Ukraine’s Nord Stream Attack: Underwater Sabotage and Its Fallout
Sasha Ingber: Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.
The trial for a former Ukrainian special forces officer identified as Serhii K. is set to begin October 14 in Hamburg. German investigators have been unrelenting in their pursuit for justice after an attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, carrying Russian gas into Germany. It was months into Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. Scandinavian seismologists detected what appeared to be an undersea earthquake on the seabed of the Baltics near a Danish Island. Denmark, Germany, and Sweden opened investigations, but only Germany moved forward. Since then, the Wall Street Journal's Chief European Political Correspondent, Bojan Pancevski, uncovered what happened in his new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy. We sat down to talk about the operation and its fallout, part of which is set to unfold in a German courtroom.
Welcome, Bojan. I know you're in Vienna right now.
Bojan Pancevski: The spy capital of Europe. Thank you very much for having me on.
Sasha Ingber: I'm sure you purposefully chose that location just for our conversation. Thank you so much.
Bojan Pancevski: Absolutely.
Sasha Ingber: So let's start by visiting the day of this incident. September 26, 2022, there is this massive explosion at the world's longest gas pipeline. Take us to what happened that day.
Bojan Pancevski: Well, it was the small hours of the morning on September 26, 2022 amidst the war in Ukraine. The early warning earthquake system of Europe detected a very powerful disturbance, and they located that at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. What initially looked like an earthquake turned out to be a very powerful explosion, not far from the Danish Island of Bornholm. So from the onset, governments were aware that something significant had happened, and so the Danish government scrambled fighter jets to the site of the disturbance to get a visual on what was going on. And what they had seen were gigantic bubbles in the water, which signaled that there was something coming out from the deep. And as it turned out, that something was the world's greatest offshore pipeline system having exploded, and gas was gushing out up to the surface and into the atmosphere in what was later established to be the largest known human-made release of greenhouse gas in history.
Sasha Ingber: Okay. You reported that months before this incident, Dutch intelligence had an informant who shared information about something that was being planned.
Bojan Pancevski: That's right. The Danish Military Intelligence Agency, which is a small but very, very powerful and well-respected outfit, had picked up some human intelligence. And that a crack team of Ukrainian special operators were planning to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines, which were connecting Russia with Germany, and they were one of the main arteries for natural gas trade in Europe.
Sasha Ingber: Now, you found that the Dutch passed this information to the CIA, and even Director Bill Burns gets involved. What happened?
Bojan Pancevski: When the CIA found out about it, they escalated this news up the food chain. The CIA was the first agency to get wind of the Dutch findings, and they established that this endeavor had to be stopped. It wasn't in the national interest of the United States for this to happen because they thought the pipeline was seen in Germany as a vital for strategic supplies of energy, and its destruction by the hand of Ukrainians could sort of alienate Germany from helping Ukraine in their war effort against Russian aggression.
Sasha Ingber: Even though several administrations had warned Germany about becoming dependent on Russian gas, and even though some of the operatives actually ended up at Langley at CIA headquarters on a field trip you found.
Bojan Pancevski: Well, that's the irony of it. The masterminds of the Nord Stream attack were veterans of the Ukrainian intelligence community, and they had been working very, very closely with their American peers since around 2014, '15. You're quite right to say that ever since George W. Bush, every single American president had opposed the Nord Stream Project. They thought that the idea behind Nord Stream was to bring Western countries and Germany above all, Europe's biggest economy, into Vladimir Putin's embrace. That was basically a geopolitical project designed to make Europe reliant on Russian energy exports. But in this particular case, because the war was raging, it was the early phase of the full scale invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration wanted to get Germany to share the financial burden of supporting Ukraine. So they thought anything that might disturb that relationship would be damaging, and they tried to stop it. They warned Germany immediately as soon as they found out from the Dutch that something was afoot, that someone was plotting to destroy the pipeline.
Sasha Ingber: And they warned the Ukrainians not to do this.
Bojan Pancevski: Exactly. They told them to cease and desist, and to stop what they were doing. They even reached out to one of the senior officers who was involved in the plot, and they got him to commit in writing that he would in fact not be participating in a plot to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, which he probably did. But nonetheless, the Ukrainians simply just postponed the attack, regrouped, and they did it some months later.
