Nord Stream bombing: the greatest geopolitical mystery of our time

After nearly two years, the worst act of industrial terrorism in European history continues to be the object of a massive cover-up

At 2 AM on September 26, 2022, regional monitoring stations in the Baltic Sea area — in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and other countries — registered two seismic events. The data was characteristic of underwater explosions. At the same time, a sharp drop in pressure was reported in both lines of the 1,200-kilometre-long Nord Stream pipeline running under the Baltic Sea from the Russian coast near Saint Petersburg to north-eastern Germany. The next day, the Norwegian Armed Forces released disturbing aerial footage of a huge kilometre-wide area of bubbling water in the Baltic Sea, near the Danish island of Bornholm. The bubbles were coming to the surface from about 80 metres underwater. Soon it became clear: they were caused by massive gas leaks on both the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines. European authorities — the Swedish, Danish and Polish governments, and even EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen — immediately established that the leak was no accident, but rather a deliberate act of sabotage. Several sections of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines had been blown up. But by whom? Thus began the greatest geopolitical mystery of our time — one that, to this day, still remains without an official explanation. 

The geopolitical context 

Nord Stream — owned by the Russian gas company Gazprom and a consortium of European energy companies — has always been a very controversial project. The first pipeline, Nord Stream 1, was inaugurated in 2011, making it by far the biggest Russian gas pipeline to Europe — and one of the main pillars of Germany’s post-2000s economic success, which relied heavily on cheap Russian gas. Prior to the Ukraine war, Germany received more than 50 percent of its gas from Russia. Meanwhile, Germany was in the process of intensifying its economic relations with its eastward partner. Indeed, over the ten years prior to the war, Germany had invested heavily in the construction of a second pipeline parallel to the existing gas line, Nord Stream 2, which would have doubled annual capacity.

It’s no secret that the US has always been opposed to Nord Stream, and in particular to Nord Stream 2. It’s easy to see why the US establishment wasn’t happy about this development: more gas would have meant stronger Russian-German relations, which would have likely led to an expansion of trade, increased cultural exchanges, and ultimately to a new security architecture that would have made NATO’s security umbrella increasingly redundant and weakened US hegemony over the European continent. This is why the United States has been attempting to torpedo the project since 2017, when the US Congress under Trump passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which authorised the US president to impose sanctions on companies involved in the construction of Russian energy export pipelines. Then, in 2019, Trump signed the Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act (PEESA), which sought to prevent the construction of the pipeline through US sanctions against the companies involved, causing the pipe-laying to stop for a year. In early 2022, both Biden and Victoria Nuland, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration, known for her famous “Fuck the EU” phone call, threatened to shut down Nord Stream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine. 

Until not long ago, the German public still viewed this as an undue meddling in the country’s internal affairs, if not — as former Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in early 2021 — as an encroachment on Germany’s sovereignty in violation of international law. German newspapers openly discussed how the US was opposed to Nord Stream because it hoped to replace Europe’s Russian gas with the sale of its own liquified natural gas (LNG) to the continent. A vocal critic of the US’s meddling in German energy affairs was the former head of the German Energy Agency, Stephan Kohler. In a 2017 interview, he pointed out that the US openly argued in the CAATSA bill that the aim was creating better market opportunities for its LNG. On another occasion, Kohler said that this was part of a wider strategy to “drive a political wedge between Europe and Russia”.

One of America’s best-known geostrategists, George Friedman, former chairman of the private (but CIA-linked) intelligence firm Stratfor, openly acknowledged this in his 2010 bestselling book The Next Decade: “Russia does not threaten America’s global position, but the mere possibility that it might collaborate with Europe and particularly Germany opens up the most significant threat in the decade, a long-term threat that needs to be nipped in the bud”. This led him to conclude that “maintaining a powerful wedge between Germany and Russia is of overwhelming interest to the United States”. More recently, Friedman stated this in even starker terms: “The overriding interest of the United States, for which we have fought wars for centuries — the First, Second and Cold War — has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there they are the only force that could threaten us. And we need to make sure that doesn’t happen”. There is no question, in short, that driving a wedge between Europe (and Germany, in particular) and Russia, and thereby preventing the rise of a Eurasian geopolitical reality, has long been an American geopolitical imperative — and that Nord Stream represented a brazen challenge to this imperative. 

Nord Stream 2 was completed in 2021 and was expected to enter into service in 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, changed everything. At that point, Germany made a 180-degree policy U-turn, announcing its plans to wean itself off Russian gas entirely within a few years — and officially shelving the Nord Stream 2 project. The German economy minister Robert Habeck stated that he didn’t see “a scenario… where Nord Stream 2 would play a role for Germany’s energy security”. Russia reacted first by reducing the flow of gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and then stopping it altogether in August of that year, officially for maintenance. At the same time, Germany, like other European countries, turned to (much costlier) American LNG in its efforts to reduce its dependency on Russia.

In other words, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made America’s longstanding plans a reality: it severed Germany-Russia relations once and for all, boosted American LNG exports and brought the Nord Stream 2 project to a halt — even before the bombing. No wonder some commentators argued, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, that the crisis in Ukraine had been partially manufactured by the US in order to torpedo the pipeline.

However, in September 2022, protests started breaking out across Germany demanding that the government turn the taps on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline amid spiralling energy prices. Later that month, the bombing occurred. Even if only one of the new pipeline’s two pipes was damaged in attack, with Russia confirming that the undamaged pipe remained operable, Nord Stream 2 never came online. 

Early speculations  

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, speculation was rife about who might be the culprit. Ukraine, along with several Western governments and high-profile commentators, was quick to point the finger at Russia. It’s not clear, however, how Russia would benefit from blowing up a pipeline that cost €15 billion dollar to build, thus losing the leverage the pipeline offered it over Germany and other European states. If Russia’s aim was to hurt Europe, it could simply have turned off the tap, as it had arguably done already. Besides, just over a week before the bombing, Putin had said that if Europe wanted to solve the gas issue, all it had to do was lift the sanctions and open up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. “Just push the button and everything will get going”, Putin said. Moreover, the Nord Stream pipeline is part-European-owned, and the “attack” occurred in Danish territorial waters; therefore, it effectively amounts to an aggression against two NATO countries and, as per Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, as an act of war against NATO as a whole. If Russia wanted to trigger World War III, there were less roundabout ways to do it.

It’s therefore perhaps not surprising that almost immediately an alternative theory started making the rounds on the internet and social media — that the United States itself might be behind the sabotage.