Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipelines?

By Daniel Drezner, Professor of International Politics, The Fletcher School

Say, remember when I said last week that there were three big intelligence mysteries that were “vexing the national security chattering classes”? I forgot a fourth: who was behind the September 2022 underwater sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines connecting Russia to Western Europe? But unlike those other cases, this does not sound like it will be a mystery for long. 

A week or two after the attack happened I was in Rome at a conference. Among the Europeans there was a lot of hushed speculation about who could be responsible. No one doubted that Russia was capable of taking such destructive action, but that possibility did not make intuitive sense to anyone. The Russians spent billions on those pipelines — blowing them up is much less efficient than shutting off the gas, which is what Russia had been doing. Even using the occasionally blinkered logic that has governed Russian national security decisions in recent years, Russia would have little to no incentive to destroy the pipelines.

There was some folks in Rome who believed the United States was responsible – but not many. That also seems unlikely. It is true that successive administrations in the United States opposed both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. It is also true, however, that conducting an attack like this and getting fingered for it would be a surefire way to sow division in the transatlantic relationship. The Europeans were already moving towards energy autonomy for the first six months of the war in Ukraine. From the U.S. perspective, blowing up the pipeline was a needless risk with huge possible downsides.

Of course, “a needless risk with huge possible downsides” is also an apt summary of large swathes of American foreign policy in this century. Last month Seymour Hersh published a story on his Substack, based on a single source, claiming that the Biden administration was behind the attack. Both the White House and CIA issued flat denials in response to Hersh. None of my sources buys the Hersh story and other national security reporters categorize it as “bullshit.” So there’s that.

Yesterday, however, the New York Times’ Adam Entous, Julian Barnes, and Adam Goldman dropped a story suggesting U.S. intelligence had fingered a different culprit: 

New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, a step toward determining responsibility for an act of sabotage that has confounded investigators on both sides of the Atlantic for months.

U.S. officials said that they had no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials….

Officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two. U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved….

The explosives were most likely planted with the help of experienced divers who did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services, U.S. officials who have reviewed the new intelligence said. But it is possible that the perpetrators received specialized government training in the past.

Hoo boy. There’s a lot to parse in this story. 

One intriguing element is the suggestion that Russians as well as Ukrainians were involved, even though U.S. intelligence officials said categorically that the Russian government was not responsible for the attack. The story notes elsewhere that, “the review of newly collected intelligence suggests they were opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.” 

The involvement on Russians would not be all that shocking. For all the talk about Putin’s stranglehold over Russian politics, it’s been clear for a while that not everyone in Russia’s national security community supported the invasion of Ukraine. There has been multiple acts of sabotage in neighboring Belarus to protest that government’s support of the Russian invasion. There have also been some mysterious incidents in Russia proper. While these might be attributed to Ukrainian forces, one has to wonder if they are getting help from Russians.

One question to ask is why U.S. intelligence officials are talking to the Times about this. It rebuts the Hersh story, which has had little to no traction in the United States but has been embraced by Russia for obvious reasons. Another possibility is that the U.S. is firing a warning shot at the Ukrainians to sop them from taking similarly reckless actions. 

Assuming the intel is accurate, the big question is the link between the Ukrainians who launched the attack. It seems risible that this kind of action could have been taken without anyone in the Ukrainian government knowing anything about the operation. One has to wonder who had the initial idea, and just how many degrees of separation there are between the saboteurs and the Ukrainian state. 

Unlike the other intelligence mysteries, however, it seems as though this one will get solved. The tenor of the Times story makes it clear that there are more leads to pursue. The Washington Post’s national security reporters already wrote a follow-up story containing the same basic thesis, but also, that “The information was offset by other intelligence suggesting the possibility that Russia was responsible” and “investigators have also been mindful of the possibility that Russia or another government could have planted evidence to sow confusion.” 

With so many governments investigating the incident, more information is starting to come out. According to the German outlet Zeit, “a Western intelligence service is said to have passed on a tip to European partner services as early as fall, i.e. shortly after the destruction, according to which a Ukrainian commando was responsible for the destruction.”

This is a case in which it seems Western intelligence agencies are making progress. We’ll see if Ukraine feels similarly about what is revealed.

This post was republished from Drezner’s World.