Sasha Ingber: Right. Committing to paper did not translate to reality. The operation moves forward, codenamed Operation Diameter. You write after the man that you call the Colonel made a drawing of a cross section of a pipeline. And some of the main people behind this is not just the Colonel, but General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, four-star general who becomes commander of the armed forces. Can you explain why they decided to move forward against the Americans wishes?
Bojan Pancevski: Well, essentially, the Ukrainians, for them, it's an existential war of defense. For the Americans and other European allies of Ukraine, there are many considerations here at play for Ukraine. There's only one, the war against their aggressor, their neighbor and former imperial master. So quite often they disregard warnings, frankly speaking, coming from the United States, coming from Europe. I mean, there have been a lot of limitations on what the Ukrainians should be doing with the weapons systems that are being provided from the West. So I think the response was fairly typical. The elite group of special forces within the armed forces of Ukraine that planned and executed the attack estimated that was in their national interest to go ahead and do it anyway. General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, he was then the commander of the armed forces. Now he's been fired by the President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and he's been made ambassador to Great Britain.
He was the most senior military officer who green lighted the operation in the beginning. For a bit of background to your audience, the Nord Stream Project was very well known in Ukraine and very well hated by pretty much everyone in government, in the military, in the intelligence, and in the broader public, because they believed this was a project happening over their heads. This was a pact between Vladimir Putin, Germany, and other Western allies, and that it was essential to them to stop it for geopolitical reasons, of course, to break that geopolitical bond, but more elementary to stop the revenues that Putin was getting because of the pipeline. We are talking about billions and billions of euros a year that were paid for Russian gas flowing from Russia to Germany.
Sasha Ingber: Right. When they're thinking about the fact that they are dealing with a matter of life and death, survival of democracy, they're willing to do anything to protect their country, and that means maximizing the damage, the hurt they can impose on the Russians. We've seen this strategy play out where they're still now escalating with long range drone strikes, Russian oil refineries, export infrastructure, supply facilities. So this perhaps was really where it began, but what are the odds that Zelenskyy, who has denied any knowledge of the Nord Stream attack, that he didn't know about this?
Bojan Pancevski: President Zelenskyy himself has denied knowledge of this operation. He's renounced it. People around Zaluzhnyi, the general who formerly commanded the armed forces have said that Zelenskyy was indeed briefed about this. The truth may be in the middle or maybe Zelenskyy's right that he didn't know. I won't speculate about the odds of him knowing or not knowing.
Sasha Ingber: And my sense is that because of the amount of people that you talk to, you likely know more than the German investigators. But when it comes to the saboteurs, you say that there were seven people who were involved in the operation, and many of them did not have a conventional background of committing sabotage. They weren't even soldiers. Can you talk about how they were chosen, why they were chosen?
Bojan Pancevski: So the actual sabotage team that blew up the pipelines on the ground as it were, consisted of seven people. Three of them were soldiers. They were members of an elite special forces unit, and four of them were civilians. In fact, they were deep sea diving instructors, people with great experience in doing that job, and they were selected in a very meticulous process. Because the commanders of the operation could not find combat divers within the special forces community who could go down that deep around hundred meters in the ocean, because it requires a special kind of knowledge, skillset, and training. And that's not surprising because the job of special forces is to ford a river or body of water or mine ships, et cetera, some sort of shallow infrastructure. They don't typically operate at the bottom of the ocean.
Sasha Ingber: So for those civilian divers who have expertise, experience going that deep, did they know what they were signing up for?
Bojan Pancevski: Initially, they didn't. It was a three-phase recruiting process. First, initially, they tested their skills, then they tested their patriotism, their commitment to the cause. Then they put them under severe physical stress. At one point, they were arrested, picked up from the street and dragged away from their cars, manhandled by police under false pretense, all with the aim of establishing how they would behave under pressure. And when they passed that test, they were basically told what they were meant to be doing, that they would do great service to the nation. But not only to Ukraine, also to Europe. That they would release Europe from the deathly grip of Vladimir Putin and his influence in the energy trade. And this was what motivated them. They were not promised money. They were not promised any financial gain. They did it for good old-fashioned patriotism.
Sasha Ingber: So the seven have been chosen. What kind of training do they go through before the actual attack begins?
Bojan Pancevski: Well, in fact, very little training. The whole operation was improvised like most of the war effort at the time and even now. So what they did is they went to a abandoned granite mine in central Ukraine, which is filled with water and it's over a hundred meters deep. And there they tested the explosives, which they had produced for them by a retired professor of engineering and undersea demolition expert.
