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Investigating the Nord Stream Attack: All the Evidence Points To Kyiv [1]
['Jean-Pierre Ziegler', 'Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt', 'Gerald Traufetter', 'Thomas Schulz', 'Thore Schröder', 'Sandra Sperber', 'Fidelius Schmid', 'Marcel Rosenbach', 'Alexandra Rojkov', 'Jan Puhl']
Date: 2023-09
It's stuffy inside the store, and smells of dried fish. The saleswoman says that the grandmother is now the janitor of the neighboring building. Five minutes later, Lyubov K. sets aside her broom and sits down on a bench. She's a small woman with red-dyed hair and speaks Russian. She says she doesn't want to speak with the press, but remains seated on the bench. When asked if her grandson Valeri is in the army, she says "yes." What does he do there? "I don't know." She does say, though, that her son and grandson had only been called up a few months before. The conversation remains brief, ending with the grandmother claiming that her grandson couldn't have been onboard the Andromeda because he doesn't have a passport and is unable to travel overseas.
Another neighbor, a retiree with gray curls and wearing a blue shirt, is more talkative. Her son, she says, went to school with Valeri senior and they also worked together. The two of them had taken a job at a shipyard in Turkey several years before.
Then, the neighbor says, Valeri senior embarked on a completely different career path, smuggling migrants across the Mediterranean on a sailboat. But the operation was busted and the Ukrainians involved arrested. The neighbor says that the younger Valeri K. wasn't involved though.
The neighbors don't have much to say about him. His presence on social media is also limited, apparently limited to VK, a Facebook clone that is popular in Ukraine and Russia.
The most striking thing about the younger Valeri K. is that he is a follower of the openly nationalist youth organization VGO Sokil. It offers young men training in shooting and diving.
His most recent active VK profile is under the name "Chechen from Dnipro," and it is linked to a telephone number. If you enter the number into an App like Getcontact, you can see the names under which the number is saved in other people's contact lists. Among the names for Valeri's number is: "K. 93rd Brigade."
There are also leads to his long-time girlfriend Inna H. The two apparently aren't together any longer, but they have a son together. The mother and child no longer live in Dnipro, but in the German city Frankfurt an der Oder.
They live in a gray housing block just a few hundred meters from the Polish border. There are a number of Ukrainian refugees living in the building, including several relatives of Valeri K.: Inna H., the ex-girlfriend who is the mother of his son, his younger sister Anya K. and apparently also his maternal grandmother Tetyana H.
In May, they received a visit from the police, who searched the apartment. A DNA sample from Valeri K.'s son was then compared with traces found on the Andromeda. But there was no match.
Inna H. lives on one of the upper floors of the apartment block, but the door is opened by an elderly lady when a team of reporters from DER SPIEGEL rings the doorbell. She doesn't give her name, but she looks like the grandmother, Tetjana H., in photos. She doesn't want to talk to journalists.
If people have something to say, she says, they should discuss it with the authorities.
Asked about the accusations against Valeri K., she says only: "We are a simple family, the Germans saved us. Why would we want to do them any harm?"
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/investigating-the-attack-on-nord-stream-all-the-clues-point-toward-kyiv-a-124838c7-992a-4d0e-9894-942d4a665778
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