By Rebecca R. Ruiz and Justin Scheck
Section: World
Source: New York Times
Published Date: December 26, 2022 at 02:00AM
As investigators piece together clues, Russia has quietly taken steps to begin expensive repairs on the giant gas pipeline, complicating theories about who was behind September’s sabotage.
More than 15 years ago, when the Nord Stream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany was little more than an idea, a Swedish government study warned of the risks inherent in running a critical piece of energy infrastructure along the Baltic Sea floor.The pipeline would be vulnerable to even the most rudimentary form of sabotage, analysts wrote, and underwater surveillance would be nearly impossible. The 2007 study, written by the Swedish Defense Research Agency, even posited a scenario:
“One diver would be enough to set an explosive device.”
Today, European investigators face almost exactly that scenario. The Swedish authorities leading a criminal investigation have concluded that a state actor was most likely responsible for a September blast that ripped through the gas pipes. Officials and experts say that explosives were probably dropped from ships or — just as the Swedish report warned — planted on the seafloor using submarines or divers.
Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/world/europe/nordstream-pipeline-explosion-russia.html
“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.
“We have seen increased acts from Russia for a long time now,” he said.
Russia, for its part, has blamed Britain, also without evidence.
Russia has a history of using energy to exert influence and has an interest in fracturing alliances within Europe. But the theory that Russia carried out the blasts, repeated often by Western officials, has only gotten more complicated.
In recent weeks, Nord Stream AG, which is majority-owned by a Kremlin-controlled company, has begun pricing out the cost to repair the pipe and restore gas flow, according to a person briefed on the work who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about it publicly. One repair estimate starts at about $500 million, the person said. Consultants for Russia are also studying how long the damaged pipes can withstand saltwater exposure. The inquiries raise the question of why, if Russia bombed its own pipelines, it would begin the expensive work of repairing them.
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