nord stream explosion yacht

How did divers manage to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline? We went down to the spot to find out

German network ard chartered yacht and divers to see how sabotage occurred.

Social Sharing

It was an event that rocked Europe and shook world affairs. 

Early in the morning on Sept. 26, 2022, a series of powerful undersea explosions damaged pipelines under the Baltic Sea near Denmark that carried Russian natural gas to Germany. 

Fingers were immediately pointed at Ukraine, which had been at war with Russia since the latter invaded in February of that year. Ukraine denied involvement, and in the absence of reliable information, conspiracy theories proliferated about who attacked the Nord Stream pipeline.

Did a Russian submarine intentionally destroy it in order to cut off the gas supply to Germany, a country allied with Ukraine? Was it the CIA, as famed U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote? 

The German government has been tightlipped about the affair for two years, but this week, German media outlets ARD, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit jointly reported that federal prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant against a Ukrainian man. A Polish government spokesperson confirmed it.

The German reports identified the man as Volodymyr Z., a diving instructor who last resided in Poland. In a brief telephone conversation on Tuesday with reporters from ARD, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit, Volodymyr Z. expressed surprise at the accusations and denied involvement.

A report this week by the Wall Street Journal also pointed to Ukraine, suggesting the operation was carried out by Ukrainian soldiers and civilians with diving expertise and under the direction of Ukraine's then-commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

Journalists at ARD, Germany's public broadcaster, have been hot on the trail since the shocking explosions took place. I was one of the reporters who was part of the team that spent months piecing together what may have occurred. 

To understand what happened to the Nord Stream pipeline that day, ARD chartered the very yacht the perpetrators allegedly used and sent divers into the roiling waters of the Baltic Sea to see how the pipeline might have been attacked.

Group chartered sailing yacht

Several outlets have reported that in early September 2022, a sailing yacht called Andromeda set sail from the port of Hohe Düne in Rostock, Germany. According to the ARD investigation, the commando that was to destroy the pipelines was on board the Andromeda. The group is said to have consisted of six people — five men and one woman. Among them, it is suspected, was Volodymyr Z.

After stops in Rügen, Bornholm and Christiansø in Denmark, Sandhamn in Sweden and Kołobrzeg in Poland, the boat returned to Rostock. 

At some point during the trip, investigators believe the crew dove from the yacht down to the seabed and, in the darkness of the Baltic Sea, attached the explosive devices to the pipeline at a depth of around 80 metres. 

What happened later is well-known. At 2:03 a.m. local time on Sept. 26, 2022, the first explosion damaged Nord Stream 2. Approximately 16 hours later, three other explosions damaged Nord Stream 1. Investigators later found residue of the explosive HMX, also known as octogen, on board the Andromeda.

• Germany issued arrest warrant for Ukrainian diver in Nord Stream pipeline attack
• Denmark, like Sweden before them, ends probe into Nord Stream pipeline 'sabotage'

During our investigation, we wondered just how hard it would have been to carry out such a mission. 

The Andromeda is a charter yacht. Anyone can rent it — so we rented it, too, and took three divers with us.  

As with many charter yachts, the Andromeda was not in the best condition — our skipper called it "one of the worst boats I've ever sailed with." 

He said several electrical components were broken and that the yacht didn't move well in the waves. Then there was the swim platform, which the divers would need to get on and off the boat. If the swell is high, the platform moves up and down, punching into the sea. A diver trying to get back on the boat could be slammed on the head by the platform, causing serious injury. For us, this risk was too high. 

So we returned the Andromeda and chartered a professional diving vessel with a crew that usually recovers Second World War explosives from the bed of the Baltic Sea. 

We then drove to the exact spot where the first explosion happened — 120 kilometres off the German coast, with the Danish island Bornholm in sight.

Trained divers required

We arrived at 6 a.m. to witness a symbolic moment in the Baltic Sea. 

A Russian military ship appeared. Through our radio, we heard, "Russian warship delta echo, U.S. warship Yankee." The U.S. Navy was trying to make contact with the Russian Navy right before our eyes. How could a sabotage operation have gone on undetected in this environment?

The burst pipeline lay almost 80 metres beneath us, a depth not every diver could handle. 

You need to be trained as a tech diver. At that depth, you have to breathe a special mixture of oxygen, helium and nitrogen, and that means carrying about 220 pounds of equipment. 

It is also pitch black at the bottom of the sea. The multiple scuba tanks gave the divers about 40 minutes to find the pipeline, which means they needed to know precisely where to look. A sonar device was required to locate the pipeline beforehand. The Andromeda did not have this kind of device on board, but our new vessel did. 

Our tech divers found the burst pipeline on their second try and filmed it. 

The difficult part for the divers was returning to the surface. The pressure is so intense that if the ascent is not done correctly, divers could experience serious symptoms like paralysis or damage to their lungs. Doing proper decompression from such a depth — which requires divers to switch to a different gas mix — takes about two hours. 

Conducting a complex mission like that from the Andromeda would have been difficult and dangerous. According to the German investigation, it's plausible Volodymyr Z. was trained for dives like that.

Everyone who has examined the Andromeda agrees it's not the vessel anyone would choose to secure a mission. 

As our tech diver Derk Remmers put it: "I would use the Andromeda for a vacation, but not a sabotage mission."

Yet this could be precisely why the saboteurs used it. To stay undetected and unaccountable — which they managed to do until the charges were made public this week.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lea Struckmeier is an investigative journalist and presenter at ARD, Germany's public broadcaster. She is currently spending her Arthur F. Burns Fellowship with CBC.

Related Stories

Associated Press Associated Press

Leave your feedback

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/traces-of-explosives-found-in-yacht-in-nord-stream-sabotage-investigation-diplomats-say

Traces of explosives found in yacht in Nord Stream sabotage investigation, diplomats say

BERLIN (AP) — Investigators found traces of undersea explosives in samples taken from a yacht that was searched as part of a probe into last year’s attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, European diplomats told the United Nations Security Council.

The diplomats said the investigation has not yet established who sabotaged the pipelines, which were built to carry Russian natural gas to Germany, or whether a state was involved.

The attack, which happened as Europe attempted to wean itself off Russian energy sources following the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine , contributed to tensions that followed the start of the war. The source of the sabotage has been a major international mystery.

Denmark, Sweden and Germany have been investigating the Sept. 26 attack, and the Danish Foreign Ministry tweeted a letter Tuesday from the three countries’ U.N. ambassadors to the president of the Security Council with information on their activities so far.

Officials voiced caution in March over media reports that a pro-Ukraine group was involved in the sabotage . German media reported then that five men and a woman used a yacht hired by a Ukrainian-owned company in Poland to carry out the attack, and that the vessel set off from the German port of Rostock.

German federal prosecutors declined to comment directly on that and other reports, but they confirmed that a boat was searched in January, and said there was suspicion that it could have been used to transport explosives to blow up the pipelines.

WATCH: State Department says sanctions against Nord Stream 2 are ‘just the beginning’

A section of this week’s letter detailing Germany’s findings said that the yacht’s precise course had not been definitively established. The letter said “traces of subsea explosives were found in the samples taken from the boat during the investigation,” but it did not elaborate.

“At this point it is not possible to reliably establish the identity of the perpetrators and their motives, particularly regarding the question of whether the incident was steered by a state or state actor,” it said. “All information to clarify the matter will be pursued during the continuing investigations.”

The undersea explosions ruptured the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was Russia’s main natural gas supply route to Germany until Russia cut off supplies at the end of August.

The blasts also damaged the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which never entered service because Germany suspended its certification process shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The pipelines were long a target of criticism by the United States and some of its allies, who warned that they posed a risk to Europe’s energy security by increasing dependence on Russian gas.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian officials have accused the U.S. of staging the explosions, which they have described as a terror attack.

Ukraine has rejected suggestions that it might have ordered the attack. The countries investigating the explosions have not commented on who might have been responsible.

Since the blasts, NATO has boosted its presence in the Baltic and North Seas, using dozens of ships, aircraft and undersea equipment such as drones.

Support Provided By: Learn more

Educate your inbox

Subscribe to Here’s the Deal, our politics newsletter for analysis you won’t find anywhere else.

Thank you. Please check your inbox to confirm.

NATO summit starts with Ukraine seeking path to join alliance

Politics Jul 11

The Most Consequential Act of Sabotage in Modern Times

The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline curtailed Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. But who was responsible?

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here .

I. A Small Earthquake

At 2:03 a.m. on Monday, September 26, 2022, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, an explosion tore open one of the four massive underwater conduits that make up the Nord Stream pipeline. The pipe, made of thick, concrete-encased steel, lay at a depth of 260 feet. It was filled with highly compressed methane gas.

Pressure readings would show a sudden plunge as compressed gas screamed through the breach at the speed of sound, tearing the pipe apart and carving deep craters on the seafloor. Gas escaped with enough force to propel a rocket into space. It shot up and up, creating a towering geyser above the surface of the water.

There was no one in the vicinity—the middle of the sea in the middle of the night—to see or hear any of this, but the event registered with the force of a small earthquake on seismometers 15 miles away, on the Danish island of Bornholm. Because the explosion had occurred in Danish waters, Denmark dispatched an airplane to investigate. By then, the geyser had settled into a wide, turbulent simmer on the surface. The Danish Maritime Authority ordered ships to steer clear. Airspace was restricted. A pipeline executive in Switzerland, where Nord Stream is based, urgently exchanged information with officials in Denmark and other countries.

Nord Stream had been built in two phases, NS-1 and NS-2, each consisting of two pipes labeled A and B. The pipes, with an internal diameter of about four feet, reached across 760 miles of seafloor from Russia to Germany. Given the pressure readings and the location of the surface turbulence, the ruptured pipe appeared to be NS-2A.

No one knew yet what had happened. There were innocent explanations—none of them likely, but some certainly plausible. The pipeline may have sprung a leak on its own. Or some accident or natural event may have disturbed the sea bottom. The area around Bornholm is prone to small earthquakes, and the Baltic Sea is littered with explosive debris . It was heavily mined during the Second World War and, at war’s end, became a dumping ground for unused munitions. Efforts to clear the seabed continue, and live ordnance is often detonated in place. Fishing vessels trawl the bottom—sometimes leaving scratches on the surface of pipelines—and occasionally set off an old mine or bomb. On a typical day, Swedish seismologists detect dozens of underwater explosions, some accidental, some deliberate. But the Nord Stream pipes were built to withstand such blasts and had been placed in lanes painstakingly cleared of hazards.

Any thought that the break was an accident vanished at sunset, when new explosions on the pipeline were recorded, 17 hours after the first one. It would eventually be determined that there were three of them , and that they occurred about 50 miles northeast of the initial blast and about 50 miles east of the Swedish coast, near the edge of that country’s maritime economic zone with Denmark. The blasts scattered several 26-ton, 40-foot-long segments of pipeline on the seafloor. At this northern site, there were witnesses. An officer aboard a German cargo ship, the Cellus, saw what seemed to be the surface eruption from an underwater explosion; the captain of the ship, looking for himself, later reported “something that appeared like a dense cloud” above the water. A photo taken several minutes after the first sighting captured a bubbling swell of gas-infused seawater, which calculations from the digital image showed to be nearly 200 feet high and more than 1,000 feet wide.

Now, with two blast sites—a southern site, with a single explosion, and a northern site, with three explosions—it was clear that someone had attacked Nord Stream, the biggest natural-gas delivery system from Russia to Western Europe ever built. NS-1 had opened in 2011 and had been delivering cheap Russian gas to Germany for a decade. Construction on NS-2 was started in 2016 and finished in 2021, and was filled with gas to prepare for launch. For reasons that were not apparent, only three of the four Nord Stream pipes had been hit—a fact that would intrigue investigators. If the goal was to disable Nord Stream, why leave one of the pipes intact? Had a preset bomb failed to explode?

Together, the four Nord Stream pipes had been capable of supplying as much as 65 percent of the European Union’s total gas imports. Not everyone had been happy about this. The United States feared that Europe’s reliance on Nord Stream would give Russian President Vladimir Putin too much economic leverage. The pipeline promised cheap energy for Europe and decades of revenue for Gazprom, the state-owned Russian energy giant with strong ties to Putin. The pipeline would also reduce the value of older gas pipelines in Eastern Europe, notably the system owned and operated by Ukraine.

After Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea, in 2014, resistance to Nord Stream stiffened. The United States imposed a mounting series of sanctions against Russia’s energy sector. So did European nations. Last year, despite the anticipated financial strain on Europe, President Joe Biden was able to gain a promise of European support as Russian armies massed to invade Ukraine once again. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz agreed to prevent NS-2 from opening if Putin attacked. In February 2022, at a White House press conference with Scholz, Biden warned, “If Russia invades … there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it … I promise you we will be able to do it.” This warning was reiterated in equally plain terms by top members of his administration.

When the war came, NS-2’s pipes stayed shut, and severe multinational economic sanctions were imposed on Russia . Putin responded by gradually choking off the flow of gas from the older NS-1 (“maintenance reasons” were cited), which drove up energy prices in Europe—precisely the scenario foreseen. According to some estimates, energy prices in the EU quadrupled. In the summer of 2022, Putin shut down NS-1 completely. By September, the war seemed deadlocked. As winter approached, pressure to deal with energy issues began to grow in Europe.

Leon Aron: The sanctions against Russia are starting to work

The four underwater explosions on September 26 made any debate over Nord Stream moot. The attack on the pipeline—without loss of life, as far as we know—was one of the most dramatic and consequential acts of sabotage in modern times. It was also an unprecedented attack on a major element of global infrastructure—the network of cables, pipes, and satellites that underpin commerce and communication. Because it serves everyone, global infrastructure had enjoyed tacit immunity in regional conflicts—not total but nearly so. Here was a bold act of war in the waters between two peaceful nations (although Sweden and Denmark both support Ukraine). It effectively destroyed a project that had required decades of strenuous labor and political muscle and had cost roughly $20 billion—half of that money coming from Gazprom, the other half from European energy companies. The attack was a financial blow to Russia and upended the EU’s energy planning and policy.

There may have been more daring capers, but one recently retired U.S. military commander, a man who has held senior appointments and is knowledgeable about the Baltic region, couldn’t help but acknowledge what he called the “coolness factor” of the Nord Stream attack. Cool , because whoever did it managed to achieve total surprise and leave few traces behind. Indeed, more than a year later, nobody knows for certain who was responsible, although accumulating evidence has begun to point in a specific direction. Officials from Sweden, Denmark, and Germany would answer none of my questions. Nor would officials at the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or the Pentagon comment on the record, beyond denouncing the act as sabotage. Sweden, Denmark, and Germany have initiated criminal investigations, but very little has emerged about the conduct of any of these probes. That has surprised some journalists, who are used to a leakier status quo. None of the relevant investigating authorities has announced a clear finish line, although Swedish officials have expressed the hope that a decision on whether to bring charges could be made by the end of the year.

“Nobody really wants to clear it up,” suggested the Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, who at 95 is one of his country’s most honored citizens. A former minister of foreign affairs, he is best remembered in the U.S. for contradicting President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (Blix was in charge of the United Nations’ monitoring effort there, and his skepticism proved well-founded.) I met him in his spacious apartment in central Stockholm, moving with the help of a walker—“this condition is not just old age,” he explained, but a consequence of tick-borne encephalitis. His mind was as fresh and independent as ever. We considered various theories about the Nord Stream sabotage—the Russians did it; the Americans did it; the Ukrainians did it. “I end up not convinced of any conclusion … yet ,” Blix told me, echoing what he had said in an earlier email. He smiled and added, “And is not that the wish of all parties?”

II. Gas as a Weapon

Nord Stream was an astonishing engineering feat, even if the details of its creation attracted little of the world’s notice. The oceans and seas are threaded with cables and pipelines. Few people give much thought to how they got there. Nord Stream took a quarter of a century to build. Initial planning studies for a new gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea were launched in 1997, when Gazprom joined forces with a Finnish oil company, Neste. This was the era when Boris Yeltsin, then the Russian president, was making boozy trips abroad to sell the capitalist West on the boundless opportunity of investment in his country.

Engineers determined that a direct pipeline from Vyborg, northwest of St. Petersburg, to Lubmin, on the north coast of Germany, would be commercially and technically feasible. The project had broad support: Many European companies wanted in. Compared with coal and oil, natural gas was relatively cheap, safe, and clean. Nord Stream seemed to herald a new era. Russia was at long last joining the peaceful, cooperative commonwealth of Western Europe. Construction of the pipeline began in 2010.

The underwater environment was challenging. The bottom of the Baltic Sea is rocky and irregular. Pipe had to be laid across hundreds of miles of subsea terrain without disturbing the marine ecosystem, disrupting the fishing industry, or destroying historically valuable wrecks. The Baltic’s low salt content is hostile to wood-boring shipworms, so even ancient sunken vessels tend to be well preserved , and the seabed is a prized hunting ground for marine archaeologists.

One man who has specialized in underwater work in the Baltic is Ola Oskarsson, a retired Swedish naval demolition diver. Oskarsson lives on his own small island, Keholmen, south of Gothenburg, on Sweden’s west coast. The island, a rock outcrop, once held a ship-repair business and still has on its west side an idle crane and a slip for hauling vessels out of the water. Oskarsson’s big house is paneled with rough-hewn pine and stained with tar, and has wide windows that look out across the sea.

Oskarsson has a lifetime of experience on and below the water, first for the Swedish navy, then running a business specializing in underwater research, surveying, and exploration. He is weathered and fit in his 70s, tall and blue-eyed, with a trim gray mustache and bright-white chin whiskers. He is an animated storyteller. Once, not content to simply describe for me the breach of the Nord Stream pipes, he jumped onto his front deck to rig an experiment with a pressurized hose, showing how an underwater pipe might have reacted to a sudden rupture.

At the time Nord Stream was being conceived, Oskarsson’s company, MMT (Marin Mät Teknik), was still relatively small. It had one ship and 50 employees. Word of a big Baltic pipeline project spelled opportunity, so he and his business partner traveled to Switzerland, where the NS-1 project had set up shop, to pitch themselves for the underwater surveying and mapping. As Oskarsson recounted, they were informed that all such work had already been taken care of by a Russian company. They were on their way out the door when his partner asked, out of curiosity, “Have you found any mines?”

