KYIV - An adviser to Ukraine’s president has denied fresh allegations of his country’s involvement in explosions that damaged the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and instead pointed the finger at Russia.
“Such an act can only be carried out with extensive technical and financial resources … and who possessed all this at the time of the bombing? Only Russia,” Mykhailo Podolyak said in written comments to Reuters on Thursday.
The multi-billion dollar Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines transporting gas under the Baltic Sea were ruptured by a series of explosions in September 2022, seven months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Speculation has long swirled about who was behind the operation, with both Ukraine and Russia denying any involvement.
This week The Wall Street Journal reported that Ukraine’s top military commander at the time, Valery Zaluzhny, oversaw the plan to blow up the pipelines used by Russia to deliver gas to Europe.
Polish prosecutors said on Wednesday that Poland had received a European arrest warrant issued by Berlin in connection with the attack, but the suspect, a Ukrainian man named as Volodymyr Z, has already left Poland.
Germany has said the Ukrainian diving instructor was allegedly part of a team that blew up the pipelines.
“Ukraine has nothing to do with the Nord Stream explosions,” Podolyak said, adding that Kyiv did not gain any strategic or tactical advantage from the blasts.
Russia has already blamed the United States, Britain and Ukraine for the blasts, which largely cut Russian gas off from the lucrative European market. Those countries have denied involvement.
Germany, Denmark and Sweden all opened investigations into the incident, and the Swedes found traces of explosives on several objects recovered from the explosion site, confirming the blasts were deliberate acts.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022 was approved by senior officials in Kyiv, the Journal reported, with President Volodymyr Zelensky initially giving his support.
The idea emerged during a meeting of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen in May 2022, just months after Moscow invaded Ukraine.
Six people were directly involved in carrying out the operation, which cost around $300,000 and was privately financed, the newspaper said.
Using a rented yacht, they sailed out to the area of the pipelines and dived down to lay explosives on them.
CIA steps in
Zelensky also initially approved the operation. But when the US Central Intelligence Agency learned of the plan, they asked him to stop it going ahead and he ordered a halt, according to the Journal.
But Zaluzhny, who was removed from his post earlier this year in a shake-up, pushed ahead anyway, the report said, citing Ukrainian officials.
Zelensky took the military commander to task for going ahead with the operation despite the order to pull the plug, according to the paper.
But the commander replied that once the sabotage team had been dispatched, they could not be called off.
“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 was cited as saying.
Contacted by the Journal, Zaluzhny — now Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain — said he did not know anything about such an operation and any suggestion to the contrary was a “mere provocation”.