Sasha Ingber: A guy that you called the grandpa.
Bojan Pancevski: The grandpa, that's what they called him because he's obviously quite old. He's a very interesting character. Initially, they thought they would need a bunch of explosives because they needed to do a really good job. But in fact, what the old professor figured is that the pipelines are highly pressurized. So he realized they would only need a tiny amount of explosive to make a small incision into the coating, which is made of steel and concrete. And once they pierced that coating, the interaction between the pressure would do the rest of the job, very much like piercing a balloon with a needle. And that's exactly what happened. They unleashed a chain reaction with a comparatively small explosive device. It was fitted into oxygen tanks the divers carry on their backs, and they unleashed a very powerful violent chain reaction that had the effect we discussed at the beginning, essentially comparable to a small earthquake.
So they practiced a little bit in that abandoned quarry, and then off they went, they rented a boat in the Baltic and they went ahead with a mission. And it's important to note that the four divers that were involved are all extremely experienced, so going that deep for them was nothing new. It's something they've done many, many times in the past.
Sasha Ingber: Okay, so let's go back to the day of the explosions, but now from the perspective of these saboteurs which took about two weeks to execute, during those two weeks, what were they experiencing?
Bojan Pancevski: Well, the first day was quite smooth, but then everything went wrong as it tends to in operations like that. Essentially, they rented a small yacht to pleasure, a boat called Andromeda. They set sail from the German island of Rügen on the Baltic coastline of Germany, and they went up into Danish waters and then Swedish waters, and then they ran into a storm, a very severe storm, gale-forced winds. They were forced to temporarily abandon mission. They had to make unscheduled stops, take shelter in a South Swedish port. And then the storm just wouldn't subside, so they essentially had to go ahead and execute the mission in this inclement weather, which added a layer of danger to the already dangerous mission. So it was anything but a walk in the park.
Sasha Ingber: And there was also a senior diver who caught COVID amongst the many unexpected challenges that rose up.
Bojan Pancevski: That's right. He was diagnosed with COVID on the first day of the mission, and he just had to go ahead and do it anyway, which is extraordinary. There were all sorts of instances like that. I mean, at one point, they were stopped by the border police of Poland. They had to make another unscheduled stop in a Polish port, and the portmaster, he grew suspicious of people who he though were speaking Russian, so he just called the police. But everything ended well from the perspective of the Ukrainians, and they had to then flee that port within hours of that because they were worried they might run into trouble with the cops again. So there were all sorts of unexpected setbacks, and the whole operation is important to know, was run on a shoestring. Essentially, the total cost of the operation was around $250,000, which is extremely cheap for an operation of that sort, especially if you consider that the pipeline system cost around $20 billion to make.
Sasha Ingber: Or even that a Patriot missile cost about $4 million.
Bojan Pancevski: Exactly. Five in some cases, that's right.
Sasha Ingber: And yet, the sole female diver, Freya, who seemed to be a person who encouraged them to keep moving forward out of exhaustion, seems to lose one of the explosives in the water and cannot go down and grab it because of the amount of time it takes to descend into the depths of the Baltic. So many setbacks here. We're also speaking about Serhii, who is the captain who is going to be on trial in the days ahead, and he also ends up cutting himself on a valve. Which will play a role most definitely in this trial because they took some blood from the Andromeda, the vessel that they used.
Bojan Pancevski: Well, the German police did a lot of extremely competent forensic work and other detective work on the case, so they've gathered a lot of evidence, including DNA, hair, fingerprints. They obtained speed camera footage, which show one of the suspects at the wheel while exceeding the speed limit on a German regional road. They've done a lot of things such as taking the photographs from their fake passports and running them to face recognition software. So the German police have armed the prosecutors of Germany with a lot of evidence that will now, basically, be presented in court.
Sasha Ingber: But after these mines are fastened to the pipelines, what are the saboteurs thinking? Do they feel like now they can rest, they're safe, they're all good? Is there any sense that maybe something else had gone awry that they didn't anticipate?