“No,” came the answer. “Why do you ask?”

Astonished, the Swedes explained what they knew about the dangers lurking on the Baltic seafloor—and MMT was hired. The company expanded to seven ships and 350 employees. In the course of their work, the MMT survey teams found 400 unexploded mines .

They and other teams on the project found plenty else, too: sunken World War II submarines, and a wreck that may have been eight centuries old. Oskarsson was enthusiastic about his work. As he saw it, MMT was not only making money but helping to narrow the Cold War divide and preserve the Baltic Sea’s historic and environmental integrity.

Laying the pipeline has been likened to building a railroad underwater. Swaths of seafloor had to be swept of hazards; occasionally holes and depressions had to be bridged. The pipes themselves were fabricated on shore in segments and shipped out to “lay barges”—flat vessels longer than a football field. Studded with cranes and crawling with hundreds of workers, the barges served as platforms on which prefab segments were welded together, end-to-end. The seams were coated with expandable polyurethane foam to minimize potential snags. When that was done, the ever-lengthening pipes were eased off the barge at a carefully calibrated angle toward the water. The steel pipe, encased in concrete, had to be flexible enough to bend from the barge to the water, yet strong enough to contain highly pressurized gas and to withstand any shocks from outside. As the barges slowly advanced, the pipelines slipped into the sea until they settled on the bottom.

A fleet of ships and helicopters supported the barges, delivering crews, equipment, tools, and food. Work continued day and night. The first of the two NS-1 pipelines began delivering natural gas from Russia to Europe in 2011, the second in 2012.

Meanwhile, preliminary work had begun on a parallel pair of pipelines, NS-2. But the political climate was changing. Putin, reelected to a third term , was aggressively consolidating his autocratic rule and installing himself as leader for life. He was also throwing Russia’s military weight around. As prime minister, in 2008, he had overseen the invasion of Georgia, and when he retook the presidency, he occupied Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Democracy in Russia vanished. Opponents and critics of Putin’s regime were harassed, jailed, and sometimes killed. Russia’s cheap natural gas was no longer seen as a friendly bond but as a weapon—a way for Putin to pressure the EU. Some investors and governments may once have resisted (and resented) American arguments against the pipeline, but after the invasion they curtailed their involvement .

David Frum: Putin’s big chill in Europe

Oskarsson cut his own company loose before the NS-2 was even finished. He had met Putin once, at a ceremonial event for NS-1 around the time of its opening. Leaders from the surrounding nations had all been gathered. As Oskarsson recalls, he was standing with Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor at the time, when Putin arrived with an entourage of seven bodyguards. Putin is short, and seemed to have deliberately picked bodyguards who were even shorter. Merkel commented, “Snow White and the seven dwarfs.” The breaking point came years later, when, according to Oskarsson, his company was subject to an extortion demand in return for a contract on a different pipeline project. Oskarsson told the Russians, “We don’t pay bribes.”

By September 2022, Nord Stream, this hopeful project, the proud achievement of engineers who had spent much of their careers on it, sat primed and poised on the sea bottom, fully pressurized and waiting, an international rem non voluerunt —a thing not wanted.

III. Blaming the Bear

In the absence of facts, speculation and misinformation rule. At the time of the Nord Stream attacks, many people assumed that blowing up pipelines at the bottom of the sea would require the prowess of a big, modern navy with sleek submersibles, skilled divers, and very large bombs. So the two prime suspects immediately became Russia and the United States. Both countries have denied any involvement , but, under the circumstances, wouldn’t they?

Working 260 feet underwater can be challenging. Visibility is zero (divers work with lights) and the water pressure extreme (about 115 pounds per square inch). Nitrogen under such pressure becomes narcotic, so the air breathed by divers is mixed with helium to lower the exposure. Ascending to the surface without the aid of a recompression chamber or a diving bell requires divers to pause multiple times on the way up to allow their bodies to adapt. Both the Russian and American navies have the personnel and the specialized technology to conduct sophisticated deep-sea operations as needed. An autonomous submersible might even obviate the need for much diving. Among the other nations with a big navy—the United Kingdom, Iran, India, China—none had much of a motive to attack Nord Stream.

Russia, in the words of the Foreign Policy columnist Emma Ashford, writing in June 2023, “ seemed to be the most obvious candidate .” Putin, according to this logic, had blown up his own pipeline primarily to punish Europe for its solidarity with Ukraine. Further—a Putinesque twist—if suspicion could be quietly cast on Kyiv, then support for Ukraine might itself be undermined.

This explanation was immediately popular in Sweden. There was no direct evidence for it, and the Kremlin called such suspicions “stupid,” but journalists and amateur sleuths found suggestive patterns in Russian ship movements in the Baltic during the days and months prior to the blasts. Specifically, they identified military vessels that had lingered near the blast sites during the summer. That said, Russian naval traffic is common in the area.

“Of course, in Sweden, the automatic reaction from the press or the media was that the Russians did it themselves,” Mattias Göransson told me. Göransson is the founder and editor of a popular literary and journalistic Swedish magazine called Filter . He is also the author of a book titled The Bear Is Coming! , which examines (and pokes fun at) his country’s preoccupation with its unfriendly neighbor to the east. “It’s very counterintuitive,” he said of the finger-pointing at Moscow, “but it’s a foolproof argument”: If you can’t explain some Russian act or behavior rationally, then you can always say, “‘But you know the Russians. You never know how they think’ … It’s very funny in a way.”

Funny or not, the theory was developed in a ponderous three-part Scandinavian public-television documentary, Putin ’s Shadow War , which aired last April and May. It didn’t present any solid new evidence, just speculation and a menacing litany of aggressive acts by Russia. But the contention gained broad traction, and not just in Scandinavia.

“Nobody benefits from this except the Russians,” Ben Hodges, a retired lieutenant general who commanded the U.S. Army in Europe until 2017, told me. “Not only does it serve as a potential wedge”—between Ukraine and its Western supporters—“but it also sends a message, even if it doesn’t have Kremlin fingerprints on it yet, to the Scandinavian countries that their energy infrastructure is very vulnerable, that it can be destroyed.”

Many EU nations had stood with Ukraine when Russia invaded, and Kyiv has relied heavily on their economic and military support. In the spring of 2022, Germany was weighing whether to supply state-of-the-art Leopard combat tanks to Ukraine. Feeling newly threatened by Russia, Finland joined NATO and Sweden ditched a more than 200-year tradition of neutrality to apply for membership. So perhaps Putin was sending a message: There was a price to pay for poking the bear.

But the logic is strained. Russia was hurt more by the sabotage than any other nation. It had spent billions to build the pipeline and theoretically stood to profit from it for years to come. Why would Putin destroy it when he could simply keep it shut? The Ukraine war will not last forever. That said, the retired U.S. military commander and senior appointee observed, “A lot of things they’re doing just don’t pass the sanity check.”

A former CIA officer, who spent decades at the highest levels of intelligence-gathering, characterized the Russia theory to me as “too complicated,” especially if it involved trying to pin the sabotage on Ukraine. He went on: “If you’re in Moscow and you’re going through all of this … you’re going to know that you’re going to be blamed, right? Even if you can blame the Ukrainians, you know you’re going to be blamed. So, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Emma Ashford, in her Foreign Policy column, ended up dismissing the possible Russian motives for an attack on the pipeline as “weak.” Although some observers still hold to the theory, Russia is an unlikely suspect.

IV. Next on the List

One can almost see the movie—the dark suits and cornpone accents in a shadowy glass room in Washington. Like Russia, the U.S. has the military know-how to mount sophisticated undersea operations, and it had a motivation that had been articulated by the president himself. America is also everyone’s favorite hidden hand when it comes to international skulduggery .

The suspicion that the U.S. was involved in the sabotage was given a big boost in some minds by the celebrated journalist Seymour Hersh. In February, Hersh published on his Substack a confident and detailed article titled “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline.” He presented the account simply as fact. Hersh’s history of blockbuster revelations about episodes of American wrongdoing—among them, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the torture of prisoners in Iraq—gave his story weight. But some of Hersh’s recent work has raised questions. Relying heavily on one unnamed source, his 2015 article about the killing of Osama bin Laden , published by The London Review of Books , flatly contradicted every other account of the mission, including my own and those of mission participants.

Hersh’s account of the Nord Stream sabotage appeared also to have relied heavily on a single unnamed source, and a remarkable one at that. The source provided accounts of top-secret meetings at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, secret meetings of CIA and NSA working groups, and planning sessions in Norway, as well as specific details of the mission itself, including tools and methods.

According to Hersh, the decision to bomb the pipeline was made by Biden in early 2022. After months of indecision, it was carried out by American divers schooled at the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, Florida, who had “repeatedly practiced” placing explosives on pipelines. The mission was staged in Norway, where that country’s naval experts chose the precise spots to place bombs on each of the four pipes. A Norwegian Alta-class mine hunter was used as a platform for the dives, which were made during a regular NATO exercise called BALTOPS 22 , which employed “the latest underwater technology.” There would have been plenty of warships in the Baltic Sea to provide cover. A research exercise was invented as a facade. The bombs were planted in June and ultimately triggered by a signal from a sonar buoy dropped on September 26 by a Norwegian P-8 surveillance plane on a routine flight. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung , Hersh elaborated, saying that eight bombs had been planted, which made sense: two bombs on each pipe, for redundancy.

It was a neat, authoritative play-by-play. For anyone inclined to suspect the U.S., it offered a plausible scenario of what America might have done. No conflicting information was presented. But it broke down in the details. Ship movements near the blast sites during the naval exercise didn’t add up, and no Alta-class mine hunter had taken part. Independent flight-tracking data showed no record of a Norwegian P-8 flight in the area on September 26. Hersh maintained that eight explosives had been placed on the pipes, but there appear to have been only four explosions. He also reported that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, himself Norwegian, had been cooperating with U.S. intelligence since the Vietnam War, when the 64-year-old statesman was still a child. Hersh dutifully reported the White House response: “This is false and complete fiction.” He received a similar response from the CIA.

The Hersh article has been analyzed and criticized by a number of knowledgeable investigators . My own military and intelligence sources were unanimous in discounting the idea of American responsibility. These are people who have hands-on experience with covert U.S. military missions over many decades. In previous interactions, they have responded to sensitive questions they didn’t want to answer with “No comment.” In those instances where they have agreed to share information with me, it has always been correct.

“I’m at a loss to know who actually did it, other than the fact that we didn’t do it,” the retired U.S. military commander told me.

The former high-ranking CIA officer, a man who can draw on long experience in the White House Situation Room, from which covert operations are often launched, was unequivocal: “Without a doubt, the United States did not do this. There is no way the Biden administration would. If it was the Trump administration, it might be a different story. But there’s no way that Biden would ever sign off on doing something like that.”

The logic was clear. One of the triumphs of Biden’s presidency has been rebuilding NATO and repairing ties with Europe that were strained during Trump’s tenure. And one of Biden’s proudest achievements is the international coalition that keeps Ukraine supplied with war-fighting matériel. The bonds of that partnership are not sturdy. They have been sustained by aggressive persuasion. Would Biden put all of that in jeopardy? No matter how carefully a covert mission like an attack on Nord Stream is executed, history shows that the truth will come out, usually sooner rather than later. If the U.S. were discovered to have attacked a major piece of its allies’ energy infrastructure, the information might shatter his coalition. And why risk it? The pipelines were already idle. There is also, despite the Hollywood cliché, an inbred reluctance in the U.S. military and intelligence community to conduct missions that might trigger strong political blowback.

From the January/February 2024 issue: Anne Applebaum on how Trump will abandon NATO

Russia had blamed the United States for the blasts immediately, and when Hersh’s story came along, it was embraced by Putin and his Russian media. It was also embraced by right-wing American pundits with their own political agendas. Tucker Carlson, still a Fox News host at the time, emphatically pronounced Hersh correct: “So many details in here. It is not possible that it’s not true. It is true!”

When the story appeared, it represented the only detailed narrative explanation of exactly what had happened, and for that reason alone many people were swayed by it. And Hersh has expressed no doubts. But in light of the broader context, America, like Russia, seems to be an unlikely suspect.

Neither Big Navy theory is convincing: For different reasons, both Russia and the U.S. would have little to gain and much to lose. Meanwhile, facts have emerged that offer a very different perspective.

V. The Andromeda Connection

Ola Oskarsson, the diver and surveyor, viewed initial speculation about the bombing with a more practiced eye than most. In addition to his military service, when he handled explosives underwater, and his Nord Stream service, when he helped locate 400 mines in the pipeline’s path, he has supervised commercial underwater operations in the Black Sea, the North Sea, the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and Lake Victoria. He has surveyed almost all of the undersea power and telecommunications cables in the Baltic at one time or another. He helped find and remove old listening devices from the ex-Soviet submarine base near Paldiski, Estonia, after the U.S.S.R.’s collapse, in 1991. Over the years, Oskarsson has maintained close friendships with military and commercial divers, and he knows that world as well as anyone.

He also maintains friendships with journalists, who prize his expertise. And he had been telling them that certain widespread assumptions about the Nord Stream bombing were mistaken. The explosives did not have to be all that large, he maintained, and breaching a gas pipeline would not require the most advanced technology on the market. In other words, you wouldn’t need Big Navy resources.

Oskarsson has no direct knowledge of the Nord Stream attack, but he does have suspicions. “I think I know pretty well how it was exploded,” he told me. He believes it was done by “a little sea group, two to six people in a rubber boat”—a Zodiac, say, launched from a fishing vessel or private yacht as a base of operations. His scenario starts with a standard vessel large enough to take half a dozen people on a cruise. Most Swedes live on or close to the water, and there are hundreds of thousands of privately owned boats in the country. Its 2,000-mile coastline is notched and dotted with a seemingly endless series of inlets and small islands—indeed, the capital city, Stockholm, is itself a cluster of 14 islands. You can smell water from just about everywhere except the pine forests of the interior. Large vessels are closely monitored, but tracking the multitude of small fishing boats and yachts is impossible. A vessel being used as a platform for the attack need not even have anchored over the submerged pipes, whose exact position is well known; it could have stayed some distance away and launched a Zodiac at night. A line dragged along the seafloor would snag a pipe and provide a dive rope. Descending, divers wearing rebreathing apparatus could stay submerged for hours. Military-grade explosives, small enough to be carried in a backpack, could then be affixed to the concrete shell of the pipes. The operation would likely have required as many as four dives, one for each pipe, depending on the number of divers involved. And it would have been strenuous. But if the crew rested on the larger vessel during the day, it would have been doable. This approach also had the virtue of being simple, inexpensive, and completely inconspicuous.

And evidence exists to support this scenario. Although officials in Sweden, Germany, and Denmark have said little about their ongoing investigations, journalists both in and outside the region have pieced together a story similar to Oskarsson’s basic idea from government sources and determined legwork.

On March 7, The New York Times reported that American intelligence officials had come to suspect that divers from a pro-Ukrainian group had sabotaged Nord Stream. That report prompted a consortium of journalists from Germany, Sweden, and Denmark—brought together by Georg Heil, a journalist who works within Germany’s public-broadcasting conglomerate—to rush ahead with the first in what would be a series of reports in German news outlets and on regional TV stations. They had been accumulating information for months and had hoped to flesh out their findings in greater detail before publishing, but the Times article forced their hand.

They offered a lot more than the Times. Their reporting linked the bombing to a small crew of divers working off a yacht—a private vessel that had made a stop at a marina in Wieck am Darss, a German port on the southern edge of the Baltic. The boat carried a group of six: a captain, two divers, two diving assistants, and a doctor. Passports presented by the crew proved to be fake. When the boat was returned, it was found to contain traces of an explosive. All this information had come from sources cultivated within the German police. A subsequent article by the magazine Der Spiegel named the boat: Andromeda.

The consortium of journalists had in fact known the name since January—and not only from German sources. The team’s Danish reporter, Louise Dalsgaard, was able to confirm that authorities in Denmark were also interested in Andromeda. Fredrik Laurin, a prominent and respected Swedish journalist whose work is featured on a 60 Minutes –like program on Swedish public television called Mission: Investigate , was determined to find the boat—not an easy task when dealing with multiple jurisdictions and proprietary record-keeping.

When I met with him in Gothenburg, Laurin told me that he had contacted a young woman, the daughter of an old sailing friend, whom he knew had worked as a harbormaster on Germany’s north coast. He figured she knew more than any journalist did about boats, ports, and rentals on that side of the Baltic. She was happy to be consulted; the project sounded exciting—perhaps a little too exciting, because she didn’t (and still doesn’t) want her name connected with it.

When I spoke with her by phone, she seemed pleased with her contribution. She and Laurin had made the assumption that Andromeda was probably a yacht—possibly a Bavaria, a very popular sailing vessel on the Baltic. A motorized vessel big enough for a six-person crew would be more likely to attract attention, as would a large purchase of diesel fuel, which it would need to travel across more than 100 miles of sea from the German port to the blast locations. A sailboat would not need that much fuel and, on the water, “would look like a charter tourist who is just lost, or swimming,” she said.

Because the harbor depth at Wieck am Darss was too shallow for a sailboat with a Bavaria’s draft—the consortium journalists would prove to have been mistaken about the location, and later published a correction—the young woman guessed that the Andromeda was likely chartered elsewhere. She started calling companies to ask if they had a vessel by that name. She was having fun. She had to have a reason for the ask, and worried that the truth might spook the people she called. So she played stupid. She knew that the boating communities of north Germany were still almost exclusively male, and decided that pretending ignorance would suit their expectations.

A typical conversation went like this:

“I want to rent a boat this year, and my friends, they rented a boat called Andromeda last year,” she would begin, explaining that her friends had been “so happy with it.” Then she said she didn’t know any details about the boat, even whether it was a motorboat or a sailboat.

“Well, a sailing boat usually has a mast on it,” one of the charter officials told her.

