Russian naval vessels "near Nord Stream" days before attack

A convoy of six Russian naval vessels was detected around the site of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage five days before it occurred, according to a report.

Three of the four conduits carrying natural gas from Russia to Germany along the bottom of the Baltic Sea were disabled by explosions near the Danish island of Bornholm on September 26 last year, Times reports. While various reports have pointed the finger of blame at the US or a “pro-Ukrainian” group, there are discrepancies and puzzling details in both versions of events.

Independent open-source intelligence researchers have highlighted unusual manoeuvres by a Danish patrol vessel and a Swedish warship that suggest they may have spotted suspicious activity in the area on September 22 or 23. At the weekend T-Online, a German news website, claimed that the ships had been tracking a Russian naval contingent that had broken away from a larger exercise three days earlier.

Citing sources in the security services, the report said a frigate and a corvette were accompanied by two rescue tugs, an Alpinist-class surveillance ship and a submarine rescue ship called the SS-750, with a crane and a mini-submarine of its own.

The AS-26 mini-submarine is said to have a deep submergence rescue vehicle from the Priz class. It can operate at depths of up to 1,000m — significantly lower than the 80m depth of the Bornholm Deep, where the pipeline blasts occurred — and has a pair of remote-operated arms that can handle loads weighing up to 50kg.

“It would absolutely make sense to use something like the AS-26 for this kind of attack,” Johannes Riber, a Danish navy captain and military analyst, told T-Online. This account can be partially corroborated with navigation data from the public domain, which shows some of the ships named in the report heading towards Bornholm from Kaliningrad, a militarised Russian exclave on the south coast of the Baltic Sea.

However, the tracking data cuts out on September 21, probably because the ships switched off their electronic identification systems. Russia has argued that it had no interest in attacking its own infrastructure. On Saturday President Putin said he “fully agreed” with Seymour Hersh, the American investigative journalist, who has claimed the attack was the work of the CIA.