of explosives have been found on the yacht, which set sail from the German city of Rostock on September 6th, 20 days before the explosions, which destroyed the two pipelines at a point off the coast of Sweden and just south of the Danish island of Bornholm. 

“The traces lead in the direction of Ukraine,” Die Zeit wrote in its article. “However, investigators have not yet found any evidence as to who ordered the destruction.” 

The newspaper said that, “according to its information”, a western intelligence service had already tipped off its European partners in the autumn that a Ukrainian commando unit had been responsible for the attack, after which there had been “further intelligence indications that a pro-Ukrainian group” was behind the attack. 

In a separate report, the New York Times newspaper reported that US officials had seen new intelligence indicating a “pro-Ukrainian group” was responsible for the sabotage.

The Times report said US officials had no evidence implicating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the pipeline bombing, and it did not identify the source of the intelligence or the group involved.

The attack, the newspaper said, benefitted Ukraine by severely damaging Russia’s ability to reap millions of dollars by selling natural gas to Western Europe. The intelligence suggested that the perpetrators behind the sabotage were “opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia”, the Times report said.

When confronted with the reports, Ukraine denied any involvement.

The country’s presidential adviser Mychajlo Podoljak told ARD that Ukraine “of course had nothing to do with the attacks on Nord Stream-2”. There was, he said, “no confirmation that Ukrainian officials or the military took part in this operation or that people were dispatched to act on their behalf.”

It was still conceivable that Russia was behind it, he said. “There are many more motives and many more uses in this scenario.” 

He later tweeted that Ukraine “has nothing to do with the Baltic Sea mishap”. 

Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson for Russian president Vladimir Putin, claimed the reports had been fabricated by the true “authors of the attack” as a diversion. 

“How can American officials assume anything without an investigation?” he told the Ria news agency, complaining that Russia was not part of the investigation of this “monstrous crime”.

The Russian embassy in the US blamed the reports on US intelligence services, which it accused of “an attempt to confuse anyone who sincerely wishes to seek out the truth in this flagrant crime”

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