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Nord Stream: Russia may have operated a submarine before the explosions [1]

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Date: 2023-03-25 06:07:14.411000+01:00

The Russian Navy is believed to have operated a mini-submarine at the Nord Stream sites days before the explosions. This calls into question previous theories.

For many years, the scene of the Nord Stream attacks northeast of the Danish island of Bornholm was nothing more than a random spot in the Baltic Sea. Located just outside the Danish and Swedish radar zones. There is nothing but water as far as the eye can see. And beneath it, at a depth of nearly 80 meters, four gas pipelines whose exact location was known only to insiders at most.

Alarm before the attacks

Danish patrol boats almost never strayed there. When a Swedish radar aircraft took off from Malmen military airfield at about the same time every morning to fly over the Baltic Sea, the crew tended to secure the strategically important island of Gotland. Northeast of Bornholm, there was apparently little to control.

That changed shortly before the explosions on September 26, 2022, that ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. It was the abrupt end of a very exclusive German-Russian energy cooperation. At the evening of September 21, extraordinary things started to happened there.

Route of a Danish patrol boat on September 21 and 22: Did unidentified Russian ships make it necessary to check at the later scene? (Quelle: Marine Traffic)

The patrol boat "Nymfen" of the Royal Danish Navy unexpectedly left Rødbyhavn at 7:50 p.m. and set course for Bornholm. More precisely: to the spot that would become known only five days later as the scene of the Nord Stream sabotage. Something there was obviously in need of an urgent inspection.

When the ship reached its destination on the morning of September 22, it was soon joined by Swedish military forces by sea and air. The course of one of the Swedish pursuers in the coming days: the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad at the Baltic Sea.

Chasing a ghost

Presumably, the patrol boats were chasing Russian military vessels. As t-online learned from sources in the security community, a unit of the Russian navy is said to have operated under strict shielding in the area of the later crime scene. It is said the unit operated "like a ghost" by for example not transmitting its position data. The ships would have had the necessary equipment to place explosive devices at the pipelines. Publicly available data indicate the information as accurate. (Update, April 27th 2023: The ships were photographed by the Danish navy.)

The Russian Navy's activities in the days leading up to the explosions could be an important lead in a mysterious criminal case: the attack on gas pipelines in the midst of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. At the same time it calls into question some theories about other possible culprits that have caused a worldwide stir in recent weeks.

Sailing yacht "Andromeda": Experts have doubts about the so far evidence. (Quelle: Oliver Denzer/Reuters)

One of them was: The U.S. was the mastermind behind the Nord Stream sabotage. But many details of the report by Seymour Hersh have since been refuted. Most recently, however, a joint investigation by ARD, SWR and "Die Zeit" and also a report by "New York Times" brought a different sequence of events into play: The German Federal Prosecutor was following the tracks of a possibly pro-Ukrainian group that could have carried out the attacks with a sailing yacht named "Andromeda" and two divers. In fact, the German Federal Criminal Police Office searched the suspicious boat.

Experts suspect "false flag"

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[1] Url: https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/aussenpolitik/id_100149758/nord-stream-russia-may-have-operated-a-submarine-before-the-explosions.html

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