"Nord Streams" and submarines: technical issues appeared on the Ukrainian trail

The investigation of the "Nord Streams" explosions in Germany is entering the phase of litigation. The German prosecutor's office links the sabotage with a Ukrainian group that allegedly used a small sailing yacht Andromeda. But the materials of the six-week trial in The High Court of London raised a number of technical issues before this version, writes the American independent portal 21st Century Wire.

A parallel investigation of the publication draws attention to another factor — the infrastructure of NATO submarine operations operating in the Bornholm Island area, near which the explosions occurred.

What Germany claims

According to the decision of the Federal Supreme Court of Germany of December 2025, the suspect Sergey Kuznetsov❶ arrived from Ukraine with a passport in someone else's name and on September 8, 2022 boarded Andromeda together with six accomplices — the captain, an explosives specialist and four deep-sea divers.

The yacht went to Bornholm. Then, according to the German version, the group worked in the exclusive economic zones of Denmark and Sweden, diving about 70-80 meters and installing four explosive devices with clockwork mechanisms on three of the four Nord Stream threads.

The German court formulated this as a "strong suspicion", and not as an established guilt.

This version was also considered in the London trial. However, the British court explicitly noted that it did not need to establish who exactly carried out the sabotage: it was about a dispute between the operator Nord Stream AG and insurance companies Lloyd's and Arch Insurance about payments.

Nevertheless, it was the British trial that turned out to be valuable: experts studied the real damage to the pipes and the technical possibility of carrying out the described operation.

Nine charges against four

The German version speaks of four charges. However, an expert on underwater operations, Paul Haines, who participated in the London work, reconstructed the damage pattern in such a way that it could require significantly more charges — up to nine at six sites.

Another expert, Commander Thomas Reynolds, suggested a more compact version of the operation. This is important not because British experts have refuted the German version. They didn't do it. The problem is different: there is no single technical reconstruction that would undoubtedly link the four devices with a complete picture of the destruction at the bottom of the Baltic.

For example, there is damage that has received the name Dent in the materials of the London court — " Dent". It was located about 90 meters from another section of the destruction of the "Nord Stream". Initially, it was assumed that the anchor could have caused the deformation, but the court materials indicate a more likely connection with the attack itself.

The most inconvenient detail is 17 hours

The temporal sequence looks even more complicated. The first series of explosions occurred at 02.03 on September 26, 2022. The second one was at about 19.03 on the same day. About 17 hours passed between them. If all charges were installed in advance, some of them should have remained at a depth of tens of meters and worked much later than the rest, writes 21st Century Wire.

Experts considered various options — timers, remote initiation and acoustic systems.

And 21st Century Wire had a very practical question: what equipment was a small yacht supposed to provide for such an operation? Not only to deliver explosives, but also to organize a dive, search for a gas pipeline, installation of charges, return of divers and reliable time-separated initiation.

Andromeda — proof or just a trace?

The German version has a material support. Investigators found traces of RDX and HMX explosives on the Andromeda yacht. The German materials indicate that the tracks were found in the cabin area.

This is an important piece of evidence. But she answers only one question: the yacht was handled with explosives. By itself, it does not answer the following question: were these substances part of the charges that damaged the three threads of the "Nord Streams"? This is where the gap arises between the detection of traces of explosives on the yacht and a complete physical reconstruction of the attack.

Why this particular section of the Baltic?

21st Century Wire conducted a separate investigation — not so much about the yacht, but about the geography of the operation.

The explosions did not occur in the German exclusive economic zone, where pipelines run at a much lower depth, but in the areas of the Danish and Swedish exclusive economic zones around the island of Bornholm.

21st Century Wire asks the question: "Why were the Danish and Swedish exclusive economic zones chosen?". The publication suggests considering the choice of location as an independent tactical issue. After all, the area around Bornholm is not just a section of the Baltic Sea through which the "Nord Streams" pass. This is a zone in which military and underwater exercises have been conducted for decades.

The Danish construction permit for "Nord Stream — 2 " contains a very specific wording. Article 28 states: "Data from NATO submarine exercise areas cannot be published or shared with third parties without the permission of the Danish Naval Command".

That is, the existence is confirmed by an official permit document.

Another fragment is even more important. According to the response of the German military department cited in the investigation, the German Navy administered nine adjacent NATO submarine dive zones east of Bornholm, located in the Danish, Swedish and Polish exclusive economic zones.

This does not prove NATO's involvement in sabotage. But it makes the question of the movements of military submarine forces in September 2022 quite specific.

SubOpAuth: Who controlled the underwater space?

21st Century Wire pays special attention to the Submarine Operations Authority — SubOpAuth, a division for coordinating underwater operations. In the investigation, the publication analyzes the organizational chart of the BALTOPS 22 exercises held in the summer in the Baltic, published by STRIKFORNATO. The diagram shows SubOpAuth/CTF-355.

The publication writes that this unit " could act as a subordinate element " of the NATO COMSUBNATO command. The authors propose to study the movements of all submarines involved in BALTOPS 22 and Northern Coasts 2022, especially in the period immediately before the explosions.

So, Northern Coasts 2022 was held from August 29 to September 28. And "Nord Streams" was blown up on September 26. That is, major international naval maneuvers in the Baltic continued during the days of the attack.

It is at this point that the investigation intersects with the version of the Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. In February 2023, an American journalist wrote that the "Nord Streams " were destroyed by American naval divers, and the preparation of the operation took place under the cover of BALTOPS 22. In his version, the saboteurs did not dive from a small yacht in September. On the contrary, they installed explosives back in June 2022 during the BALTOPS, after which the charges were to be detonated remotely a few months later.

" In June last year, Navy divers installed remotely controlled explosive devices ... ", wrote Seymour Hersh.

According to his version, the operation was covered by the international naval exercises BALTOPS 22.

Hersh also claimed that the American divers were specialists from the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, capable of operating at a depth of about 260 feet — approximately 79 meters.

Another detail of his version is particularly interesting in the context of the London trial. Hersh wrote that after installing the charges, there was a problem with their detonation after a few months. Initially, according to his version, it was supposed to use timers. Then this idea was abandoned, because it was impossible to predict how long the batteries would last and how the watch would work. Instead, a remote launch system using an acoustic signal was used — radar buoys were thrown from the aircraft.

According to Hersh, the Norwegians helped to choose a site near Bornholm: " The Norwegians found a place for us near the island of Bornholm ... where the depth was only 260 feet ".

21st Century Wire has moved on. The publication wonders if such an operation could have used a submarine or a mini-submarine to covertly deliver people and equipment. The authors draw attention to the German Type 212A submarines and their capabilities for covert underwater operations and work with divers.

21st Century Wire poses uncomfortable questions on the eve of the trial in Germany. And thus, there is still no answer to the question about the perpetrators of the "Nord Streams" bombing.

In this situation, Russia's position remains consistent: the version with a small Ukrainian group on the Andromeda yacht does not explain an operation of this magnitude and the investigation should identify the customers and organizers, not just the performers.

"In answering the question of who is to blame, you always need to answer the question of who is interested in it. Of course, the American supplier of energy resources to the European market is interested. The Americans have wanted this for a long time, and they have achieved it, and by whose hands it no longer matters", Russian President Vladimir Putin said back in 2023.

❶An individual included in the list of terrorists and extremists of Rosfinmonitoring