She quickly found what she was looking for. A 50-foot Bavaria called Andromeda had been rented from Mola Yachting, on Rügen, a German island north of Wieck am Darss. And it fit the bill: It had a galley and could sleep up to 10. There was no telling if the authorities had already learned all this, but Laurin spread the word.

In May, Süddeutsche Zeitung , the German newspaper, published “The Fog Is Lifting,” a detailed account of Andromeda’s possible role. Subsequent stories chronicled its doings during September 2022. Many of the stories carry the name Holger Stark (among others), one of the most consequential journalists investigating the Nord Stream attack. According to these reports , the request to Mola Yachting for the Andromeda charter had come from a Google account that appeared to be American but that had actually originated in Ukraine. The yacht had been sighted at ports around the Baltic on a voyage that lasted a little over two weeks. A witness at Rügen remembered five men and a woman who stood out among the usual mix of families and couples renting a yacht for a pleasure cruise. They were seen loading a lot of equipment onto the boat, which a harbor webcam had captured moving out to sea on September 7.

Andromeda was again noticed during a stop at Bornholm, the Danish island near the southern explosion site, and near Christiansø, a tiny island closer to the northern site. Then, two weeks before the blasts, the yacht reportedly sheltered during heavy weather in Sandhamn, a small harbor on the Swedish coast, about 40 miles from the northern site. A German skipper had a slight run-in with its crew, a dispute over boating etiquette, and described two of the men as middle-aged but fit, with military haircuts. He spoke to them in English, which he said was translated by one of the crew into a language that to him sounded Eastern European. A second witness in Sandhamn described the boat’s captain as heavyset and unfriendly. The crew bought some diesel fuel, paying cash in euros, and left on September 13 as the weather calmed. Six days later, Andromeda arrived at the Polish city of Kołobrzeg, closer to the southern site, where the first explosion would occur.

Andromeda had been chartered through a travel agency in Warsaw registered to a woman with a Ukrainian address, and Die Zeit , the German weekly newspaper, tracked down a man associated with the company in Kyiv . Identifying him only as “Rustem A.,” the reporters found that he owned a string of companies, some of them real, some of them without an internet presence or a real-world address. He reacted, when contacted, not with surprise, but with anger. He refused to cooperate and insulted and threatened the journalists. Meanwhile, using the passport photos obtained from the boat-rental company, together with facial-recognition software, journalists had tentatively identified one member of the Andromeda crew as a Ukrainian soldier. (The soldier denied any involvement .)

Additional information became public in June, when The Washington Post revealed the existence of a secret report received by the CIA the previous summer, months before the blasts, outlining a Ukrainian plan to sabotage Nord Stream. According to the Post, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service had warned that Ukraine was planning an attack using a small team of divers.

The contents of the Dutch memo were brought to light when Jack Teixeira, a young U.S. airman assigned to the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, allegedly began showing off his access to classified documents to a members-only server on Discord, a social platform popular with gamers. Teixeira was arrested this past April , and has pleaded not guilty to multiple federal charges. Some of the posted files were subsequently obtained by The Post . The newspaper’s first detailed account of material related to Nord Stream noted that, according to Dutch intelligence, Ukraine’s plan had originally been set for midsummer 2022, but had been delayed. Six Ukrainian operatives with fake passports would travel to Stockholm, where they would rent a boat and a submersible vessel. They would deliver the bombs, blow up the NS-1 pipeline, and depart undetected. (No mention was made of NS-2.) It said the operation was supervised by Ukrainian General Valery Zaluzhny, the country’s top military commander, but that President Volodymyr Zelensky would not be informed. The details in this summary did not agree with every detail in the findings of the journalistic consortium and other reporters, but the resemblance was clear: a crew of six and a boat.

The accumulation of information pointed circumstantially to Ukraine, or at least a group of Ukrainians. Ukraine has denied involvement repeatedly. “I am president, and I give orders accordingly,” Volodymyr Zelensky said in June, in an interview with the German publishing company Axel Springer, following up on the reports about Andromeda. “Nothing of the sort has been done by Ukraine. I would never act that way.”

But Ukraine had a clear motive. The attack delivered a punishing and enduring economic blow to Russia, which daily rains shells and missiles on Ukrainian cities . By mid-2022, Ukraine had fought off Putin’s initial thrust and taken back much of the territory seized in March. It had hit Russian ships on the Black Sea. Soon it would down part of the Chonhar road bridge, the main Russian link to occupied Crimea; its drones and covert units would be striking Russian targets far from the battlefronts. Knocking out Nord Stream also preserved the value of Ukraine’s own gas pipelines, which have continued to deliver Russian gas to Western Europe even as war has raged. Russia has reduced the flow to a third of prewar levels, but the pipelines still earn important revenue for the embattled nation.

Anne Applebaum: The West must defeat Russia

Ukraine does not have a large navy, or anything comparable to the advanced undersea technology that Russian and the U.S. can deploy. But it has demonstrated tenacity and ingenuity—certainly enough to charter a yacht with a Zodiac and send skilled divers down 260 feet with small bombs. This is where things stood one year after the blast, with the United States and Russia still considered suspects by many, but with evidence tilting more strongly to Ukraine.

VI. The Mistake

Solving the Nord Stream mystery has been the province not only of journalists but also of amateur investigators (and conspiracy theorists) who have been active online. Most just offer opinion or conjecture. Some tap expertise that journalists don’t possess. The very rare ones combine expertise with detective work—actual reporting—in the real world. Few people have produced more useful information about Nord Stream—including a possible explanation for why one of the pipes remained unharmed—than a man named Erik Andersson, a well-to-do retired engineer in Gothenburg.

His career began at Volvo, which has its headquarters there. Andersson has a precise mathematical mind and an itch for complex problem-solving. He was drawn to the challenge of scheduling—whether of production or personnel—and a software product he helped build was useful enough that outside companies began approaching Volvo for help. Among them were major international airlines, such as Scandinavia’s SAS and Germany’s Lufthansa. Volvo at first allowed Andersson to put his skills to work creating timetables for the ever-moving army of pilots and crews that commercial air fleets require. He was eventually able to spin off a new company, Carmen Systems, dedicated to the airline work. The software Carmen developed has since become widely used. In 2006, a Boeing subsidiary purchased the company for $100 million. Andersson stayed on for a decade, then retired: wealthy but slightly aimless. Ease didn’t suit him. He took on a few engineering projects and became a philanthropist, an investor, and something of a gambler. At heart he remained a nerd, and he still had that problem-solving itch.

Andersson found an outlet for that itch in conspiracy theories. He was drawn into a murky online world that revolves around topics such as Russiagate, the Steele dossier, and the origins of COVID. Politically, he is on the right. He likes Donald Trump, and in 2016, finding the odds attractive, he bet and won big—$300,000—on the results of the 2016 American presidential election. He has intimated online that he thinks the 2020 election was stolen. Andersson also understands, as he told me, that “going on social media and launching your opinions” is “not good for your health.”

He began conducting actual research. Andersson was intrigued by the Nord Stream mystery, and particularly taken with Seymour Hersh’s rendering of events. He could see that most mainstream media were skeptical of Hersh’s account, but he himself was inclined to believe that the U.S. was behind the explosions. With time and money at his disposal, he decided to begin where detectives usually do, by examining the crime scenes, looking to verify Hersh’s story. Last May, he chartered a boat, bought an undersea drone, assembled a crew, cruised out to the blast sites, and performed his own forensic inspection.

I met Andersson in his airy, high-ceilinged apartment in Gothenburg’s historic center. He is now 63, a sturdy man with a ruddy countenance and short, unruly white hair. His dress shirt was untucked and his pants were wrinkled; his manner was fidgety but patient. My questions were generally broader than the intricate, technical issues that preoccupy him, and I had to keep reeling him up from the depths. Before him on a long table Andersson had unfurled large maps of the Baltic, annotated with his own notes, as well as small plastic models of the undersea blast areas showing deep craters and scattered segments of the Nord Stream pipes. The craters were carved, Andersson suspects, by the force of the escaping methane.

Andersson’s reports on Substack are clearly written and convincing, and they have earned the respect of knowledgeable journalists. Indeed, I had been led to Andersson by Fredrik Laurin. Much of Andersson’s work is based on input from specialists in a variety of fields, and it is taken seriously by people who have experience with the Baltic pipeline. Andersson’s findings tell a story, one that, contrary to his original intention, is at odds with Hersh’s.

Hersh had maintained in an interview that eight bombs were set on the pipeline, and that only six had gone off. In a follow-up Substack article , he referred only to “the one mine that has not gone off”—presumably meaning a mine placed on the undamaged pipe, NS-2B—and nodded at the idea that it had been retrieved covertly by the U.S. Navy afterward. If Hersh still believed that there had been eight bombs or mines—he did not specify a new total in his follow-up—then that suggested there had been seven explosions.

Investigation or inspection by Andersson and others showed clearly that there had been four explosions and strongly suggested that they had been caused by just four bombs. There were four gas plumes: one large one at the southern site that had erupted early in the morning, plus two large ones and one very small one at the northern site, from the explosions 17 hours later. The timing and location suggested that the small plume came from a pipe that had already been depressurized by the initial blast; in other words, two bombs had been placed on the same pipe. Why would the saboteurs leave one pipe, NS-2B untouched, and put two bombs on NS-2A? The answer, as Andersson came to see it, was that they made a mistake. If he was right, then the smaller blast site would yield the best clues about the number and size of the bombs because, unlike at the other three blast sites, there would have been no subsequent catastrophic outflow of gas.

We don’t know whether official investigators have come to this same conclusion, but Andersson’s underwater drone seemed to confirm its accuracy. The first blast on NS-2A—the early-morning one, at the southern site—had done catastrophic damage; the second blast on NS-2A, at the northern site, had simply poked a neat hole in the pipe. There had been no violent burst of escaping methane, just a relative trickle that made its way steadily up to the surface—the small plume. The neat hole also confirmed that the explosive charge used was relatively modest—compact enough to have been carried in a backpack.

Without consulting the perpetrators, there is no way to know why the northern bombs went off 17 hours after the southern one, and there is no way to know whether bombs were placed at the northern site first or the other way around. But it isn’t hard to imagine why there were two separate blast sites. If performed in the simplest way, by divers off a Zodiac, the work would likely have required a series of descents over several nights, and it could have been interrupted—and the boat forced to move—for any number of reasons: bad weather, say, or fuel or supplies running low. Maybe there was just a need to rest. But this is mere speculation. What does seem clear, from all the evidence, is that the divers made a mistake: They put two bombs on the same pipe.

How did they get confused? If the divers were using magnetic compasses, the readings could have been affected by the steel pipeline itself or by a high-voltage underwater cable that lies only about 1,000 yards from Nord Stream at the northern location. That said, in these circumstances, experienced divers would have preferred a sonic device to a magnetic compass. There are plenty of other reasons why divers might have gotten disoriented. Working at such depths is inherently difficult. But the mistake is noteworthy—a piece of what might be called negative evidence. It points away from a Big Navy operation, conducted off a warship with divers who had repeatedly conducted practice runs planting explosives on pipes. In such a scenario, there would also have been no need for a second site. The bombs could all have been planted in a single dive. Weather and supplies would not have been issues.

Andersson’s findings, along with reports about the meandering Andromeda and its crew of six, told a different story.

VII. A Taboo Is Broken

The idea that world-changing events are guided by secretive actors with meticulous plans can be oddly reassuring. It reduces the troubling randomness of reality. Someone in power orders a thing to be done, and it is done.

In his Nord Stream story, Hersh describes a tidy process: an order from Biden, a collaborative effort with Norway, a warship deployed as a platform, and a team of U.S. Navy divers with the best military technology available. This scenario conforms with ideas of a hidden American guiding hand. But in life, things rarely work so smoothly. The Zodiac version is messier: an order from an unknown source, a rented sailboat, a Polish travel agency linked to a snarly Ukrainian, a somewhat noisy crew of divers who left witnesses all over the Baltic, a mission that needed to be paused and then picked up again, and then, possibly, a crucial mistake. Hersh’s version apparently comes from a single unnamed but very knowledgeable source. The messier version comes from scattered, disconnected, unpredictable sources in different places, most of them on the record, each yielding different bits of the story. The messier version leans toward Ukraine.

The Washington Post and D er Spiegel added weight to a possible Ukraine connection in November , when they coordinated the publication of separate articles that told the same broad story, based on shared reporting. The articles named a central player in the sabotage mission—a Ukrainian colonel, Roman Chervinsky. The authors based their stories on “officials in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe, as well as other people knowledgeable about the details of the covert operation.” Chervinsky, who denied his involvement in a statement from his lawyer, is a decorated veteran of his country’s special-operations forces who, the reporters said, “is professionally and personally close to key military and security leaders.” He reported to Major General Viktor Hanuschak, who “communicated directly” with Ukraine’s top military commander, General Zaluzhny. The article said that Chervinsky handled “logistics and support” for a six-person team that dove from a rented sailboat to place the explosives. The mission was undertaken, the reporters said, on orders from senior Ukrainian military officers who report to General Zaluzhny. This did not necessarily mean that Zaluzhny himself gave the order. Chervinsky is currently under arrest for allegedly abusing his military authority by conducting an unauthorized mission, different from the Nord Stream one (an allegation that he also denies).

So President Zelensky might be telling the truth when he says he never ordered an attack. The Dutch memo to the CIA noted that he would not be informed. Such a mission might have been undertaken on orders from Zaluzhny alone, even in defiance of a hard no from the president. Given the stated U.S. opposition to the pipeline, it’s not inconceivable that there could have been quiet acquiescence from Washington. Such things can be conveyed by a nod or a wink. It is also possible that the mission skirted Ukraine’s military chain of command entirely. A wealthy patriot—someone like, say, Rustem A., believing that Nord Stream’s destruction might benefit his besieged country—might have contracted with someone like Chervinsky to charter a boat and hire a diving team without asking permission from anyone. Such a person might well have assumed that the penalty for success in his own country would likely be gratitude, if not acclaim.

Until there is some formal resolution, unofficial findings and theories are all we have. But the evidence at the scene of the blasts is well documented . A military-like crew aboard the Andromeda definitely wandered in the vicinity of the explosion sites, behavior that may of course turn out to have an innocent explanation. Then there is the explosive residue found on Andromeda. Hersh, for his part, contends that the Andromeda voyage and the explosive residue are part of a carefully constructed ploy designed to steer investigators away from the truth. If so, given the variety of sources and methods used to reconstruct Andromeda’s voyage, it would be a remarkably intricate confection. If the official investigations do identify Ukrainians as the perpetrators, as I suspect they will, many of those inclined to believe the Russia theory or the America theory will hold to their opinions. People tend to believe what they wish to believe, and theories are bound up with political ends.

That said, there are also ample reasons why many are not eager to assign blame—even if, in the end, investigators will have to come to a conclusion. Officially naming Russia, the U.S., or Ukraine as the saboteur would have sticky political consequences all around. The belief that Russia might have carried out the attack has already helped swell military spending in Scandinavia, spending that some in the region oppose. If Russia is shown to be behind the attack, that opposition could lose traction. Identifying Russia as the perpetrator would also put Germany on the back foot: Germany had seen Russia as a partner, and German companies had invested in Nord Stream. Because Germany is now aligned with the United States and Ukraine in resisting Putin’s invasion, pinning the attack on the U.S. or Ukraine would pose its own difficulties. If Ukraine is responsible, it would make that country appear singularly ungrateful, because European arms and ammunition have kept it in the fight . Blowing up a major piece of energy infrastructure in the middle of the Baltic would feel like a betrayal. At the same time, it would make Russia look weak and ineffectual, unable to defend a marquee infrastructure project on its doorstep. The Biden administration, which has worked strenuously to rebuild its alliance with Europe and to rally its support for Ukraine, would appear coldly calculating and two-faced if it was behind the sabotage.

Whoever is blamed, European outrage will likely be muted. Time passes, and memories are short. The environmental damage was minimal. Estimates vary considerably, but the amount of methane released, thought by some to be one of the largest single emissions ever to have occurred, is a small fraction of annual natural releases of the gas . The loss of Nord Stream inflated energy costs for a time, but today they are below where they were before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Workarounds were quickly found. Western Europe, it turned out, had alternatives to Russia’s natural gas.

“The European Union had prepared in earnest for supply disruptions from Russia since 2009, when a Russian cut-off of gas flows to Ukraine forced Bulgaria, an EU member state, to cut off industrial consumers of gas,” wrote Mitchell Orenstein, a University of Pennsylvania professor of Russian and East European studies, in a 2023 article published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Most of these measures did not attract public attention, because of their highly technical nature.” The energy grids of member countries were linked, so that a production slump in one could be offset by others. A pipeline connector between Greece and Bulgaria was opened to allow natural gas to flow from Azerbaijan through the Trans Adriatic pipeline. New terminals were built in Poland, Lithuania, and Germany to enable liquefied natural gas to be imported from the United States and elsewhere.

The loss of Nord Stream also gave a big push to the EU’s green movement, which seeks to replace fossil fuels with renewable-energy sources. Putin was awarded first place in Politico ’s “Class of 2023” —a list of top environmental “power brokers.” Taking note of suspicions that Russia had blown up its own pipeline, Politico observed : “Vladimir Putin has done more than almost any other single human being to speed up the end of the fossil-fuel era.” Politico was poking fun, but it should not be forgotten that, whoever was behind the actual bombings, Putin is ultimately responsible for them. He started the war that made Nord Stream a target.

Repairing Nord Stream will not be as simple as putting the shattered pieces back together. In the days and weeks after the blasts, water gradually pushed into the broken pipes, reducing the outflow of methane until the water pressure from outside equaled the gas pressure inside, and stopped the flow. Repairing the pipes—if the effort is even attempted— would be time-consuming and costly . With the EU’s energy priorities shifting away from fossil fuel, repairs might very well never happen.