Bojan Pancevski: Well, they finished the job three days before schedule, and then they kind of, in a rush, left Germany via Poland and returned to Ukraine. What happened was though, in one case, they placed the explosives at the wrong spot of the pipeline and put it where the structure was actually the strongest. So what happened was there was only a scratch on the pipeline, that it didn't penetrate the pipeline as it was meant to. So one single pipe remained operational despite the attack. So when they left home, they thought they basically almost completed the mission and they left no trace, but indeed they did leave a bunch of traces. There were witnesses, there were all sorts of things that were then later held against them in the course of the investigation.
Sasha Ingber: After all is said and done, the Swedes, the Danes, and the Germans start investigating, but only the Germans push forward. Why do the Swedes and the Danes stop investigating, and why do the Germans decide to keep moving forward with their own work?
Bojan Pancevski: Well, that is a very interesting question. I can't really speak for the governments and the authorities of Sweden and Denmark, but what happened there was when their investigations reached a certain point, they stopped it. And both countries announced that it is not in their national interest to continue with the probes because their national interest, they said, was not actually affected by the attack. So what they did is they sealed the findings, they classified all the evidence that had gathered, and to this day, no one's been able to gain access. And the Germans were left alone in their investigation. Now, why this didn't happen in Germany? Well, it's interesting, essentially, when the Germans established that they have serious leads pointing in the direction of Ukraine. It was already too late to stop the investigation because the German police is an independent agency that acts on the orders of the German prosecutor, who is also independent of the government.
Now, the politicians, when they first were briefed that there is pretty serious evidence pointing in the direction of Kyiv were not, as you can imagine, enchanted by the idea because this was around the time when Germany was getting to be one of the biggest supporters of Ukraine in the world, and now in fact, today, they are the biggest supporter by far. So the politicians were not happy, but the police were highly ambitious and they were doing that job, and it became politically difficult to just pull the plug. It was possible constitutionally, the German chancellor who heads the German government could tell his justice minister to call off the investigation. But Germany is a rule of law country, and the Germans follow the letter of the law as much as they are concerned with the spirit of the law and political considerations. I can vouch for the detectives who I know personally, they were never at all interested in the political implications of their work. They wanted to catch the perpetrators.
Sasha Ingber: How did the investigators from these three countries end up uncovering the fact that Ukrainians were indeed behind this? We discussed some of the DNA that was left behind, and the fact that a Dutch military intelligence had warned others. Was that the starting place? What else did they use?
Bojan Pancevski: So the initial lead pointing in the direction of Ukraine was indeed the Dutch Intelligence Report. Now, after the explosions, the Dutch filed another classified report to the CIA, which was then later passed on to the Germans in which they detailed what had happened. And they, in fact, confirmed their earlier intelligence that Ukrainian outfit was behind the plan and now the attack on the pipelines. But that's not evidence in court. So the police in Germany, due to very complicated intelligence sharing rules known as the third party sharing rules, which effectively means if another intelligence agency shares something with your intelligence agency, you're not supposed to share it with anyone else. And in Germany, which is a very legalistic country, that meant that the intelligence agency couldn't share this with the police. So it took quite a while before the police was made aware in great detail of what was in that Dutch report.
Once though they were made aware, they sent out police officers, they found out across the region where allegedly the boat was leased, and they went to every single boat rental asking them whether they had any foreign customers in that given space of time in September. And sure enough, one company on the island of Rügen produced two passports for foreign citizens from Eastern Europe who had rented a boat in that time. So that was one lead. Another lead, and perhaps the breakthrough was when the chief detective figured that in order to reach the port where those two Eastern Europeans had rented the boat, the divers and the crew had to come by road. And there were only two roads leading up to this port because it's on an island. So essentially, he sent out his people to scan through all the speed camera footage. They had to go through around 6,000 images before they hit the jackpot.
They saw a picture of a man at the wheel of a car with Ukrainian license plate, and they put it aside because they were looking for foreign license plates. So once they took that picture, and in Germany you have to know speed cameras make high resolution pictures because Germans are very litigious. They want to challenge when they get a fine, they want to challenge it. They don't like to pay their speeding fines, it's turns out. And essentially, they took the speed camera footage and they ran it through a commercial face recognition software that essentially takes in a picture and then hunts for pictures of the same person on the internet. And the results came in and they showed that the person on the picture driving that car was a well-known Ukrainian deep sea diving instructor, and obviously that was a major breakthrough. And then they followed his orbit, his social media and everything else.
