Investigating the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage

“The key question is not what kind of surveillance there was, but why the lack of surveillance for this pipeline — and other pipelines and electric cables and the underwater cables on the seabed,” said Niklas Rossbach, deputy research director at the Swedish Defense Research Agency.

The Baltic is also a giant graveyard for unexploded munitions and chemical weapons dumped after the World Wars. Expeditions to clear those obstacles are common, meaning the expertise to carry out underwater detonation is ubiquitous. Several countries along the Baltic, including Russia, have dive teams that specialize in seabed operations, officials in the region said. Russia, with a port along the Baltic, has small, quiet submarines that can move undetected, according to former military and intelligence officials in the region.

After the blasts, Poland and Ukraine openly blamed Russia but provided no evidence. In an interview, Daniel Stenling, Sweden’s top counterintelligence official, declined to speculate on a perpetrator. But he placed the Nord Stream attack squarely in the context of increasingly brazen Russian espionage.

“In the big context of the war in Ukraine that is ongoing, it’s very interesting and very serious,” he said of the blasts, repeatedly emphasizing growing threats from Russian spycraft and cyberattacks.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/world/europe/nordstream-pipeline-explosion-russia.html