A year after the blasts, Hans Blix was less worried about the future of the pipeline than about the precedent set by its destruction. Pipelines and electric cables “wire our continents together,” he said the afternoon we met. He wondered if “it was a warning that those who did it could do it in other situations.” He stepped back for a measure of perspective: When you have wars, he said, the restraints come off—but not all of them. “Belligerents may have some common interests still,” such as the exchange of prisoners or the export of grain, interests that can be defined. “The partial [nuclear]-test-ban agreement: That was also a common interest.” Generally speaking, underwater infrastructure has been seen as a common interest, too; but, he said, “maybe that taboo is broken.”

Whatever the official findings, there is a good chance in the end that no one is ever likely to be brought to account for the attack. This is no small thing. A $20 billion engineering feat, built over decades by thousands of skilled workers—a wonder of the modern world—might well rest forever, inert and flooded, at the bottom of the sea.

About the Author

More Stories

The Tiny and Nightmarishly Efficient Future of Drone Warfare

American Special Ops Forces Are Everywhere

Nord Stream sabotage probe turns to clues in Poland: Report

Investigators reconstructed the two-week voyage of a 15-metre yacht suspected of being involved in the gas pipeline sabotage, Wall Street Journal reports.

Investigators in Germany are examining evidence suggesting a sabotage team used Poland as an operating base to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

The investigators reconstructed the two-week voyage of the Andromeda, a 50-foot (15-metre) yacht suspected of being involved in the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, the newspaper said .

The Journal on Saturday cited people familiar with the voyage as indicating the sabotage crew placed deep-sea explosives on Nord Stream 1, before they set the vessel on a course towards Poland. It added Germany was trying to match DNA samples found on the vessel “to at least one Ukrainian soldier”.

The evidence included data from the Andromeda’s radio and navigation equipment, as well as satellite and mobile phones and Gmail accounts allegedly used by the perpetrators, WSJ reported.

“Taken together, the details show that the boat sailed around each of the locations where the blasts later took place – evidence that fortified investigators’ belief that the Andromeda was instrumental in last year’s destruction of the pipeline,” it said.

Investigators began looking at the vessel after a tip from a Western intelligence service, the newspaper said.

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office and Poland’s government spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Information about Polish or Ukrainian clues in the destruction of NS1 and NS2, repeated in the media space, is consistently used by the Russian apparatus of influence to create the impression/presumption among the recipients that Warsaw and Kiev were behind this incident,” Stanislaw Zaryn, deputy to Poland’s minister coordinator of special services, wrote on Twitter.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 put Europe’s reliance on Russian natural gas in the political spotlight. The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines hastened the region’s switch to other energy suppliers.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported the US government learned from a European intelligence agency of a secret plan by Ukraine’s military to attack the pipelines using divers, who reported directly to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces three months before the September 2022 explosions.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denied his government’s involvement in the sabotage of the gas pipelines.

“I am the president and I give orders accordingly. Nothing of the sort has been done by Ukraine. I would never act that way,” Zelenskyy said, asking for proof of Ukrainian involvement.

German media in March identified the possible involvement of a yacht from a Poland-based company owned by Ukrainian citizens in the attack.

‘Kill Bill’ Star to Divorce: Says Wife Drove Son to Suicide

‘TOXIC’ MARRIAGE

Michael Madsen cited his wife’s “neglect, drinking and alcoholism” as contributing factors to his son’s death.

‘elf’ star jokes about diddy case: is ‘being nasty’ a crime, “i didn’t know there was a limit on baby oil,” said comedian and actor faizon love in an instagram post., feds scouring for evidence in case against trump suspect.

WHAT YOU GOT?

Federal investigators are searching for evidence to further charge the man they believe tried to kill former President Donald Trump before being stopped by Secret Service.

Poll shows voters think kamala harris is tougher than trump.

BRAINS & BRAWN

The poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs shows that voters believe that Kamala Harris is tougher and smarter than Donald Trump.

Lady gaga’s dad endorses ‘pure’ candidate donald trump, “one is pure, and he’s a patriot. the other is just going to say whatever she needs to say to get elected,” joe germanotta, lady gaga’s father, said of the two candidates., zach bryan deletes x after post about ye and taylor swift, he later tried to placate an army of outraged swifties., longtime ex-gop rep throws his support behind harris.

‘SICK PUPPY’

The longtime GOP stalwart decried Trump as unfit to lead the country and said he will vote for Kamala Harris in November.

Diddy’s first meal in notorious brooklyn prison revealed.

CAN I SPEAK TO THE CHEF?

The choices are undoubtedly less lavish than what the rapper is used to.

Explosive tracings found on yacht connected to nord stream explosion, brett bachman.

Night Editor

Reuters/Oliver Denzer

German authorities investigating a Baltic Sea explosion last year that hobbled Europe’s Nord Stream pipelines said they found tracings on a suspicious yacht that may have been used to haul the explosives used in the incident, which captured international headlines last September amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. Germany notified the U.N. security council of its findings Tuesday in a letter with Sweden and Denmark, Reuters reported. It remains unclear who owns the boat—the letter said simply that German intelligence agencies were probing “the suspicious charter of a sailing yacht” meant to “hide the identity of the real charterer.” The investigation remains ongoing and may last for some time.

Traces of explosives found at Nord Stream pipelines, confirming 'gross sabotage,' Sweden says

Investigators found traces of explosives at the site of the damaged Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic sea , confirming that the pipelines had been subject to “gross sabotage,” the Swedish Security Service said Friday.

In a statement, prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said that investigators had seized a number of “foreign objects” at the site of the damaged pipelines, which showed traces of explosive residue after analysis.

The statement did not expand on how the explosives might have got there and said an investigation was ongoing.

In September, European officials were quick to blame Russia for the sabotage, accusing it of starting an energy war with Europe to damage international support for Ukraine.

The Swedish statement confirmed preliminary findings by Swedish and Danish authorities in October that “powerful explosions” had caused damage to the Nord Stream pipelines, referring to ruptures in the pipeline in Denmark’s exclusive economic zone.

Seismologists in Denmark and Sweden have previously said they had registered tremors in the immediate vicinity of the leaks and that the signals did not resemble those from earthquakes.

Underwater blasts ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines , which carry natural gases from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, in late September. Methane gas bubbled to the surface of the ocean, triggering fears of environmental damage and public hazard.

Russia has denied responsibility for the explosions, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claiming the Russian government was “extremely concerned” about the damage in late September.

In October, Russia claimed that British navy personnel blew up the pipeline. It did not give evidence for this claim, which the United Kingdom denies.

Dwindling flows of gas from Russia, which once supplied 40% of Europe’s energy needs , led to divisions within the European Union over how to respond to surging prices and the politically difficult cost of living crises. In mid-October, the European Commission announced a number of emergency measures, including for E.U. states to start jointly buying gas.

European states rushed to protect other infrastructure for liquefied natural gas to be unloaded and distributed across the continent. Russia and Norway are the two major European exporters of natural gas, upon whom the rest of Europe has long been dependent.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

• The Big Story
• Newsletters
• Steven Levy's Plaintext Column
• WIRED Classics from the Archive
• WIRED Insider
• WIRED Consulting

Online Sleuths Untangle the Mystery of the Nord Stream Sabotage

It’s been six months since the Nord Stream gas pipelines were ruptured by a series of explosions, leaking tons of methane into the environment and  igniting an international whodunit . Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and an unnamed pro-Ukrainian group have all been accused of planting explosives on the Baltic Sea pipelines in recent months. But half a year since the sabotage took place, the mystery remains unsolved.

Digital sleuths are stepping in to help provide clarity around bombshell claims about who was behind the attacks. Open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers are using public sources of data in their efforts to verify or debunk the snippets of information published about the Nord Stream explosions. They’re providing a glimpse of clarity to an incident that’s shrouded by secrecy and international politics.

Since early February, multiple media reports have claimed to provide new information about who could have attacked the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on September 26. However, the reports have largely been based on anonymous sources, including unnamed intelligence officials and leaks from government investigations into the attacks.

First, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published claims that the US was behind attacks in a  post on Substack . This was followed by reports in The New York Times and German publication  Die Zeit claiming a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible. (European leaders have  previously speculated Russia could be behind the attacks, and Russia has  blamed the United Kingdom .) No country has claimed responsibility for the blasts so far, and official investigations are ongoing.

Each of the recent reports has provided little hard evidence to show what may actually have happened, while helping to fuel speculation. Jacob Kaarsbo, a senior analyst at Think Tank Europa, who previously worked in Danish intelligence for 15 years, says the claims have been “remarkable” but also “speculative” in nature. “In my mind, they don’t really alter the picture,” Kaarsbo says, adding the attacks look highly complex and would likely be “very hard to pull off without it being a state actor or at least with state sponsorship.”

In the absence of official information, OSINT researchers have been trying to plug the gaps by examining the claims of the new reports with public data.  OSINT analysis is a powerful way to determine how an event may have unfolded. For instance, flight- and ship-tracking data can reveal movements around the world, satellite images show Earth in near real-time, while small clues in the backgrounds of photos and videos can reveal where they were taken. The techniques have  uncovered Russian assassins , spotted North Korea evading  international trading sanctions , identified  potential war criminals , and  documented pollution .

For the Nord Stream blasts, there was little OSINT available. Researchers  identified “dark ships” in the area . But underwater, there are obviously limited data sources that can be tapped into—cameras and sensors don’t monitor every inch of the pipelines. “OSINT probably won’t break this case open, but it can be used to verify or strengthen other hypotheses,” says Oliver Alexander, an analyst who focuses on OSINT and has been closely looking at the Nord Stream blasts. “I do think that it’s more of a verification tool.”

Alexander and others have been examining the claims made so far. The New York Times and  Die Zeit  both published stories on March 7 claiming a Ukrainian group was behind the sabotage. (Ukraine has  denied any involvement .)  Die Zeit published more details, claiming German investigators searched a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, knew where the yacht sailed from, and that six people were involved in the operation, including two divers. All of them used forged passports, the publication reported.

The details were enough for OSINT researchers to start tracking down which yacht could have been used. Alexander, as well as contributors to the open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat, started following the breadcrumbs, narrowing down potential vessels. A follow-up  report soon named the boat under suspicion as the Andromeda , a 15-meter-long yacht. Webcam footage from the harbor where it is  believed the Andromeda was docked shows the movement of a boat around the time reported by the publications. (The Andromeda is  reportedly too small to be required to use ship-tracking systems.)  Years-old videos   and photos of the boat have surfaced. The sleuthing adds public details to the reports.

Similarly, OSINT has been used to debunk Hersh’s story claiming the United States was behind the explosions. (Hersh has  defended his article , while US officials have said it was false.) Alexander has used, among other things,  ship-tracking data to show Norwegian ships were “accounted for” and not in a “position to have placed the explosives on the Nord Stream pipeline, as claimed by Hersh.” Another detailed article from Norwegian journalists has similarly  poured cold water on Hersh’s claims , partly using satellite data.

The sabotage was always likely to be controversial and surrounded by rumors: Russia’s full-scale invasion of  Ukraine in February 2022 has heated global tensions and put pressure on diplomats around the world. There has been a whirlwind of disinformation around the blasts, further muddying the waters. Mary Blankenship, a disinformation researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has analyzed online conversations around the war, says the “high uncertainty and high stakes” of the incident help to fuel the spread of disinformation. 

“This is an issue that exploits existing worries, tensions, and grievances within European audiences,” Blankenship says. Initially, the earliest disinformation on Twitter about the explosions came from conspiracy theorists, Blankenship says, who shared a pre-war statement from US president Joe Biden, where he said there would be  an “end” to Nord Stream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine . Since then, Russia and China have taken to  sharing unproven theories about the sabotage, the researcher says.

“Disinformation actors, but also official representatives of the [Russian] regime, stepped up their efforts on every news story that was published on this—however contradictory about the origins of the blast—be it a blog post by Seymour Hersh or a  New York Times article,” says Peter Stano, an EU spokesperson, adding most disinformation narratives have circled around the idea that “the US is to blame.” The EU’s disinformation monitoring project, EUvsDisinfo, has  flagged more than 150 pieces of disinformation linked to the Nord Stream explosions, including those building on Hersh’s story. “EUvsDisinfo experts also found that Moscow considers the recent materials in German-language media a hoax,” Stano says.

While OSINT is helping to provide bits of extra detail on the claims about the Nord Stream attacks, it is likely that reports debunking dubious claims reach fewer people than disinformation or claims that are hard to verify. “It does not nearly get the same level of engagement,” Blankenship says. “You can have a book’s worth of evidence for it, and they would still find a way to discount it.”

And while OSINT research can answer some questions, it has its limits and can also raise new ones. Kaarsbo, the former Danish intelligence official, and other experts have pointed out that the Andromeda is a relatively small yacht, and it may have been unable to carry the amount of explosives needed to blow the pipelines. “The Andromeda is quite likely a piece of the puzzle, but I don’t think it’s a bigger piece of the puzzle that everyone makes it out to be,” Alexander says. “I think there are a lot of the big pieces missing.” Detailed sonar imagery of the damaged pipes would help people to understand what happened underwater, Alexander adds.

Ultimately, there is still very little hard public evidence—either from governments or publicly available online—about who may have been behind the attacks. Behind closed doors, intelligence agencies likely have more data and theories on the potential culprits. However, investigators in Sweden and Denmark refused to comment on their progress, while Germany’s Office of the Federal Prosecutor confirmed it had searched a yacht and is continuing to examine for explosives. German officials have also said there could be a  chance of a “false flag” operation to smear Ukraine . And when the countries complete their investigations, there’s no guarantee they will publish their findings or evidence to back them up. The mystery continues.

You Might Also Like …

Politics Lab: Get the newsletter and listen to the podcast

An ER doctor’s cure for America’s gun epidemic

Watch : Antony Blinken dragged US diplomacy into the 21st century

Confessions of a Hinge power user

Event: Join us for the Energy Tech Summit on October 10 in Berlin

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Investigators skeptical of yacht’s role in Nord Stream bombing

Officials believe more than one vessel might have been involved in sabotaging the natural gas pipeline last year and wonder if a 50-foot sailing yacht that investigators scoured for clues could be a decoy

After saboteurs severely damaged the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines last September, German officials zeroed in on a rented sailboat that appeared to have taken part in planting explosive devices deep below the surface of the Baltic Sea.

But after months of investigation, law enforcement officials now suspect that the 50-foot yacht, the Andromeda, was probably not the only vessel used in the audacious attack. They also say the boat may have been a decoy, put to sea to distract from the true perpetrators, who remain at large, according to officials with knowledge of an investigation led by Germany’s attorney general. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details about the active inquiry, including doubts about the Andromeda’s role that haven’t been previously reported.

Officials hope that the true purpose of Andromeda in the deep-sea demolition will provide further insight in a high-stakes, international whodunnit that could eventually lead to those responsible and explain their motives, which remain unclear.

U.S. and European officials said they still don’t know for sure who is behind the underwater attack. But several said they shared German skepticism that a crew of six people on one sailboat laid the hundreds of pounds of explosives that disabled Nord Stream 1 and part of Nord Stream 2, a newer set of pipelines that wasn’t yet delivering gas to customers.

Experts noted that while it was theoretically possible to place the explosives on the pipeline by hand, even skilled divers would be challenged submerging more than 200 feet to the seabed and slowly rising to the surface to allow time for their bodies to decompress.

Such an operation would have taken multiple dives, exposing the Andromeda to detection from nearby ships. The mission would have been easier to hide and pull off using remotely piloted underwater vehicles or small submarines, said diving and salvage experts who have worked in the area of the explosion, which features rough seas and heavy shipping traffic.

The German investigation has determined that traces of “military-grade” explosives found on a table inside the boat’s cabin match the batch of explosives used on the pipeline. Several officials doubted that skilled saboteurs would leave such glaring evidence of their guilt behind. They wonder if the explosive traces — collected months after the rented boat was returned to its owners — were meant to falsely lead investigators to the Andromeda as the vessel used in the attack.

“The question is whether the story with the sailboat is something to distract or only part of the picture,” said one person with knowledge of the investigation.

Still others allow that the bombers may simply have been sloppy.

“It doesn’t all fit,” a senior European security official said of the fragments of evidence. “But people can make mistakes.”

Suspicions turn to Poland and Ukraine

The German investigation has linked the yacht rental to a Polish company, which is in turn owned by a European company that’s connected to a prominent Ukrainian, fueling speculation from Berlin to Warsaw to Kyiv that a deep-pocketed partisan may have financed the operation. The identity of the Polish company and the Ukrainian individual, as well as his potential motive, remains unclear.

Based on the initial German findings, officials have been whispering about the potential involvement of the Polish or Ukrainian government in the attack. Poland arguably had a motive, some said, considering it has been among the most vocal critics of the Nord Stream project since it began in the late 1990s, warning that the pipelines, running from western Russia to Germany, would make Europe dependent on the Kremlin for energy.

Marcin Przydacz, the Polish president’s chief foreign policy adviser, urged caution about reaching conclusions from the initial evidence. He too shared the view that the Andromeda could be a red herring, but said it may have been planted by Moscow.

“This could be a Russian game to blame” Poland, Przydacz said in an interview at the presidential palace in Warsaw. “Poland had nothing to do with this [attack].”

Intelligence agencies have found no clear evidence that Russia, initially the prime suspect, was responsible.

Privately, former Polish government officials said that despite the country’s vehement opposition to Nord Stream and staunch support for arming Ukraine, they doubted that President Andrzej Duda would authorize an act that risked fracturing the alliance of nations that have come to Ukraine’s defense. Polish officials routinely refer to Ukraine’s conflict with Russia as “our war” and are fearful that if Russian President Vladimir Putin succeeds there, he would set his sights on Poland next.

Suspicion also has turned toward Ukraine as the culprit behind the Nord Stream bombings, based in part on intercepted communications of pro-Ukraine individuals discussing the possibility of carrying out an attack on the pipelines before the explosions, The Washington Post previously reported.

A senior Western security official with knowledge of the secretly gathered intelligence said the communications were only discovered after the bombing, when Western spy agencies began searching their records for insights.

“Ukraine absolutely did not participate in the attack on Nord Stream,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said last month, questioning why his country would conduct an operation that “destabilizes the region and will divert attention from the war, which is categorically not beneficial to us.”