They did similar things. They went to the port, they figured out who stayed in the given period in all the Airbnbs and the hotels. It's a fairly small town. And then they went to all these tourists and their families, and they questioned them for weeks and weeks trying to pry out of their memories who they saw, what they saw, what they filmed. And they eventually found footage of the boat with the skipper on it, mooring the boat into the small port. Someone found that so impressive because the skipper was so skilled in doing that, that someone just pulled out their phone and filmed the yacht sailing into the port and mooring. So that was also then used as lead. It was a combination of shoe-leather detective work and high-tech digital snooping.
Sasha Ingber: There's a real irony here that Germany is doggedly looking for these saboteurs when Germany is now, as you mentioned, Ukraine's biggest supporter, and we have seen Russian sabotage threatening Germany and the European continent. When it comes to the captain, Serhii K., he has been charged with war crimes. Before we get to the implications of that, how in particular was he identified and ultimately caught?
Bojan Pancevski: Well, there are two suspects that have been apprehended. One of them is Serhii K.. He will stand trial in Hamburg on the 14th of October. This year, essentially, he's been indicted. He's been accused of having been the commander of the sabotage group. He is a man with a long experience in the intelligence community of Ukraine and the armed forces. He volunteered on the first day of the full scale invasion, and he commanded a air defense unit in the Battle of Kyiv. He then retired with a rank of captain. At the time of the attack, he held the rank of captain of the army. And he was identified and then arrested because essentially when he crossed the border from Ukraine into Poland, he had a fake passport. When I say fake, it wasn't a fake passport, it was an authentic passport issued by the Ukrainian Secret Service in a fake name.
So it was a different name in the passport, it was his picture, and it was a real Ukrainian passport, is a typical modus operandi for the Ukrainian Secret Services. And so that's all the Germans had of him. He was a ghost to them. The name was obviously fake. There was a tiny little picture. They ran it through the face recognition software, couldn't find anything on the internet. So it was a puzzle for years, in fact. But then they expanded their search to countries outside of Europe who have pretty lax privacy laws because there is a data retention issue in Europe. When you cross the border at the airport, they scan your passport, and then in different countries, there are different rules as to how long you can keep the scan of that passport. So they eventually found the country that keeps indefinitely the logs of travelers, and that country was willing to run a scan search based on the little photograph they had from the passport.
And sure enough, they did find that this person had visited them, and his actual passport popped up with the passport number, with his address, full name, date of birth, et cetera. So that's how they identified him. And from then, it was a short way to finding him where he lived in Kyiv, and then they identified his wife, et cetera. So they eventually arrested him while he was on holiday in Italy with his children, with his family, and his wife. They tagged his wife's booking.com application, then they found the hotel they booked in Italy, and they asked the Italian authorities to arrest him. And that's how they got to him.
Sasha Ingber: When we come back, how the Germans are prosecuting Nord Stream saboteurs like Serhii and the blowback in Ukraine. Now, Serhii was charged with war crimes, which means that his defense can't claim immunity. Was that purposeful on the part of the Germans, a strategy for them, or do they truly see this as a war crime?
Bojan Pancevski: According to my reporting, the charges earlier did not include war crimes. They included sabotage, attack against the constitutional order of Germany, causing illegal explosions and things like that, which are obvious. But then came the war crimes charge, which is highly controversial, as you said. The reason I believe why they're doing that is because the defense geared up to say, look, this was a military operation. This man at the time of the incident was a serving military officer, and therefore he cannot be tried in a civilian court of law. Under international law, combatants have what is known as functional immunity. And this man was demonstrably, at the time of the event, a combatant. So in order to jump over that hoop, the prosecutors of Germany said, "Okay, we accept this was a military operation, but we do not accept it was a legitimate military operation because you attacked the pipeline that we believe belonged to us. It may have supplied money to Russia, but it was supplying gas which is strategic asset for our economy. It was supplying gas to Germany, and therefore we consider this to be a war crime."
It's a very severe indictment. It's a very controversial indictment. Also, because this will be the first time in this war, and the war is in its fifth year now, that someone will be charged with war crimes. And as we all know, Russia has been the aggressor and Russia has been accused multiple times of various war crimes. I mean, we've all seen footage of missiles striking kindergarten schools, hospitals, et cetera. There were massacres in places like Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Sasha Ingber: I remember covering it, it is gruesome. The photographs from Bucha were horrific.
