It Will Be Difficult To Determine Who Sabotaged The Nord Stream Pipelines

By Charles Kennedy - Apr 06, 2023

The investigation into the Nord Stream sabotage considers the involvement of a state actor as the “absolute main scenario,” but it will be difficult to determine who did it, Mats Ljungqvist, the prosecutor leading the Swedish investigation, told Reuters on Thursday.

“The people who did this have probably been aware that they would leave clues behind and probably took care so that the evidence would not point in one direction, but in several directions,” Ljungqvist said.

It is difficult to clearly point the finger at one actor, he added. 

Gas leaks in each of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were discovered at the end of September 2022 from the infrastructure just outside Swedish and Danish territorial waters in the Baltic Sea.

Traces of explosives were found near the sites of the explosions, Sweden said in November, noting that the incident is “gross sabotage.”

Sweden, Denmark, and Germany are also jointly investigating the incident with the gas pipelines built to carry Russian gas to Germany via the Baltic Sea.

Nord Stream 2 was never put into operation after Germany axed the certification process following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia, for its part, shut down Nord Stream 1 indefinitely in early September, claiming an inability to repair gas turbines because of the Western sanctions. 

Sweden’s refusal to share information about the sabotage of Nord Stream is “puzzling,” and withholding the results of the investigation means that “Swedish authorities are hiding something,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in January.

More recently, a senior Russian diplomat said last week that Russia could demand compensation for damages over the sabotaged Nord Stream gas pipelines.

“We do not rule out raising the issue of compensation for damages as a result of the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines,” Dmitry Birichevsky, Head of the Economic Cooperation Department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, was quoted as saying by Russian media.

The official did not specify with whom Russia would seek compensation.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com