Those who suspect Ukrainian involvement said that disabling the pipeline could have been an effort to galvanize allied support in the face of Russian aggression, and particularly to strengthen German resolve. Germany had halted activated authorization for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline days before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Officials in the United States and Europe initially blamed Russia for the bombing. The country had already halted gas flows on Nord Stream 1, the older of the two sets of pipelines. That suggested that Moscow was willing to engage in a form of political blackmail with energy supplies.

One of the pair of Nord Stream 2 pipes remains intact. Both of the Nord Stream 1 lines were severed in the explosions on Sept. 26.

Some officials said that Ukrainian saboteurs or those from other countries acting in what they felt were Ukraine’s best interest could have attacked Nord Stream without Zelensky’s knowledge, arguing that he doesn’t have complete visibility into all the operations of his government or the military. That kind of plausible deniability could protect the celebrated leader and dampen the political fallout of a brazen attack tied to his country, these officials said.

No country has provided firm evidence tying the attacks to Ukraine, and a senior Biden administration official has cautioned that the intercepted communications of pro-Ukrainian actors are not conclusive.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned against making early conclusions as to who was responsible, suggesting that it might be a “false flag” operation, an idea echoed by other German politicians.

Roderich Kiesewetter, a German lawmaker who is part of a committee that was briefed last month by intelligence officials on the probe’s progress, said he believes that investigators have not yet communicated any results because the “evidence is far too thin.”

Kiesewetter said that unfounded speculation over the culprits could endanger cohesion in Europe. “We should continue to ask who had an interest in the detonation” and who “benefits from uncertainty and accusations,” he said.

Trail of breadcrumbs

As the Nord Stream mystery has turned into an international game of Clue, German investigators have scoured the Andromeda for leads. Officials first became interested in the vessel after the country’s domestic intelligence agency received a “very concrete tip” from a Western intelligence service that the boat may have been involved in the sabotage, according to a German security official, who declined to name the country that shared the information.

German authorities determined that the tip was credible and passed the information onto law enforcement officials, the official said.

The Andromeda left a virtual trail of breadcrumbs as it set off from a German port for the Baltic Sea, according to investigators.

Mola Yachting rented out the boat on Sept. 6 from Hohe Düne harbor in Warnemünde, a German port town on the Baltic, near Rostock, which is about 145 miles north of Berlin. The rental location is in plain sight of a huge vacation complex, home to a five-star hotel, seven restaurants and a high-end shopping area, with views across the harbor.

Investigators said the boat then traveled in a northeasterly direction, stopping in Hafendorf Wiek, or “Wiek harbor village,” on the northernmost part of Rügen island.

When a reporter from The Post visited in early March, the area had emptied out, save for the odd local dog-walker braving the biting temperatures. A half-dozen yachts bobbed in the water where the Andromeda is said to have been. “Investigators came [in] mid-January, and we helped them where we could,” said the harbor master, René Redmann.

“It wouldn’t be unusual for a boat setting off from Rostock with the destination of Bornholm to stop in Wiek,” Redmann noted, referring to a Danish island near the site of the Nord Stream explosion. Investigators believe that the Andromeda left Hafendorf Wiek and moored off the coast of the tiny island Christianso, near Bornholm.

A stop in Hafendork Wiek may have offered the Andromeda’s crew a final chance to stock up on supplies before heading to the explosion site.

“Lots of things are loaded on the boats … including groceries,” Redmann said. “Some people stop to tank up on fuel.” Redmann would not confirm that the Andromeda stopped there, citing the continuing law enforcement investigation. But he said he wouldn’t have any record of the crew’s identities, just the name of the boat, the number of people aboard and the type of vessel.

“Recording names of passengers is the job of the charter,” Redmann said.

Thomas Richter, co-owner of the charter company Mola, said that the search of the Andromeda took place in Dranske, on Rügen island, where the yacht was kept in winter storage. He declined to share further details.

‘Don’t talk about Nord Stream’

For all the intrigue around who bombed the pipeline, some Western officials are not so eager to find out.

At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm, said one senior European diplomat: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” Leaders see little benefit from digging too deeply and finding an uncomfortable answer, the diplomat said, echoing sentiments of several peers in other countries who said they would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.

Even if there were a clear culprit, it would not likely stop the provision of arms to Ukraine, diminish the level of anger with Russia or alter the strategy of the war, these officials argued. The attack happened months ago and allies have continued to commit more and heavier weapons to the fight, which faces a pivotal period in the next few months.

Since no country is yet ruled out from having carried out the attack, officials said they were loath to share suspicions that could accidentally anger a friendly government that might have had a hand in bombing Nord Stream.

In the absence of concrete clues, an awkward silence has prevailed.

“It’s like a corpse at a family gathering,” the European diplomat said, reaching for a grim analogy. Everyone can see there’s a body lying there, but pretends things are normal. “It’s better not to know.”

Harris reported from Warsaw and Washington, Mekhennet from Berlin and Washington, Morris from Berlin, Birnbaum from Washington and Brady from Rügen and Rostock, Germany. Meg Kelly in Washington contributed to this report.

What to know about Ukraine’s counteroffensive

The latest: The Ukrainian military has launched a long-anticipated counteroffensive against occupying Russian forces , opening a crucial phase in the war aimed at restoring Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and preserving Western support in its fight against Moscow.

The fight: Ukrainian troops have intensified their attacks on the front line in the southeast region, according to multiple individuals in the country’s armed forces, in a significant push toward Russian-occupied territory.

The front line: The Washington Post has mapped out the 600-mile front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces .

How you can help: Here are ways those in the United States can support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.

Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war . Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video .

• National Security
• Environment
• Special Investigations
• More Ways to Donate
• Impact & Reports
• Join Newsletter
• Become a Source

© THE INTERCEPT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Searcher

Fishing for Secrets in the Nord Stream Abyss

• Share on Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on WhatsApp

In partnership with

The skies over the Baltic Sea are a clear blue with just faint ribbons of clouds. It’s May 24 and Erik Andersson eats a bowl of yogurt for breakfast on the deck of the Swedish diving vessel Baltic Explorer. Between bites, the 62-year-old retired engineer and entrepreneur discusses the previous day’s work on his investigation into one of the most significant international crimes in recent history: the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines.

“Well, we arrived at the site, it was the southern site, you know, the first bomb that exploded at 2:03 in the morning local time 26th of September, and we started by making sonar scans with the sonar sensors that are attached to the boat,” he says to the camera held by his daughter Agnes, who has joined him on the expedition to document his journey. “We’re scanning back and forth over the explosion site and by doing that, we got a three-dimensional depth profile. And we could map out, we could see immediately that that was the trench, 100 by 60 meters and 10-meter-deep trench, which was quite an interesting discovery. That’s what we were looking for. It’s almost like a photo of the crime scene. I think it’s the first time we have an accurate three-dimensional model of the crime scene.”

That evening, just after 5 p.m., Andersson stands inside the cabin of the Baltic Explorer behind the captain, watching a video monitor as the ship slowly maneuvers back and forth over a section of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline off Sweden’s coast. On the screen, sonar imaging comes into focus and reveals a hole in a pipeline on the seabed. Andersson jokingly calls this section of the pipeline the “holy grail” of his investigation because it is the only section of the three strands of the Nord Stream pipeline that was bombed but did not cause a massive gas rupture. That’s because it was no longer pressurized when the explosives detonated. This is significant, Andersson says, because on the other two bombed lines, the explosion caused the pipeline to break apart, making it impossible to see what the initial puncture wound from the bombs looked like.

Before the expedition, Andersson believed that if he could find the hole, then it would be the first time anyone outside of a government authority or the Nord Stream company had examined a bomb puncture in the pipeline from the sabotage. “What we want to see is really the primary impact of the explosives. And this site is the only site I think now where we have any hope to see that because all the other sites, there had been this enormous outflow of gas: natural gas that’s just blown away all the mud and all the traces that were of the original explosion,” Andersson explained. “It’s not so easy to find. We didn’t see it on the boat-mounted sonar, so we have to send down the fish,” the nickname given by the captain to the submersible sonar device. Eventually, using the “fish,” they managed to find their target.

“It’s on the seam,” says the captain in a matter-of-fact tone as Andersson stares at the sonar monitor.

“It’s right on the seam?” Andersson asks.

“Yeah,” the captain responds.

“Whoa,” exclaims Andersson. “It’s on the seam! It’s right on the seam! Yeah. So, this is the first evidence that they actually put the explosives on the seam. They knew about the seam. That must be the weak point.”

Andersson is not a professional investigator or a journalist, and his voyage was not sponsored by a government. By training, he is an engineer with a master’s degree in engineering physics. He had a successful career at Volvo and Boeing and worked on advanced programs used by commercial and military aircraft, including U.S. military aircraft. He had followed the developments of the Nord Stream bombing carefully, but it was not until journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell story alleging that President Joe Biden had personally ordered the destruction of the pipelines that he became obsessed with the mystery. The expedition to the bombing site grew out of that passion. Andersson freely admits that he was motivated by a desire to prove that Hersh’s narrative was correct. What he found was quite different.

A handout photo provided by the Swedish Coast Guard shows the release of gas emanating from a leak on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea on Sept. 27, 2022.

A Forensic Investigation

On September 26, 2022, when a series of explosions rocked the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea waters off the coasts of Sweden and Denmark, Andersson followed the news like everyone else. He says he didn’t see it as a massive geopolitical mystery or an event of much consequence beyond the potential environmental impact in the water. “It wasn’t like a big thing when it happened,” he recalls. “I found the media coverage fishy,” he said. “It was like they were downplaying it.” Initial news reports showed a pool of bubbling water caused by the discharge of gas in the sea. The possibility that the gas release was the result of a leak or other accident was quickly ruled out once the Danish and Swedish authorities did an initial survey of the site. And once the other bombs went off 17 hours later in multiple sites, there was no doubt. Government authorities swiftly concluded that an intentional act of sabotage had been carried out against a high-profile, profitable, and controversial international project controlled by Russia.

Andersson saw video clips circulating on Twitter that showed Biden and other U.S. officials appearing to threaten to take out the pipeline in the months before the attacks. “With all the history of the Nord Stream 2 and the motivation, I suspected that this was somehow a U.S.-sponsored action, I guess, but I wasn’t thinking much about that,” he said. Andersson had spent years working on jet fuel calculations for major airline corporations, and he was curious, on a scientific level, to hear details of how the pipelines exploded.

He was frustrated that very few technical details had filtered into the media. There were aerial images of the bubbling pools, but nothing showing the aftermath of the immediate impact. The first explosion had happened on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm at 2:03 a.m., so it is not surprising there was no active surveillance of the event itself.

“It was annoying me tremendously that the first footage was like 12 hours after. While in the immediate event, the gas plume must have been enormous and just the thought of what could have happened,” said Andersson.

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines each had two lines that stretched from northwestern Russia and under the Baltic Sea to northern Germany. On Sept. 26, 2022, three of the four lines were severely damaged in an act of sabotage. The first explosion occurred on Line A of Nord Stream 2 at 2:03 a.m. off the coast of the Danish island Bornholm. Seventeen hours later, off the coast of Sweden, three more explosions occurred, damaging both of the Nord Stream 1 Lines and a second section of Nord Stream 2 Line A. Line B of Nord Stream 2, the one closest to Russian territory, was the only line left undamaged.

Sweden, Denmark, and Germany all launched investigations with the support of the United States. Divers filled shipping containers with underwater evidence and conducted marine video surveys and forensic analysis. Publicly, insinuations and accusations proliferated. The U.S. all but accused Russia of blowing up its own pipeline. Ukraine directly accused Vladimir Putin of responsibility. Open-source analysts began monitoring ship movement data and speculating about how Moscow might have done it. Putin charged that “Anglo-Saxon powers” were behind the attack. Some analysts speculated that Poland, the most aggressive supporter of Ukraine’s fight against Russia, may be the culprit. Given the larger context of the Russian invasion, Ukraine clearly had the strongest motive, but Kyiv steadfastly denied it had anything to do with the bombing.

Andersson tweeted some criticism of the government investigations of the incident, mostly focused on the lack of transparency. He also criticized media outlets for not uncovering more forensic evidence, despite the official pronouncements that the explosions were a deliberate act of terrorism and the possibility the sabotage was conducted or sponsored by a major world power. He found the secrecy disturbing. “There was no real information being shared with the public about the evidence that had been gathered or just sort of what exactly happened down there on a scientific or forensic level,” he said. “I think that when the government is so secretive, they’re feeding speculation and conspiracy theories.”

On February 8, Hersh published his story on Substack, charging that Biden had personally authorized the bombing of the pipelines and that U.S. navy divers had planted the bombs on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines during NATO’s BALTOPS 22 exercises in the Baltic Sea three months before they detonated. Russia publicly embraced Hersh’s story and introduced it as evidence of the need for an independent United Nations investigation into the attacks. The White House called Hersh’s report “utterly false and complete fiction.”

“When the government is so secretive, they’re feeding speculation and conspiracy theories.”

Andersson had never heard of Hersh, but when he saw journalists and commentators he admired on Twitter defending the 85-year-old reporter from the almost immediate deluge of attacks on his credibility by prominent media and political figures, as well as the denials from the White House, his gut instinct was that the right people were attacking Hersh. “I saw he had a lot of respect. I mean, this is a very experienced journalist, and he knows how to deal with sources, to evaluate his sources.” Andersson’s sense was that Hersh’s story was “probably true,” but he was mostly interested in the voluminous details contained in his report.

Soon, Andersson was spending his days and nights poring over every news story on the bombing that he could find, watching hours of news footage, and exchanging analyses with a wide cross section of people on Twitter, mainly accounts scouring the internet for open-source data that might shed light on who perpetrated the attacks and how. Andersson would engage both critics and supporters of Hersh and argue his case, ask questions, or share information. He eventually helped assemble an informal online war room with a handful of other amateur sleuths , and they publicly and privately compared notes and built on one another’s research. He also watched countless interviews Hersh did about his story, hanging on to every new detail that had not been in his original article, including an assertion that some of the bombs planted by the saboteurs did not detonate, leading to a scramble by the U.S. to remove the evidence.

At the beginning of his full-time obsession with the Nord Stream attacks, Andersson worked exclusively online. He began tinkering around with MarineTraffic , a service for monitoring the movement of ships and vessels and began reviewing all the data from the Baltic Sea to search for corroboration of various aspects of Hersh’s report. He also argued with open-source analysts aligned with the research group Bellingcat, whose network emerged as a leading force in trying to debunk (and mock) virtually every detail of Hersh’s story. Andersson often appeared in the Twitter feed of Oliver Alexander , a Danish researcher who has been particularly vicious in his denunciations of Hersh (he refers to him as “Senile Hersh”) to argue with him about his conclusions . He also discreetly joined Bellingcat’s Discord forum on the Nord Stream bombing and said it appeared to him to largely be a groupthink operation aimed at proving that Russia was behind the attack.

Andersson also began corresponding with some prominent scientists and researchers in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, sharing his theories and analysis. Several leading researchers working to document the seismic activity caused by the Nord Stream blasts engaged in extended email exchanges with him, and some thanked Andersson for his insights and for pointing out discrepancies or errors in their data presentations.

On March 7, the New York Times and a consortium of German media outlets led by Die Zeit and ARD reported that U.S. intelligence and German law enforcement sources were investigating what they characterized as a “pro-Ukrainian” group suspected of being involved in the attacks. Neither story directly accused the Ukrainian government of involvement. The German reports identified a 50-foot sailboat, the Andromeda, rented in the Baltic Sea port town of Warnemünde by a company registered in Poland and owned by two Ukrainians. According to the reports, a team of six people, at least some of whom allegedly used fake passports, left a slew of evidence onboard, including explosive residue. Ukraine vehemently denied it had any involvement in the attacks. For his part, Hersh suggested that the Andromeda evidence had been concocted as part of a cover story to counter his exposé and draw attention away from the actual perpetrator, the U.S. government.

In this aerial view, the Andromeda, a 50-foot Bavaria 50 Cruiser recreational sailing yacht, stands in a dry dock on the headland of Bug on Rügen island on March 17, 2023, near Dranske, Germany.

Andersson grew tired of the online information wars and speculation based on publicly available data that he believed was subject to manipulation or biased interpretations. He had watched scores of documentaries and news reports about the Nord Stream attacks, including the handful of films featuring underwater footage of the damaged pipelines. He says he got the sense the journalists filming under the waters of the Baltic “were not guided by some forensic interest to figure out what was going on” and only filmed superficial footage of the crime scene. “There was no primary damage from the explosion anywhere, so there was nothing that could narrow down the number of possible narratives.”

In March, Andersson began looking for a captain with a ship willing to take him on his own expedition. Within days, he had contracted a vessel with Patrik Juhlin, a captain Andersson jovially described as a “cowboy.” Juhlin was an experienced and knowledgeable Baltic skipper willing to push the bounds of rules and regulations and cruise around in the international waters where multiple bombs had exploded. Andersson’s mission, he said, centered around “very simple objectives: the type, size, and placement of the bombs.”

Andersson spent $10,000 on the boat charter and another $10,000 on an underwater drone with a high-resolution camera and other equipment. He taught himself how to use the remotely piloted marine surveillance vessel, beginning in his backyard swimming pool and then eventually conducting tests off the coast of Gothenburg. He also wanted the ability to take sediment samples from the seabed, so he improvised a valve that looked like a high school science project. He used plastic cylinders and bicycle inner tubes to collect samples that might contain traces of explosives.

Andersson applied for permission from the Swedish and Danish authorities and was pleasantly surprised when they approved his request to conduct a survey. “It was perfectly legal and allowed to go there, but it was still prohibited by some sort of insinuation that we’re not supposed to do it,” he said.

Although Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the U.S., and Russia are all currently investigating the sabotage of the pipelines and are doing so with vastly superior equipment, resources, and access, Andersson was skeptical there would be any meaningful transparency from the national investigations — certainly not anytime soon. He had no hope that new organizations would do serious forensic investigations of the blast sites. “I think that there must be some competition if they are just sweeping the things under the carpet.”

