The bombing that destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea on September 26, 2022, was carried out by Ukrainians with the support of the highest levels of the state and military. This was reported by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on August 14, citing several unnamed sources in the Ukrainian military apparatus.

According to the WSJ report, President Volodymyr Zelensky personally approved the attack. At the urging of the American CIA, however, he made a retreat and ordered the termination of the operation. The now deposed commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Valery Zaluzhny, ignored the order and carried the attack through to its completion.

The WSJ report came a day after German newspapers reported that German chief state prosecutor Jens Rommel had already obtained an arrest warrant for a suspect in June. Ukrainian diving instructor Volodymyr Z., who is trained as a deep-sea diver, is said to have been a member of the six-person crew that rented the sailing yacht “Andromeda” in September 2022 and, according to investigators, installed the explosive charges and detonated them.

Although the European arrest warrant was sent to the authorities in Poland in June, where Volodymyr Z. now officially resides, they did nothing and let him leave for Ukraine. He was apparently warned in advance.

With the arrest warrant against a Ukrainian suspect, however, it was clear that after almost two years of investigations, the Ukrainian state and party leadership was now also among the suspects.

The investigations were until now delayed and dragged out by all sides. Sweden and Denmark, on whose territory the attack took place, did virtually nothing and halted the investigation after a year and a half. Poland sabotaged the investigations and Ukraine refused to cooperate. In both countries, the attack is celebrated as a heroic deed.

But the United States and Germany, the country hit the hardest apart from Russia, also put the brakes on the investigation.

The US had an obvious interest in destroying the pipeline that made Germany dependent on Russian gas supplies. President Joe Biden even openly threatened an attack two weeks before the start of the Ukraine war. “If Russia invades,” he said at a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “then Nord Stream 2 will no longer exist. We will put an end to it.”

For its part, Germany feared that the identification of the real perpetrators would affect its war offensive against Russia, which it is advancing with billions of euros in arms supplies and the largest rearmament since Hitler.

“The findings could upend relations between Kiev and Berlin, which has provided much of the financing and military equipment to Ukraine, second only to the U.S.,” wrote the WSJ, quoting a German official familiar with the matter, “An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash.”

The article, which also covers joint research by the German public broadcaster ARD, the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and the news magazine Die Zeit, paints a devastating picture of Ukrainian responsibility for the attack. Although it is said to have been financed by private businessmen and carried out by a mixed team of soldiers and civilians, the leadership clearly lay with the Ukrainian military: “A serving general with experience in special operations would oversee the mission, which one participant described as a ‘public-private partnership.’ He would report directly to the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, the four-star Gen. Zaluzhniy.”

Furthermore, the WSJ reported: “The general tasked with commanding the operation enlisted some of Ukraine’s top special-operations officers with experience in orchestrating high-risk clandestine missions against Russia to help coordinate the attack. One of them was Roman Chervinsky, a decorated colonel who previously served in Ukraine’s main security and intelligence service, the SBU.”

Not only the CIA, but also the German foreign intelligence service BND knew about the plans before the attack but did nothing. They were warned by the Dutch secret service, which is extremely active in Ukraine after the downing of flight MH-17 that killed numerous Dutch citizens. A few days after the attack, the BND received another detailed report on the incident from Dutch military intelligence, which the investigating police authorities were not allowed to read.

These findings were completely hidden from the public. Instead, the media and politicians spread the absurd claim that Russia itself destroyed the pipeline, with which it earned billions annually and half of which belongs to the state-affiliated Russian company Gazprom. 

The WSJ’s article, despite its revelations, is an attempt at damage limitation. It admits what is already known, reveals what can no longer be hidden for long, and at the same time strives to pull the main people responsible out of the line of fire.

The article declares Zaluzhny, who now sits in London as the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, to be primarily responsible, in order to protect Zelensky. The claim that the CIA dissuaded Zelensky from the attack plan and that Zaluzhny opposed this is absurd. Like Zelensky, Zaluzhny could not take a single step without the consent of the US.

Zaluzhny was actually an especially close confidant of the US. When Zelensky fell out with him and wanted to remove him, Washington resisted for a long period. The Ukrainian army was rebuilt, trained and armed by the US after the Maidan coup. Zaluzhny was in regular telephone contact with the top US general, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. “I talk to him every week, sometimes twice, sometimes three times a week,” Milley told CBS News. 

The WSJ’s story that the plans were spontaneously concocted by a handful of officers and businessmen during a drinking binge four months before the attack is also absurd. Such plans have been in place for a long time. The US put pressure on Germany for years to shut down Nord Stream 1 and not put Nord Stream 2 into operation. Biden’s previously quoted threat was just one of many.

The real role of the American and German governments in the Nord Stream attack remains in the dark. But one thing is now undeniable: the attack, which caused billions in damage and drove energy prices to dizzying heights, did not come from an external source, from Russia, but from within Ukraine and NATO itself.

The bombing lays bare for all to see the predatory nature of the war that NATO is waging against Russia in Ukraine. The methods of the war correspond to its aims. It is not about freedom and democracy for Ukraine, which is being bled white and destroyed by the war, but about the conquest and division of Russia’s vast resources. That is why the NATO partners also fight among themselves using methods akin to mafia clans.