Bojan Pancevski: Absolutely gruesome, right? So there's a body of evidence of war crimes on behalf of the aggressor, and now the first person who actually will stand trial for war crimes will be a former Ukrainian defender, which is an irony. And I think it remains to be seen how the media will interpret this, but I suspect there will be a lot of controversy in Germany itself as well as in the international debate. And certainly, in Ukraine.
Sasha Ingber: Very ironic. I also want to discuss the fates of some of the other operatives who have been caught. What's going on with them right now? We just spoke about Serhii. What about the others?
Bojan Pancevski: A second person has been arrested on a German arrest warrant. His name is Vladimir Z., that's the initial of his surname.
Sasha Ingber: Which is not to be confused with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Bojan Pancevski: Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that's right. There's no relation there and it's not him, but he is a deep sea diving instructor from Ukraine who is resident in Poland. The Germans located him in Poland. He was living with his family, and he was the man on the speeding camera footage that they initially identified through the face recognition software. First, they identified him in 2024. They sent out their arrest warrant. The Polish refused to execute the arrest warrant, and they warrant the suspect. So the suspect was then picked up by the military attache of the Ukrainian embassy in Poland who drove him from his home to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital in a black BMW with diplomatic license plates. So that was the end of that effort in 2024. Then he came back, however, because his family lives there, he didn't want to be separated from his children and his spouse.
So he got arrested by coincidence by a Polish police officer who saw the warrant against him and didn't know about the political background of the whole case because there was an open arrest warrant in the system. So he was put in a courtroom and there was a hearing, and a judge decided not to execute the German arrest warrant because the judge said, "It doesn't matter if this man is guilty or not, Ukraine is fighting a just war. And therefore, even if he's guilty, he was doing the right thing essentially." I'm summarizing, I'm not quoting directly, but that was the essence of what the judge said. So he released the man, Vladimir, and he was a free man in Poland as long as he stayed in Poland. Now what he did, however, is this year he traveled to Croatia apparently to work as a consultant on a movie, and the Germans got wind of him being there through their channels and they asked the Croatian police to arrest him.
The Croatians did that and a Croatian judge has just this week as we are recording this podcast, decided to extradite him to Germany. So he will also presumably stand trial in Hamburg, just like Serhii, the other Ukrainian suspect. Now, the case with Vladimir is a little bit different because there seems to be much harder evidence against him. There is a photograph and then they search his house in Poland, and in the garage they found diving equipment. And on that diving equipment they found traces of the very same explosives that were found at the blast sites.
Sasha Ingber: So for those who have not been arrested, who are safely in Ukraine or a country that would protect Ukraine like Poland, what are they saying right now?
Bojan Pancevski: They're bitter, they're angry, they're disillusioned, they're completely outraged. They have no sort of understanding of why this is happening. They can't comprehend how Germany can charge their comrades with war crimes, and potentially themselves. Because obviously, if these people are charged with war crimes, anyone arrested in connection with this case could be charged with war crimes. I mean, they're simply outraged. Essentially, they are now trapped in Ukraine and they're being hunted. They're also very angry at their own government because Volodymyr Zelenskyy has disowned them. He said, he doesn't know anything about the operation, and he doesn't basically want to deal with it. Because obviously, it's a geopolitical nightmare. Now, Germany is the biggest supporter financially and otherwise of Ukraine. There'll be a massive trial in Germany where Ukrainians, including members of the Ukrainian armed forces are being charged with war crimes. So it's a very difficult case for Zelenskyy and everyone else involved.
And I think they're very angry that nobody stands up in Ukraine and says, "Well, look, we did it and we were right to do it." They expect the military leadership, even the people who are retired or no longer in office, they expect at least they should be the ones to pipe up and say, "Well, I was part of the command chain and this was the right thing to do. These people just did their jobs."
Sasha Ingber: So Zelenskyy isn't going to stand up for them. What about General Zaluzhnyi who is now, as you say, Ukraine's ambassador to the UK? Is he likely to speak up?
Bojan Pancevski: What I do know is that Zaluzhnyi is no politician. He's a straight talking, huge patriot, nationalist, military man. I give you a little anecdote, I reported exclusively on how the German police gathered evidence against the suspect. And one of the Ukrainian media outlets translated my article from the Wall Street Journal and put it on their Facebook page. And what happened was Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the ambassador, used his ambassadorial account on Facebook to comment underneath that article. I'm quoting from memory, he wrote, "Interesting times ahead, but we will never be ashamed." And that cryptic remark triggered a lot of controversy and debate in Ukraine and in Germany. So there is, I think, a slight possibility that he might open up. I mean, who knows? It's an open secret that he wants to run for president. I mean, that's part of the reason why he got fired as a commander-in-chief.