Aboard the Baltic Explorer, Erik Andersson and his daughter Agnes monitor the video feed from an underwater drone over Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline on May 24, 2023.

The Engineer

If you look at Erik Andersson’s CV, it paints an impressive picture of a successful entrepreneur and inventor. Early in his career he worked for Volvo, before his work caught the eye of major airline corporations and he negotiated the buyout of a program he had developed. He helped start a new company where, as chief technology officer, he oversaw the development of software for major airlines. Eventually, the firm was acquired by Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen in 2006 for $100 million. Andersson wanted to continue working for Boeing, so he stayed on as an engineer. “I worked on trajectory optimization and aircraft performance modeling. I learned a lot about flight physics and forces generated by accelerating gas masses,” he said. “Some of this general knowledge has been useful to me in the Nord Stream investigation.”

In 2016, he left Boeing and retired, though he continues to work on a variety of projects, including a teak wood harvesting plantation on a rainforest he manages in Brazil. How he came to own a majority share of that business is a story unto itself, but it centers around Andersson allegedly getting swindled out of $1 million by a Swedish politician and businessman. He aggressively fought back against the fraud, a battle that was covered by Swedish media . The politician denied any wrongdoing, but Andersson emerged from the battle with a majority stake in the business.

When you talk to Andersson or look at his social media feeds, you quickly encounter two major strands of his personality. Clearly, he has a sharp scientific and analytical mind. He researches his hypotheses extensively and tries to use solid scientific and mathematical approaches to proving or disproving them. He readily admits when he is wrong, though he first stubbornly exhausts all possibilities that he might be right. He engages in lengthy and detailed email exchanges and conversations with scientists and government officials in Sweden and elsewhere.

“I think it’s a healthy thinking process to create narratives and then look for confirmation as long as you are aware that’s what you are doing, and you’re ready to say you were wrong if the evidence says so,” he argues. “If you pretend to be ‘objective,’ you are much more likely to be fooled by your biases, I think. It’s also much easier to change your mind if you go all in for some narrative until you are exhausted and done with it.”

Join Our Newsletter

Original reporting. fearless journalism. delivered to you..

But there is another aspect to Andersson that would seem to contradict his scientific disposition, and that is his enthusiasm for a mishmash of fringe theories about Covid-19, the 2020 presidential election in the U.S., and other dubious narratives popular in MAGA world. He admires Donald Trump; disparages climate crisis activists; and retweets dubious theories about Anthony Fauci, Covid, and China. Andersson said he liked many of Trump’s campaign pledges, including on immigration, deregulation, and pulling back from foreign wars. He also supported Trump’s posture toward Putin and Russia.

Andersson didn’t just watch the Trump campaign. He logged onto a betting marketplace in October 2015 and saw that oddsmakers were offering 18 to 1 odds, so he placed an initial bet of 100,000 Swedish krona, a bit more than $12,000 at the time, that Trump would win in 2016. When he woke up the morning after the election, he was 2.5 million Swedish krona — or $300,000 — richer. “I should have put up a third of my fortune, the optimal bet, which should have been bigger. So, it was a small bet. I was very conservative.”

Andersson was elated when Trump won and said he wished Sweden could have a leader like Trump. Mostly, though, he was excited that a bombastic outsider might shake up the system in the world’s most powerful nation. “I was interested to see what would happen. You know, it’s like a big sledgehammer coming in.”

Perhaps it was his fascination with such counter-narratives that led him to believe so fervently in Hersh’s account of the Nord Stream bombing. But unlike many social media warriors, when confronted with empirical evidence that refuted his hypothesis, he changed his position.

Andersson retrieves soil samples taken near Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to test for explosive residue on May 24, 2023.

Popular Oversight

Andersson began his investigation onboard the Baltic Explorer on May 22 and declared his mission an act of “popular oversight.” If governments, especially those whose allies may be responsible for the attacks, “can control all the evidence and then tell a story and expect us to take it at face value, that’s not how the system should work.” He said he wanted to prove that private investigations of major world incidents could serve as a guardrail against media outlets spinning false narratives or governments covering up crimes. “This is no criticism of [lead prosecutor] Mats Ljungqvist and the Swedish investigation. I see signs that they might actually do a good job,” he said. “It’s more a general observation from similar cases that a certain amount of citizen oversight is good to help authorities to not abuse their control of information.”

For three days, Andersson’s vessel traversed the crime scene in the Baltic Sea, and he created extensive sonar maps of each of the blast sites. He filmed the damage from the explosions and the sites where sections of pipelines ruptured. In the case of one section of Nord Stream 2, which was punctured by a blast but did not explode because it had been depressurized, he captured what appears to be the only private footage of primary damage from an explosive device used in the bombing. He discovered craters from gas explosions and found evidence suggesting that the bombs had been dug into the mud, indicating that divers, not drones, likely placed explosives under or along the lines. “I felt that the Swedish investigator sounded very credible when he said that this could only be done by big state actor. And I don’t really see that now,” Andersson said. He also believes his research shows that it is unlikely a marine drone or other underwater vessel was used to plant the bombs, as has been suggested by analysts who believe Russia carried out the attack. “I think it would be very difficult to place the bomb under the seams with a remote-operated vehicle and do the variety of tasks of digging a hole and putting it in in there. It was a slab that you dig down next to the pipeline. I think a diver could have done it in a very short period of time.”

Hersh has been adamant that the bombs were placed by American divers and that it was a highly complex task necessitating not only U.S. Navy specialists, but also the support of Norwegian maritime forces. Some analysts , including Hersh , have also suggested that the 80-meter dive could not have been accomplished from a sailboat, such as the Andromeda, which has been connected by German law enforcement to the operation.

“Totally false,” says Peter Andersson, an executive at Poseidon Diving Systems , a Swedish company that provides advanced diving equipment to militaries around the globe, including the U.S., Germany, and Sweden. A world-class diver who travels the globe teaching military and civilian diving instructors to use Poseidon’s equipment, Peter (no relation to Erik) says he personally knows at least 30 divers in Sweden alone who are capable of such a dive. “It’s very common in Germany, very common in the U.S. and so on around the world doing these kinds of dives. I could easily do this, no problem,” he said. “You don’t need to be super experienced, but for a military diver or a paramilitary diver, it is no problem at all.”

Peter Andersson, who estimates that he has personally done several hundred dives in the Baltic Sea, said that if the divers dispensed with traditional safety precautions and backup equipment and used underwater propulsion devices to descend to the pipelines, the entire sabotage mission would be achievable in a matter of hours with two divers and a support crew. “In the case of doing this, bending all the rules, don’t care about security, don’t care about having bailout tanks that we normally have, if you’re in a war mode, you can easily go down with the machine,” he said. “Of course, if something happens, they will never find you. But I think that in this case, putting some explosives there has nothing to do with the rules and regulations and backup plans.”

While a sailboat would not typically be a sound choice for most deep-sea diving operations, in the case of a clandestine military or paramilitary operation, Peter Andersson says it would be a brilliant cover. “When you see a sailboat, the last thing you think of is diving,” he said. “That is a perfect disguise. If you take all the ships and the vessels that you can figure out to take — like a freight boat, canal boat, or whatever — the sailboat is the best way to disguise the diving operation because nobody would think that’s what you’re doing.” He said that if you had three or four strong individuals onboard, they could use ropes and other tools to retrieve the divers and equipment.

The divers, he said, would not have to be tethered to the boat. They could be dropped in the water and later use a marker buoy to identify themselves once they ascend. The boat could then cruise around in wait for the mission to be accomplished. Transporting the explosives to the bottom of the sea, even if they weighed hundreds of kilograms, he added, would be possible if the saboteurs used buoyancy bags. “And then you can work down there and even if you want to stay down there for one hour, it will only take like 3 hours to get to the surface in total,” he said.

Just because it would be possible to conduct such a dive operation from a sailboat does not mean that is what happened. Jens Greinert, a marine geologist who chairs the Deep Sea Monitoring Group at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, said he believes it would have been easier for the saboteurs to use remotely piloted devices rather than human divers to plant the explosives. “Personally I think it was either a small submersible, which doesn’t have to be big, or it was something along the lines of a robot,” he said in an interview with our reporting partner ARD. “You don’t need a diver to put anything in the sediment. I would even say machines can do it better.”

A former German military diver, however, was skeptical a submersible or robotic device was used to plant the explosives. Noting that the Baltic Sea is heavily surveilled, he said that using such equipment capable of planting bombs would have drawn far more attention and potentially necessitated a much larger vessel than a sailboat. “Both are possible, but it would have been a very sophisticated and very expensive robotic,” he told our reporting parter Die Zeit. “If it was a sailing yacht, it would have been complicated to deploy a robotic, because of the weight but also for the steering mechanism. You would need a calm sea and no wind.” He estimated that if humans planted the bombs, each dive would take between 30 minutes to two and a half hours depending on the equipment used and how much time was spent on the sea floor identifying the lines and planting the explosives.

When the Andromeda story first emerged in March, German officials cautioned that the ship could be a “false flag” to conceal the true identity of the saboteurs or that other ships may have been involved. The amount of evidence left on the boat and the trail of digital clues leading to Ukrainian individuals appeared to be either deliberate or the work of sloppy amateurs.

The kitchen area and table stand inside the Andromeda on March 17, 2023.

German investigators appear to be intensifying their probe of possible Polish connections to the attacks, something Warsaw has consistently denied. The Andromeda is known to have made at least one 12-hour stop at a port in Poland during its voyage in the Baltic, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the Andromeda suspects “used Poland as a logistical and financial hub.” The Polish government said that allegation was “completely false and is not supported by the evidence of the investigation.”

Along with Ukraine, the Polish government was the most vehement opponent of the Nord Stream pipeline. Poland has direct access to the sea and held its own exercises, code-named REKIN-22, in the Baltic in late September, just days before the pipelines were sabotaged. The day after the blasts, Poland cut the ribbon on a new pipeline that was established as a direct competitor to the Moscow-led initiative. The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Ukrainians who rented the Andromeda were Polish residents and used local bank accounts and paralegals for their business. “There is no evidence whatsoever that would indicate the involvement of Polish citizens in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline,” Polish investigators said in a carefully worded statement June 21.

“Russia, the United States, and any number of other state or independent actors have the infrastructure and ability to have carried this off at a reasonable cost,” said a former U.S. Navy underwater demolition specialist who reviewed Erik Andersson’s footage and other images. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he now works in the private sector and is not authorized to speak to the media. “It doesn’t have to necessarily be a James Bond-esque operation.”

Seismic Readings

Andersson’s data suggests that the seismic readings registered after the explosions were not caused exclusively from the detonation of the bombs, but were also the result of the sudden and immensely powerful release of the pressurized gas from inside the pipelines. Andersson reached that conclusion after he and his son, a computational engineer who works on seismic surveys in the oil industry, ran a series of advanced mathematical equations. First, they solved Euler’s equations in the geometry of the pipelines, which created a basis for them to make calculations about what happened inside the lines after they were punctured by bombs. This data allowed them to utilize seismic air gun simulation software developed at Stanford University to understand the dynamics of the massive gas bubbles caused by the puncturing of the lines. They also ran the rocket equation to calculate the propulsive force of the gas. “The signature of the gas explosion is much bigger than the signature from the bombs,” Andersson said.

If their calculations are correct, various speculations that the explosions would have required 500-900 kilograms of explosives may be erroneous. The New York Times cited a European lawmaker briefed by his country’s foreign intelligence service late last year as saying more than 1,000 pounds, or 453 kg, of “military grade” explosives were used in the operation. “I am saying with high confidence that I don’t think the bombs were that big,” Andersson said. “The size of the bomb cannot be determined by the seismic data currently available.”

Andersson used side scan sonar imaging to create underwater maps depicting the condition of all four Nord Stream pipeline strands in May 2023. The images were captured by Captain Patrik Juhlin of the Baltic Explorer. The first explosion of the Nord Stream sabotage occurred on a section of Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm at 2:03 am on September 26, 2022. The puncturing of the pipeline caused a massive release of gas, resulting in high thrusts that severed sections of the pipeline and left large craters on the seabed.

But Andersson is not just relying on calculating seismic and hydroacoustic levels to determine the size or placement of the bombs. His footage of a blast hole and other detonation sites suggest that the sabotage could have been accomplished with a smaller quantity of explosives: 50 kg or less for each line. “Fifty kilograms placed at intersections with concrete supports would probably do the trick,” said the former Navy demolition specialist who reviewed the footage. “At given pipeline pressures? Wow.” He and a German military explosive expert who also reviewed Andersson’s images agreed the bombs could potentially have been as small as 10 kg each depending on the specific type of explosives used.

Andersson’s video footage of the pipelines has convinced him that the saboteurs used slabs of explosives, rather than shaped charges, to puncture the lines. “It’s sloppily put there. It’s not professionally applied to surgically cut a hole in the pipeline or anything like that. That’s not what we’re seeing. It was crudely dug in a little bit in the mud next to the pipeline,” he said. “I think it tells a story of a diver who was in a hurry, perhaps diving without the possibility of surface decompression and thus only having 10-15 minutes to spend on the bottom.”

The former German military diver, who reviewed Andersson’s footage, agreed with his assessment that slabs of explosives rather than shaped charges were likely used at the site of the second explosion on Line A of Nord Stream 2. “With a shaped charge, we would see markers, cuts, the impact of the charge,” he said. “We would recognize it clearly. We don’t see that here. Everything speaks to a slab charge.”

With the images and footage currently available to the public, it is difficult to determine the nature of all of the bombs and whether they were identical at each site. The former U.S. Navy specialist said he would not entirely rule out that the saboteurs used cutting or shaped charges at some point in the operation because of their ability to forcefully and quickly pierce through metal and concrete. “I don’t think ‘cutting charges’ are mandatory given hydraulic pressures at depth and placement of charges,” he said. “Deformation of the pipe at a welded junction to the point of failure doesn’t require a cutting charge, in my opinion. But cutting charges make sense and are within the realm of plausibility for sure.”

Andersson also believes that his footage indicates that only one bomb was intended for each line, not two as Hersh has at times suggested . “I gave up the theory of double bombs after the expedition,” Andersson said. “I think there were just four.” All of this in turn could make it more plausible that a small team of divers could have pulled off the operation and not necessarily one sponsored or deployed by a major nation state like the U.S. or Russia. This would not exonerate any particular suspect, but it does suggest a wider circle of actors, nation states, or private groups could have pulled it off. 

Andersson may also have solved one of the several sub-mysteries of the Nord Stream saga: Why were only three of the four pipelines attacked? Proponents of the theory that Moscow did the bombing have pointed to the fact that the line closest to Russian territory was not damaged. This, they say, may be evidence Russia wanted to preserve a line in order to swiftly resume gas delivery should political winds shift on support for Ukraine or if Germany had faced a fuel or heating crisis last winter, as many analysts had predicted. Hersh, meanwhile, claimed that the bomb planted on the line closest to Russia simply failed to detonate and that the U.S. military clandestinely removed the evidence. “We were there within a day or two and picked it up and took it away so nobody else could see what kind of evidence there might be with the weapons used,” Hersh said.

Andersson believes that the saboteurs accidentally placed a second bomb on a northern section of Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That explosion did not result in the type of massive damage as the other three bombs because it had been depressurized following the initial blast 17 hours earlier. Line B of Nord Stream 2 was the only line to escape damage from the sabotage. Andersson believes the saboteurs experienced magnetic interference with their compasses when trying to place a bomb on Line B and accidentally rigged a second bomb to the A line, which was just 50 meters away.

On June 20, Der Spiegel reported that German investigators believe the fourth line was actually rigged with a bomb, but that it was a much smaller device than the others. But an official from Nord Stream 2 AG, the company that owns the pipeline, said that line is functional and remains filled with gas, though the company intentionally reduced its pressure to half the level it functioned at prior to the blasts. “Our concern is to safeguard the integrity of the line and safeguard any risk to the environment, to understand how we could stop any further gas seepage from the lines,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

On his expedition, Andersson filmed the aftermath of the destruction caused by the first bomb of the sabotage action, the one that blew up Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline at 2:03 a.m. About 70 kilometers northeast of that blast site, Andersson shot video of a puncture wound he believes was caused by a second bomb on that line. This was the discovery he described as the “holy grail” of his mission. He was able to film it because the line had depressurized after the initial blast, so it did not break the pipeline apart, and the hole from the bomb remained intact. That hole is just 50 meters away from the other strand of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the one closest to Russia.

Andersson suspects that the saboteurs encountered magnetic anomalies on their compasses when they were under water causing them to accidentally place two bombs on Line A of Nord Stream 2. “I would have made the same mistake with my drone if the captain hadn’t told me to make small moves and always return to the starting point,” Andersson said. “The compass pointed in the exact opposite direction of what it should, and before [the captain] advised me to turn back, I was heading full speed towards the wrong pipe. They are only 50 meters apart in that location. Maybe the compass failure was because of stray electrical currents in the pipeline itself, and if that situation appeared when the perpetrators executed their mission their compasses would have led them to the wrong string. It is possible that they accidentally blew up the A-string of Nord Stream 2 twice.”

A group of journalists who filmed a documentary for the BBC and Sweden’s Expressen newspaper encountered a compass malfunction similar to the one Andersson experienced when they filmed over the site late last year, according to a source who participated in the expedition.

Poseidon’s Peter Andersson made clear he has no decisive theory on what happened but said he believes the erratic compass theory is technically plausible. “When you’re trying to put the bombs under the pipe, you need to dig a little bit with your hands. It’s not rock-solid clay or something, it’s more like silt. It’s very loose, but you need to dig a little bit. And when you do this, the visibility becomes totally zero. It’s like in a mud cloud,” he said. In this case, he said, the saboteurs would have needed to rely exclusively on the compass readings. If those were inverted, as was the case with Erik’s readings during his survey of the Nord Stream 2 lines, it is possible they mistakenly placed a bomb on the wrong line. “If you’re doing this, you’re a little bit stressed. You have no clue. It’s not like walking in the forest. You have no clue when you look up which direction you are going or which direction you came from, because you just have to look at the compass.”

