Nord Stream saboteurs may have used Poland as base of operations, WSJ reports

Poland could have been used as an operating base to carry out the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 10, citing findings of a Germany-led investigation.

German investigators are examining why the yacht believed to have been used to carry out the sabotage deviated into Polish waters, according to the report. The investigators have been able to reconstruct the two-week journey of the boat — the Andromeda — during the operation, the newspaper said.

The investigators established that the yacht had entered Polish waters by looking into Andromeda’s radio and navigation equipment, satellite and mobile phones, as well as Gmail accounts, the WSJ said.

The report comes after the Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Western intelligence agencies were aware of a Ukraine-backed plan to damage the Nord Stream pipelines three months before the blasts took place. The allegations were promptly dismissed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an interview with Bild and POLITICO Europe, both of which belong to the Axel Springer group.

“I didn’t know anything, 100 percent,” Zelenskyy said. “I said, 'Show us proof. If our military is supposed to have done this, show us proof.'”

The Kremlin, meanwhile, said the Washington Post report raised suspicion of "an Anglo-Saxon involvement" in the pipeline blasts.

The sabotage of the Nord Stream links, which were designed to carry as much as 110 billion cubic meters of gas a year from Russia to Germany, took place in September 2022, just five months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The German investigators also came to the conclusion that the substance used in the act of sabotage was HMX, an explosive typically used for disrupting subsea infrastructure, according to Saturday's Wall Street Journal report.

The blasts occurred in the economic zones of Sweden and Denmark, which prompted separate investigations by Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. So far, however, countries had struggled to identify who was behind the attack.