Bombshell WaPo Article Alleges Ukraine Was Behind Sabotage of Nord Stream Pipeline
A new report claims that a senior member of Ukraine’s special forces, acting at the direction of Ukraine’s top military leader, played a role in the operation that damaged the Nord Stream pipeline last September.
Previous reports had speculated that the destruction of three of the four natural gas lines under the Baltic Sea was committed by Ukraine either with or without official sanction.
Building on that foundation, The Washington Post reported that Col. Roman Chervinsky, whom it called the coordinator of the attack, was at the end of a chain of command that started with Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the highest-ranking officer in the Ukrainian military.
The Post did not name its sources for the report, which claimed Chervinsky managed the six-person unit that rented a boat and used deep-sea diving equipment to place charges that ruptured the line.
“All speculations about my involvement in the attack on Nord Stream are being spread by Russian propaganda without any basis,” Chervinsky said in a statement.
Chervinsky is currently in jail due to a July 2022 incident in which he allegedly tried to get a Russian pilot to defect, giving away the location of a Ukrainian airfield and prompting a deadly Russian attack. He was arrested in April.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has responded in the past to accusations of Ukrainian involvement in the pipeline blast by saying, “Nothing of the sort has been done by Ukraine. I would never act that way.”
Zaluzhny said in June that after the explosion, he received a call from Gen. Mark Milley, then America’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“He asked me, ‘Did you have anything to do with it?’ I said, ‘No.’ A lot of operations are planned, a lot of operations are going on, but we have nothing to do with it, nothing at all,” he said.
In June, The Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence agencies believed ahead of time that Ukraine was considering a strike against the pipeline.
That report was among the classified documents leaked by Air Force National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, who was later arrested for sharing the information.
The classified document said Zaluzhny was involved in planning the attack, and that Zelenskyy was kept out of the loop. The report also said that in June 2022, the CIA briefed multiple European governments on the possible Ukrainian plot to blow up the line.
A March report in The New York Times suggested the Nord Stream attack could have been linked to Ukraine.
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