The former German military diver agreed that such compass interference can happen, including near pipelines like the Nord Stream, but he said professional divers should know how to calibrate them and adjust to such anomalies.

Andreas Köhler is the senior research seismologist at Norwegian Seismic Array, a joint initiative established in 1968 between the U.S. and Norway to aid in the detection of earthquakes and nuclear explosions. He co-authored an academic research study with colleagues from Germany, Sweden, and Denmark on the Nord Stream blasts, which was presented at a geosciences conference in Vienna in April, and is working on another report with an international team. “We observe seismic signals from four explosions,” he said via email. “One in the early morning at NS2 Southeast of the island of Bornholm, and three in the afternoon Northeast of Bornholm. Our data suggests that at least two occurred at NS1, possibly all three.” Based on their modeling and available data, the scientists determined they could not rule out a second explosion on Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Andersson suspects that the possible second bomb on that line was not detected by seismologists because it occurred at the same time as much more massive explosions were taking place. Köhler, who was aware of Andersson’s expedition, declined to comment. “We can’t comment on any public or private investigation as we’re only focused on analyzing the seismological data, which is our expertise,” he said.

Another scientist involved with the international academic study did not want to be identified for fear of irritating their government. That person said that multiple nations operating in the Baltic, including the U.S., have access to a far greater array of data, including from seismic readings and hydrophones, than the scientists possess and would likely be able to determine exactly where bombs were detonated and how large they were. Those governments have not made any of that data available.

“It goes way back to at least the ’60s — where we had this program of planting underwater microphones, hydrophones, under the water, in various chokepoints around the world, under the different oceans and sea,” said James Bamford, an expert on U.S. surveillance systems who has written several books about the NSA and CIA. “So, working secretly with the Swedish government, the U.S. planted a lot of these undersea hydrophones under the Baltic Sea, and those are sitting down there. And what they do is they listen, and they’re listening constantly.”

Eric Dunham, a geophysics professor at Stanford University, has been studying the Nord Stream blasts and is trying to determine which underwater events were a result of bombs and which were caused by gas release or other aftereffects of the puncturing of the pipelines. There are many challenges involved in answering these questions — or to definitively test Andersson’s theories. “Larger explosives produce higher amplitude blast waves as well as create larger gas bubbles that oscillate more slowly. Both the blast wave and bubble oscillations create hydroacoustic and seismic waves,” Dunham said. “However, a likely complication in the case of the Nord Stream events is gas discharge from the pipes. If the gas discharge is large enough, it can alter the hydroacoustic and seismic waves that are generated.”

Andersson said the image painted by Hersh of a state of alarm among planners of the U.S. operation when one of the bombs did not explode was, to him, one of the most interesting parts of the story. “It seemed to have some account of what happened after the blast, that it was panic,” Andersson said. “Hersh referred to some panic when everything didn’t explode and that eventually they were racing with American ships to the site and picked up those bombs. And I’ve been really trying to get the actual time when this happened.” He spent months reviewing marine traffic data and satellite images for any evidence of a U.S. ship in the area to conduct the sort of crime scene cleanup that Hersh reported. “If it turns out that there actually were no unexploded bombs, then of course this is something that’s just a major hoax,” he said. When pressed, Andersson finally says, “I just don’t think it happened.”

Andersson’s current hypothesis is that a small team of divers placed a single bomb under both lines of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and mistakenly placed two bombs on Line A of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. For yet unexplainable reasons, the first bomb on that line exploded at 2:03 a.m. and then all the other bombs exploded 17 hours later.

Erik Andersson on the Swedish island of Lyr on June 17, 2023.

Unresolved Questions

After Andersson’s expedition, reports emerged that German investigators had determined the type of explosives used in the operation, including octogen, which is insoluble in water and not difficult to obtain, particularly for a government. The Germans have reportedly matched samples taken from the blast site with the explosive traces left on the Andromeda. Andersson said he would like to verify those reports with his own evidence. “We took some sediment samples at the place where the bomb exploded on a depressurized pipeline,” he said. “It never hurts to double check.”

Two weeks after Andersson’s expedition, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. had intelligence three months before the attack that the Ukrainian military was planning an operation to sabotage the Nord Stream 1 pipeline using a small team of six divers. The paper asserted that European intelligence reports “made clear they were not rogue operatives. All those involved reported directly to Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer, who was put in charge so that the nation’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wouldn’t know about the operation.” Die Zeit then reported that last summer the CIA directly warned Ukraine not to carry out such an attack.

Though it was not his aim, Andersson’s research directly challenges Hersh’s details, as well as the narrative preferred by analysts who believe Russia carried out the bombing. In short, his findings bolster the case that Ukraine — or private actors — could be responsible for the attack. As for his confirmation bias in favor of Hersh’s narrative, the expedition changed his mind. “It’s not the main hypothesis anymore in my mind. In my main story, they were fairly primitive divers going in with a big slab of explosives. They dug in next to the pipelines and they placed them. There were four separate dives, but there was simplified logistics. It could have been a small boat, and they made a big mistake, and they ended up putting one bomb on the wrong pipe. That’s the story that is in my mind.”

Andersson’s mission did not solve the mystery of the Nord Stream bombing — he never thought it would — but the data he collected does contribute to the public understanding of what occurred.

During his expedition, Andersson also discovered a single diver’s boot near the site of the string of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was bombed but did not explode. A freelance journalist who accompanied Andersson published an article speculating about the boot’s origins, but Andersson acknowledges that the boot could have belonged to any number of actors in the highly trafficked sea and may not be connected to the bombing. He admits that experts he consulted “didn’t make much of it.” But, he says, he cannot rule out that it was lost by one of the perpetrators and may contain forensic evidence linking it to the crime. “We never expected to find any traces of the perpetrators, but nevertheless we ran across a diver’s boot,” he said. “I have talked to Captain Patrik about retrieving the boot. We can do it, if someone pays for it. That would also be a good demonstration of what it means to dive at this site.” 

Greinert, the German marine geologist, cautioned that Andersson’s expedition took place eight months after the Nord Stream bombings. During that time, multiple governments have examined the crime scene and retrieved evidence. “What was looked at here in May is no longer the original,” he said. “You have to take that into account.” He added, “From what you see, you can only draw conclusions about what happened, not who. Unless someone has left his credit card there.”

Andersson said he is keeping an open mind about all possible culprits and is eager for his data to be reviewed by more experts who can fact-check his own calculations and hypotheses . “I want to put everything in open source for people to look at,” he says. “I think if a person is doing something, you should assume innocence until they’re proven guilty. But when big governments do things, they shouldn’t have that protection.” The Baltic Sea, he adds, is a heavily surveilled and trafficked body of water. It is populated by swarms of advanced underwater monitoring devices, with the skies above and the water below patrolled by multiple nations’ naval vessels and aircraft. Andersson refuses to accept that the U.S. and its allies do not know exactly what happened last September 26, and he questions the motives behind their secrecy. “I don’t think the nationality of the divers is the huge thing,” said Andersson. “The Hersh story and Andromeda story are very similar in terms of how the bombs were placed and the size of the bombs.”

While Andersson now doubts the veracity of many details in Hersh’s account of the Nord Stream bombings, he is not yet prepared to exonerate the Biden administration. “Even if Ukraine planned and executed the operation, I can’t stop thinking that the U.S. was in on it in a way that makes them responsible,” he said. “At a minimum, Ukraine must have been certain that the U.S. would celebrate a successful sabotage of Nord Stream. And that’s what happened. Antony Blinken said it was a ‘great opportunity’ and Victoria Nuland cheered that the pipes had been turned into scrap metal. So, if Ukraine did it, they did it for the team, and if they didn’t inform their team leader, the USA, about all details, it was because that’s what was expected of them.”

Contact the author:

The Biggest Whodunnit of the Century

Russia Calls for U.N. Investigation of Nord Stream Attack, as Hersh Accuses White House of False Flag

Conflicting Reports Thicken Nord Stream Bombing Plot

An Especially Cold Winter: How Trump Helped Cause the European Natural Gas Crisis

Latest stories.

Israel’s War on Gaza

Kamala Harris Refused to Meet With Uncommitted About Gaza — and Uncommitted Refused to Endorse Her

The movement counts among its ranks many disillusioned Arab and Muslim voters in the key swing state of Michigan.

Paging The Hague: Israel’s Exploding Electronics Might Be War Crimes

Jonah Valdez

Experts on international law pointed to the indiscriminate nature of the blasts in Lebanon and the prohibition on booby traps.

Pegasus Spyware Victims Ask U.K. Police to Charge Shadowy NSO Group

Georgia Gee

So far, no one has been able to hold the notorious Israeli spyware firm accountable for complicity in human rights abuses.

A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage

It was the kind of outlandish scheme that might bubble up in a bar around closing time.

In May of 2022, a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen had gathered to toast their country’s remarkable success in halting the Russian invasion. Buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor, somebody suggested a radical next step: destroying Nord Stream.

After all, the twin natural-gas pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe were providing billions to the Kremlin war machine. What better way to make Vladimir Putin pay for his aggression?

Just over four months later, in the small hours of Sept. 26, Scandinavian seismologists picked up signals indicating an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption hundreds of miles away, near the Danish island of Bornholm. They were caused by three powerful explosions and the largest-ever recorded release of natural gas, equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of Denmark.

One of the most audacious acts of sabotage in modern history, the operation worsened an energy crisis in Europe—an assault on critical infrastructure that could be considered an act of war under international law. Theories swirled about who was responsible. Was it the CIA? Could Putin himself have set the plan in motion?

Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told. The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. It involved a small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers. One was a woman, whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise.

“I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites,” one officer who was involved in the plot said. “The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the plan, according to one officer who participated and three people familiar with it. But later, when the CIA learned of it and asked the Ukrainian president to pull the plug, he ordered a halt, those people said.

Zelensky’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was leading the effort, nonetheless forged ahead.

The Journal spoke to four senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot. All of them said the pipelines were a legitimate target in Ukraine’s war of defense against Russia.

Portions of their account were corroborated by a nearly two-year German police investigation into the attack, which has obtained evidence including email, mobile and satellite phones communications, as well as fingerprints and DNA samples from the alleged sabotage team. The Germany inquiry hasn’t directly linked President Zelensky to the clandestine operation.

Gen. Zaluzhniy, now Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, said in a text exchange that he knows nothing of any such operation and that any suggestion to the contrary is a “mere provocation.” Ukraine’s armed forces, he added, weren’t authorized to conduct overseas missions, and he therefore wouldn’t have been involved.

A senior official of the main Ukrainian intelligence service, SBU, denied his government had anything to do with the sabotage, and said that Zelensky in particular “did not approve the implementation of any such actions on the territory of third countries and did not issue relevant orders.”

Putin has publicly blamed the U.S. for the attacks. A senior Russian diplomat in Berlin echoed that claim, and said the German investigation findings were “fairy tales worthy of the Brothers Grimm.”

In June, Germany’s federal prosecutor quietly issued the first arrest warrant in the case for a Ukrainian professional diving instructor for his alleged involvement in the sabotage. The German investigation is now focusing on Zaluzhniy and his aides, people familiar with the probe say, although they have no evidence that could be presented in court.

The findings could upend relations between Kyiv and Berlin, which has provided much of the financing and military equipment to Ukraine, second only to the U.S. Some German political leaders may have been willing to overlook evidence pointing to Ukraine for fear of undermining domestic support for the war effort. But German police are politically independent and their investigation took on a life of its own as they pursued one lead after another.

“An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash,” said a senior German official familiar with the probe.

Following the May 2022 pact between the businessmen and the military officers, it was agreed that the former would finance and help execute the project, because the army had no funds and was increasingly relying on foreign financing as it pushed back against the onslaught of its gargantuan neighbor. A sitting general with experience in special operations would oversee the mission, which one participant described as a “public-private partnership.” He would report directly to the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, the four-star Gen. Zaluzhniy.

Within days, Zelensky approved the plan, according to the four people familiar with the plot. All arrangements were made verbally, leaving no paper trail.

But the next month, the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD learned of the plot and warned the CIA, according to several people familiar with the Dutch report. U.S. officials then promptly informed Germany, according to U.S. and German officials.

The CIA warned Zelensky’s office to stop the operation, U.S. officials said. The Ukrainian president then ordered Zalyzhniy to halt it, according to Ukrainian officers and officials familiar with the conversation as well as Western intelligence officials. But the general ignored the order, and his team modified the original plan, these people said.

The general tasked with commanding the operation enlisted some of Ukraine’s top special-operations officers with experience in orchestrating high-risk clandestine missions against Russia to help coordinate the attack.

One of them was Roman Chervinsky, a decorated colonel who previously served in Ukraine’s main security and intelligence service, the SBU.

Chervinsky is currently on trial in Ukraine for unrelated charges. In July, he was released on bail after over a year in detention. Reached after his release, he declined to comment on the Nord Stream case, saying he wasn’t authorized to speak about it.

In a subsequent broadcast interview, he said that the sabotage had two positive effects for Ukraine: It helped loosen Russia’s grip on the European countries supporting Kyiv, and it left Moscow with only one main avenue for channeling gas to Europe, pipelines traversing Ukraine. Despite the war, Ukraine collects lucrative transit fees for Russian oil and gas estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Chervinsky and the sabotage team initially studied an older, elaborate plan to blow up the pipeline drafted by Ukrainian intelligence and Western experts after Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, according to people familiar with the plot.

After dismissing that idea due its cost and complexity, the planners settled on using a small sailing boat and a team of six—a mix of seasoned active duty soldiers and civilians with maritime expertise—to blow up the 700-mile-long pipelines that sat more than 260 feet below the sea’s surface.

In September 2022, the plotters rented a 50-foot leisure yacht called Andromeda in Germany’s Baltic port town of Rostock. The boat was leased with the help of a Polish travel agency that was set up by Ukrainian intelligence as a cover for financial transactions nearly a decade ago, according to Ukrainian officers and people familiar with the German investigation.

One crew member, a military officer on active duty who was fighting in the war, was a seasoned skipper, and four were experienced deep-sea divers, people familiar with the German investigation said. The crew included civilians, one of whom was a woman in her 30s who had trained privately as a diver. She was handpicked for her skills but also to lend more plausibility to the crew’s disguise as friends on holiday, according to one person familiar with the planning.

The skipper took a short leave from his unit, which had been fighting on the front in the southeast of Ukraine, and his commander was kept in the dark, according to two Ukrainians familiar with the plot.

Ukraine has a long history of training top civilian and military divers. A naval base on the Crimean Peninsula in the past trained deep-sea divers for the purposes of sabotage and demining. It also kept combat dolphins trained to attack enemy divers and blow up ships, according to two senior Ukrainian officers. The base was taken over by Russia after it occupied Crimea, and some of its staff moved elsewhere in Ukraine.

Armed only with diving equipment, satellite navigation, a portable sonar and open-source maps of the seabed charting the position of the pipelines, the crew set out. The four divers worked in pairs, according to people familiar with the German investigation. Operating in pitch-dark, icy waters, they handled a powerful explosive known as HMX that was wired to timer-controlled detonators. A small amount of the light explosive would be sufficient to rip open the high-pressure pipes.

Spending 20 minutes at that depth requires around three hours of decompression, and the person must then refrain from diving for at least 24 hours or risk serious injury.

Inclement weather forced the crew to make an unplanned stop in the Swedish port of Sandhamn. One diver accidentally dropped an explosive device to the bottom of the sea. The crew briefly discussed whether to abort the operation due to the bad weather but the storm soon subsided, two people familiar with the operation said.

Witnesses on other yachts moored in Sandhamn noted that the Andromeda was the only boat with a small Ukrainian flag hoisted on its mast.

In the wake of the attack, which took out three of the four conduits forming the pipelines, energy prices surged. Germany and other nations scrambled to nationalize energy companies that handled Russian gas but collapsed after the pipelines were destroyed. Even today Germany is paying around $1 million a day alone to lease floating terminals for liquefied natural gas or LNG, which only partly replaced the Russian gas flows channeled by Nord Stream.

Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the U.S., among others, sent out warships, divers, underwater drones and aircraft to investigate the area around the gas leaks.

Zelensky took Zaluzhniy to task, but the general shrugged off his criticism, according to three people familiar with the exchange. Zaluzhniy told Zelensky that the sabotage team, once dispatched, went incommunicado and couldn’t be called off because any contact with them could compromise the operation.

“He was told it’s like a torpedo—once you fire it at the enemy, you can’t pull it back again, it just keeps going until it goes ‘boom,’ ” a senior officer familiar with the conversation said.

Days after the attack, in October 2022, Germany’s foreign secret service received a second tipoff about the Ukrainian plot from the CIA, which again passed on a report by the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD. It offered a detailed account of the attack, including the type of boat used and the possible route taken by the crew, according to German and Dutch officials.

The Netherlands built deep intelligence-gathering capacity in Ukraine and Russia after Russian-backed paramilitaries downed a Malaysia Airlines flight originating from Amsterdam over eastern Ukraine, two Dutch officials said.

Due to rules governing the sharing of classified intelligence, German police investigating the case weren’t allowed to see the Dutch report that linked Zaluzhniy and the Ukrainian military to the attack, but they were made aware of it by intelligence officials.

German investigators questioned dozens of potential witnesses, scanned the bottom of the sea around the blasts and sifted through masses of data including digital communication, travel records and financial transactions.

They had one lucky break. In rushing to leave Germany, the sabotage crew neglected to wash the Andromeda, allowing German detectives to find traces of explosives, fingerprints and DNA samples of the crew.

Investigators later identified their mobile phone numbers and their Iridium satellite phone. That data allowed them to reconstruct the entire journey of the boat, which moored in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. U.S. authorities sought a court order to obtain from Google the emails a Ukrainian businessman used to lease the boat, and handed them over to the Germans. That Ukrainian businessman had contacted a number of boat rental firms in Sweden as well as in Germany, starting from mid-May 2022.

Investigators then analyzed all mobile phone traffic in the areas where the boat was located, trawling through thousands of connections to distill the relevant data.

At one point they were startled to find out that thousands of German mobile phones were active in the tiny Swedish port of Sandhamn, which was nearly empty at the time the boat was sheltering there from a storm.

