An investigative journalist describes how one of the most consequential acts of sabotage in recent history (probably) took place, and what came next

📚 Finished listening to The Nord Stream Conspiracy by Bojan Pancevski.

This is the real life story of the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that transport a huge amount of gas between Russia and Europe.

Remember this?

The book’s most thrilling section is that surrounding the details of how the operation was carried out by a handful of people operating on a relatively shoe-string budget. But of equal interest is the subsequent investigation various state authorities did on it in order to establish who committed this potentially very criminal act. The legal waters are muddied in that one seemingly intuitive explanation is that it was effectively a Ukrainian attack against Russia as part of their defence of the horrific illegal invasion of their country that Putin continues to wage. However, other theories abound - was it the CIA, Russia themselves, someone else?

The book covers the method used both to blow up the pipeline and to bring the people it claims are the perpetrators of it to court. OSINT fans such as myself will be interested to know elements of that were involved in the latter, although far from exclusively. Very minor mistakes made by the team - slightly speeding for a short time whilst driving on a highway for example - proved fatal to their attempts to hide from scrutiny.

Well, that’s assuming that the author’s claims that it was a small team of Ukrainians are correct. Technically I believe this is still an unsolved case. Investigations by Sweden and Denmark got nowhere. Italy arrested a Ukrainian man on behalf of Germany 3 years later. Various people have been accused or taken to court over it but as far as I know no one has actually been found guilty of it as yet - possibly not least because if the story is as told here then the people involved are regarded as absolute heroes by many, and the actions as part of a war Ukraine didn’t instigate rather than, as some of the German authorities seem to see it, a sabotage of critical national infrastructure. There’s also no concrete evidence of state involvement.

The book is a very gripping example of incredibly detailed investigative journalism around an incredibly important geopolitical event - if one that is potentially a little too firm in some of its conclusions, unless, as is quite likely the case to be fair, the author knows something the rest of us do not.