It later emerged that a vast cruise ship belonging to a tourist operator passed by and the phones of German passengers briefly linked up with the local cellular mast.

They struggled at one point to secure the cooperation of Polish authorities despite the fact that the saboteurs used Poland partly as a logistical base and stopped in the Polish port of Kolobrzeg.

A port official suspicious of the yacht’s crew alerted police. Poland’s border guard checked the identification of the crew, who produced passports from European Union members. They were allowed to continue sailing north, where they laid the rest of the mines, people familiar with the investigation say.

The entire port was covered by extensive video surveillance, they found. However, despite a history of close cooperation between Warsaw and Berlin in police matters, Polish officials initially refused to hand over the CCTV footage of the port. This year, they told their German colleagues that the footage had been routinely destroyed shortly after the Andromeda departed.

The Polish internal security agency ABW told the Journal that no such footage exists.

By November 2022, German investigators believed Ukrainians were behind the explosion.

Earlier this year, Zelensky ousted Zaluzhniy from his military post, saying a shakeup was needed to reboot the war effort. Zaluzhniy, who has been viewed domestically as a potential political rival, was later appointed Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.K., a position that grants him immunity from prosecution.

In June, German officials issued a confidential arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen who the Germans believe was one of the crew members. According to people familiar with the investigation, a van driving the Ukrainian sabotage team from Poland into Germany in 2022 was snapped by a German speed camera, and the man, a diving instructor living with his family near Warsaw, was in the photo.

Authorities in Poland didn’t act on the warrant. The instructor is believed to have since returned to Ukraine. Poland’s failure to arrest him is a major blow to the German probe, because he and other suspects have now been tipped off and will avoid travelling outside Ukraine, people familiar with the investigation said. Ukraine doesn’t extradite its own citizens.

Ukrainian officials who participated in or are familiar with the plot believe it would be impossible to put any of the commanding officers on trial, because no evidence exists beyond conversations among top officials who were, at least initially, all in agreement about wanting to blow up the pipelines.

“None of them will testify, lest they incriminate themselves,” one former officer said.

Drew Hinshaw contributed to this article.

Write to Bojan Pancevski at [email protected]

Supported by

Nord Stream AG

Advertisement

Germany Issues Arrest Warrant for Ukrainian Over Nord Stream Explosion

The sabotage of the pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe has become one of the central mysteries of the war in Ukraine.

By Melissa Eddy and Julian E. Barnes

Finland’s New President Faces Unexpected First Test: Not Russia, but Trump

Alexander Stubb was elected vowing to bolster Finland’s new role in NATO, just as Trump’s threats have thrown the future of the alliance into doubt.

By Johanna Lemola and Erika Solomon

Sweden Closes Investigation of Pipeline Blasts, but Stays Silent on Cause

The natural-gas connection was sabotaged in September 2022, seven months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prompting rampant speculation about who was to blame.

By Rebecca R. Ruiz and David E. Sanger

C.I.A. Told Ukraine Last Summer It Should Not Attack Nord Stream Pipelines

Dutch intelligence officials shared information with the C.I.A. in June 2022 that they had learned the Ukrainian military had been planning an operation using divers to blow up one of the pipelines.

By Julian E. Barnes and Michael Schwirtz

Americans Were Aware of Intelligence Warning of Ukrainian Pipeline Attacks

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of plans to attack the Nord Stream pipelines three months before they were bombed.

By Julian E. Barnes

Suspicions Multiply as Nord Stream Sabotage Remains Unsolved

Intelligence leaks surrounding the sabotage of the pipelines have provided more questions than answers. It may be in no one’s interest to reveal more.

By Erika Solomon

Germany treads a careful line over reports that a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline.

Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Germany was waiting for further investigations, after reports in The New York Times and other news outlets.

By Christopher F. Schuetze

Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipelines?

A Times investigation may finally have revealed who was behind the sabotage in the Baltic Sea.

By Michael Barbaro, Clare Toeniskoetter, Carlos Prieto, Michael Benoist, Diane Wong, Dan Powell, Marion Lozano and Chris Wood

Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say

New intelligence reporting amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Europe.

By Adam Entous, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman

Your Tuesday Briefing: China Menaces Taiwan

Also, an emerging picture of China’s Covid crisis.

By Amelia Nierenberg

Luxury yacht sinks after fire in California; multiple explosions heard on video

A luxury yacht in marina del rey sank on wednesday night due to a fire caused by a fireworks explosion on board. the admiral was engulfed in flames, leading to multiple explosions in the harbor., september 19, 2024, what’s next for russia, what comes next after texas school shooting, what's next for abortion rights in america, the new battle for voting rights, how we can build a clean and renewable future, the fight for kyiv, examining extremism in the military, gun violence: an american epidemic, border crisis: what’s happening at the us-mexico border, remembering george floyd: a year of protest, the source of covid-19: what we know, how did the gamestop stock spike on wall street happen, why are people hesitant to trust a covid-19 vaccine, how climate change and forest management make wildfires harder to contain, disparity in police response: black lives matter protests and capitol riot, 2020 in review: a year unlike any other, examined: how putin keeps power, why don’t the electoral college and popular vote always match up, us crosses 250,000 coronavirus deaths, 2nd impeachment trial: what this could mean for trump, presidential transition of power: examined, how donald trump spent his last days as president, how joe biden's inauguration will be different from previous years, belarus’ ongoing protests: examined, trump challenges the vote and takes legal action, 2020’s dnc and rnc are different than any before, what is happening with the usps, voting in 2020 during covid-19, disinformation in 2020, abc news specials on, impact x nightline: on the brink, impact x nightline: unboxing shein, the lady bird diaries, impact x nightline: it's britney, impact x nightline: natalee holloway -- a killer confesses, impact x nightline: who shot tupac, impact x nightline, power trip: those who seek power and those who chase them, the murders before the marathon, the ivana trump story: the first wife, mormon no more, leave no trace: a hidden history of the boy scouts, keeper of the ashes: the oklahoma girl scout murders, the orphans of covid: america's hidden toll, superstar: patrick swayze, the kardashians -- an abc news special, 24 months that changed the world, have you seen this man.

Continuing Coverage

Yacht with fireworks on board goes up in flames in Marina del Rey

Neighbors reported the sounds of frightening explosions coming from the vessel., by missael soto • published september 18, 2024 • updated 3 hours ago.

Witnesses described powerful explosions as a large yacht with fireworks and unspent ammunition on board went up in flames Wednesday night in Marina del Rey.

Neighbors were worried the fire would jump to nearby boats after hearing loud explosions coming from the 100-foot vessel.

📺 Los Angeles news 24/7: Watch NBC4 free wherever you are

"I saw it fully engulfed in flames and like many of us living here heard an explosion and saw fireworks coming off it, and more flames and then walked down here and captured video of it," said Marina del Rey resident Lynn Rose.

In addition to the fireworks, an LA County Fire Captain told NBC4 that there was live ammunition on the vessel.

Get top local stories in Southern California delivered to you every morning . Sign up for NBC LA's News Headlines newsletter.

"According to boat owner 1,000 rounds of unspent ammunition and fireworks onboard,'' the county fire department said in a statement Thursday morning.

The call came in at around 8:30 p.m. of a vessel burning at 2201 Basin A in Marina del Rey.

"It’s a delicate balance with putting the fire out and not sinking the boat, there are a lot of environmental hazards on the boat fuel oil what have you, and so we’re doing that delicate dance of putting the fire out but not sinking the vessel in the slip," said Capt. Pono Barnes, of lifeguard services with the LA County Fire Department.

Get Los Angeles's latest local news on crime, entertainment, weather, schools, COVID, cost of living and more. Here's your go-to source for today's LA news.

Evacuations ordered in Ventura neighborhood due to methane gas odor

Simone Biles, Jordan Chiles to perform at Gold Over America Tour in downtown LA

Fire officials say no one was on the yacht at the time of the fire and there were no injuries.

The fuel spill cleanup operation could take several days. It was not immediately clear when the boat will be removed from the water. An environmental hazard team was called to the site.

A United States Coast Guard Incident Management Team also responded to scene.

"The fire did not appear to damage any other vessels in the harbor,'' the USCG said in a statement Thursday morning. "The Coast Guard is working with Patriot Environmental Services and Clean Harbors organizations to contain and recover the discharge from the yacht.

"The yacht's fuel capacity is reported to be 6,000 gallons. Crews from California Department of Fish and Wildlife's Office of Spill Prevention and Response and Los Angeles County Sheriff's (Department) are also assisting in the efforts."

The Oiled Wildlife Care Network also was notified and remains on standby, according to the Coast Guard.

"No observations of oiled wildlife have been reported at this time," the Coast Guard said.

This article tagged under:

Menendez Brothers: Testimony of Lyle and Erik Menendez, and the trial marred by wealth and abuse

True crime files: the menendez brothers.

The faded photographs show a family who appeared to have it all. Jose, Kitty, Lyle and Erik Menendez all smiling at birthday parties, Christmas morning and enjoying vacations.

A new documentary streaming on Netflix Thursday brings renewed interest in one of the most infamous murder cases in Southern California. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story , revisits the case that riveted the nation and pulled back the curtains on a wealthy family's inner turmoil, Lyle and Erik Menendez , who were convicted of killing their parents, José and Mary (Kitty) Menendez in 1996. 

FOX 11 has covered the case since 1989 — from the murders, to the trial, to the new push from a group of TikTok users to free the brothers. Here's a look back at the case:

Lyle Menendez, Kitty Menendez, Jose Menendez, Erik Menendez. (KTTV Archives) (FOX 11)

José and Kitty Menendez were found shot to death inside their Beverly Hills mansion on August 20, 1989. The couple's deaths shocked the world. Investigators said Lyle Menendez had called 911, crying hysterically and telling the operator his parents had been killed.

 (KTTV Archives) (FOX 11)

The case drew significant media attention due to the family's wealth, the gruesome nature of the killings, and the defense's strategy during the trial. The courtroom became a battleground of narratives, pitting accusations of cold-blooded murder for inheritance against claims of self-defense rooted in a history of abuse.

Father José was an entertainment executive, and mother Kitty was a former beauty queen.

Jose and Kitty Menendez. (KTTV Archives) (FOX 11)

The Menendez family's lavish Beverly Hills mansion set the stage for a crime that defied the family's public image. The infamous mansion — which was valued at $4 million at the time of their deaths, was recently sold in March 2024 for $17 million.

The home of the Menendez family, where the infamous murders took place. (KTTV Archives)

At first, there was speculation the mob had committed the brutal slayings. But soon, a true picture emerged — revealing the real killers were the victim’s two sons, Lyle and Erik Menendez.

Menendez brothers, Erik, left, and Lyle, right, on the steps of their Beverly Hills home in November, 1989. (Ronald L. Soble / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The brothers never denied carrying out the killings, but contended they were repeatedly sexually assaulted by their father and feared for their lives. As a result, defense attorneys argued that the brothers "did not harbor the mental state needed for first-degree murder and were therefore guilty of manslaughter."

Lyle Menendez and Erik Menendez with their father, Jose Menendez. (KTTV Archives) (FOX 11)

Prosecutors, however, said the killings were motivated by greed, pointing to lavish spending sprees by the brothers after the killings, and arguing they were guilty of first-degree murder.

News clippings from the trial detailed how the teenagers' involvement in tennis and other activities masked deeper issues within the Menendez household.

Young Lyle Menendez. (KTTV Archives)

During the trial, former coaches and teachers painted a picture of José  Menendez as an overbearing figure, inciting numerous anecdotes about his treatment of his sons. Witnesses like Lyle's former tennis coach, depicted José as a strict parent who demanded excellence, especially on the tennis court. Another coach who testified noted the elder Menendez's relentless drive. Whether disrupting his sons' tennis lessons or expressing dissatisfaction with their academic performance, José 's intense pressure was evident, the court heard.

Erik, seen as the lesser-favored son, faced his own battles. Struggling academically with a learning disability, he was denied special help by his parents. Teachers from his prep school attested to the pressures placed on the Menendez brothers, with suspicions that the heavy tennis commitments resulted in others doing their homework for them.

Lyle Menendez's emotional testimony peeled back layers of their childhood, revealing disturbing memories of being exposed to sexually violent content and claims of sexual abuse by their father.

Lyle Menendez. (KTTV Archives) (FOX 11)

His defense attorney, Jill Lansing, led him through a recounting of his childhood under the harsh rule of his father and a distant mother who told him he had ruined her life. It was within these details that the defense argued for understanding the brothers' mindset. Lyle described being pushed into rigorous sports training, discouragement from socializing, and punishment for minor infractions. The court also heard of darker testimonies, including sex between men being openly discussed, sexually violent, pornographic movies, and allegations of sexual molestation by José , depicted through naked photos of young Lyle.

Photographs presented at trial. (FOX 11 Archives)

Lyle told the court that his childhood abuse began when he was six years old, at their home in New York . He said that the sexual interactions with his father became more intense when he was seven and broke down after nearly two hours of testimony about the abuse. Lyle said his father stopped molesting him when he was eight. About the time he said, José Menendez started having sex with Erik. 

Group of TikTok users leading push to free Menendez Brothers

TikTok users are leading an online push to free Lyle and Erik Menendez, two brothers convicted of killing their parents in Beverly Hills.

During Erik's testimony, he talked about his abuse, stating, "I just wanted to die… Life no longer mattered. And I didn't know what to do. I thought of telling Lyle… I thought I couldn't do that — that it would be too embarrassing, and that I couldn't admit it."

Erik revealed to Lyle that he had been molested for years after a fight with their mother, which occurred six days before the brothers killed their parents, making Lyle angry. Lyle was confused and upset about why Erik never resisted or told anyone about the ongoing molestation and questioned Erik's reactions to the abuse. Erik and Lyle agreed to confront their father about the molestation three days prior to the killings, but the confrontation did not yield a positive outcome. During the confrontation, Lyle threatened to expose their father, who in turn went to Erik's room and implicitly threatened him for telling Lyle about the abuse. Erik testified that José threatened Erik for telling Lyle about the molestation and stated that he would not let Lyle tell anyone else.

When directly asked, Erik implied that his father had previously threatened to kill him if he ever told anyone about the molestation. Erik testified that he believed that his father and mother posed a threat to his and Lyle's lives, with his mother being seen as complicit in the potential violence. Erik interpreted his mother's statement about things possibly working out if he had kept quiet as an indication that she was involved in a plan to harm them.

Amid Lyle's testimony, he claimed that he and Erik had acted under the belief that their lives were at risk. Prosecutors probed Lyle for indications that his actions were inconsistent with genuine fear, including not expressing concern about his mother's rifles and the brothers' failure to seek police assistance. The prosecution pointed to lavish purchases made in the wake of the murders — a stark contrast to claims of self-preservation.

During an intensive cross-examination, Lyle maintained that the shooting unfolded in a moment of panic, fearing that an argument with their parents was a precursor to their planned deaths. Prosecutors challenged the narrative using a detailed floor plan of the mansion, raising questions about the consistency and believability of Lyle's version of events.

Evidence presented during the trial detailed the floor plan of the Menendez mansion. (KTTV Archives) (FOX 11)

As the trial progressed, a key focus was the brothers' confessions to Dr. Jerome Oziel, their psychotherapist. During the trial, his testimony faced legal controversy due to concerns about patient-client confidentiality. The prosecution aimed to use his statements to pursue the death penalty, while defense attorney Leslie Abramson challenged Oziel’s credibility and ethical practices, citing a complaint from the state psychology board. 

Dr. Jerome Oziel was a key part of the Menéndez brothers' trial. (KTTV Archives) (FOX 11)

During his testimony, Oziel said that Erik Menendez confessed that he and his brother murdered their parents. Oziel’s girlfriend overheard the confession and, concerned for her safety, went to the police. 

The prosecution argued that the murders were premeditated and driven by greed, pointing to the brothers’ extravagant spending after their parents’ deaths. Following the murders, Lyle and Erik began using their parents' money to buy luxury cars, expensive clothing, and even to go on lavish trips. This sudden spending spree raised suspicions, as the brothers seemed unaffected by their parents’ deaths.

Fast-forward to closing arguments, where Prosecutor Pamela Bozanich aimed to center the narrative firmly on the aspect of greed, steering it away from the allegations of child abuse. Bozanich characterized the brothers as murderers, not victims, accusing the defense of employing the abuse storyline as a strategic diversion. The defense contended that understanding the alleged abuse was imperative, with Lyle's testimony serving to illustrate the oppressive atmosphere allegedly catalyzing the fatal night.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE:

• Citing new evidence, Menendez brothers look to overturn murder convictions
• True Crime Files: Group of TikTok users leading push to free Menendez Brothers
• True Crime Files: New images show the Menendez family during happier times
• Former Menudo member alleges he was drugged and raped by father of Menendez brothers at 14-years-old

Despite the defense's efforts, who implored the jury to look beyond the brothers' affluent background, Bozanich countered fiercely. She presented contrasting stories of abuse survivors who did not resort to killing, subsequently painting Kitty Menendez in a more compassionate light. The goal was explicit — to reclaim the Menendez parents' reputations.

After weeks of deliberations, jurors in both Erik and Lyle's trials told Judge Weisberg that they could not agree on a verdict, resulting in a mistrial. Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti immediately announced that the Menendez brothers would face a second trial for first-degree murder, with no possibility of plea bargaining.

In 1995, the brothers were retried, but this time the judge did not allow cameras in the courtroom and placed limits on the defense's presentation of evidence regarding the abuse allegations. During the second trial, the brothers were found guilty of first-degree murder of both their parents and conspiracy to commit murder. Both brothers were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. They have repeatedly appealed their convictions to no avail.

In 2021, a group of TikTok users dubbed the ‘ Menendez Defenders and Guardians ’ made a push to free the brothers. The young supporters sent letters to Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles County DA Geoge Gascón , explaining they've studied the case and believe the justice system got it wrong. Just last year, attorneys for the brothers filed court papers contending that newly surfaced evidence warrants the overturning of the brothers' convictions.

The Menendez brothers remain in prison, where they have been serving their sentences since 1996.