Sasha Ingber: Right. He was very popular and it, I think, was causing some jealousy in Zelenskyy, which led to him being removed as the commander of the armed forces. So the power dynamics at play here are also important to highlight. But you sat down with these operatives. You presumably looked them face to face, and this was before these trials were underway. What was it like to meet them and to speak with them then?
Bojan Pancevski: I compared in my book to someone watching a high stakes poker game and being able to look over the shoulders of the key players. It was really extraordinary. I mean, in fact, to me, the most surprising thing was that they are people just like you and I. I mean, some of them obviously are veteran spooks, intelligence operatives, clandestine operatives, but others... And these are the peoples who actually put the minds onto the pipelines. They're completely ordinary people with extraordinary skills and hobbies like deep sea diving, but in fact, they have normal day jobs. I mean, one of them is fitting air conditioning. The other one is an IT engineer. They're perfectly normal people with families, with spouses, with children, with friends, with normal lives, and they were plucked out of obscurity by this whirlwind of war around them. And they felt they were doing service to their nation and in fact helping Europe. This is what they sincerely believed they were doing.
Sasha Ingber: So now their lives are forever changed. Their freedom is totally limited. And are they still proud of what they did or do they question the decision to have done that?
Bojan Pancevski: I mean, not everyone is of the same opinion. I mean, obviously the person who got arrested, he was fairly angry with everyone and with his own government. I had lunch with one of them relatively recently and he said, "We are just patriotic idiots. That's the resource we have in Ukraine is patriotic idiots."
Sasha Ingber: Not to be confused with the useful idiots which the Russian employ.
Bojan Pancevski: Exactly. And I think that's the sentiment that many of them share. I think they believe this is completely unjust and unfair what's happened to them, but it's not untypical. People like that are usually called proxies in the intelligence community. It's a very popular way of clandestine work, and I think a lot of these people end up in a bad way. There's no question about it. We still don't know what Volodymyr Zelenskyy will eventually do, because I think when the trial starts and the Ukrainian veteran is put in the spotlight of the media and his family's out there talking to newspapers and TV and journalists, I think the pressure on him, his government, the military will increase. People will be asking, "Well, why is this person put on trial? Who is he? Why is he being left alone in Germany to be facing severe charges of war crimes?" So I think it will become an issue of national importance.
Sasha Ingber: And what message does it show if this is how you treat a proxy, a patriot? There's so much to pull at here. Now, it sounds like the reason that they spoke with you is because they realized the importance of communicating with a journalist, sharing what they experienced, letting that story be told. Why did the German investigators speak with you? I know you previously were a correspondent in Germany, so it probably meant that you had the advantage of being able to turn to those sources.
Bojan Pancevski: Yeah. Well, I had been living in Germany for eight years at that point, and I knew a lot of people in the leadership of the security agencies, of the government, of the police, of the intelligence agencies. So I already had this network of contacts, equally so in Ukraine, by the way. I had been reporting on Ukraine since the war started in 2014. So it was a long process. It wasn't that easy, it took weeks and weeks. In one instance, I had to go in Kyiv to the home of a person who was crucial to my story for literal three weeks. Almost every day I would show up there trying to talk to him. He wouldn't utter the words North Stream at all. I made various arrangements to get them to trust me that I wouldn't share that information. I think ultimately police, detectives, spies, special operators are people who work with people, and they're essentially very curious.
And also you will find quite proud people. They are proud in their professional achievements, which are immense in both cases. The police basically solved the case, the perpetrators accomplished their mission totally against the odds. And both sets of protagonists are actually very proud of what they have done, perhaps rightly so from their perspective.
Sasha Ingber: So both sides are proud. The Ukrainians though are seeing the cost of that work. On the German side, from the investigator's perspective, do they in any way question or regret the fact that this could have secondary effects whereby it creates tensions between the Germans and the Ukrainians? And the fact that the Russians are likely to use this for their own disinformation campaigns?
Bojan Pancevski: Well, that's certainly something they're aware of. I mean, in the top echelons of German politics, people are absolutely not happy with the upcoming trial. I mean, all the way up to the chancellor. As for the police, the police, I think in the course of their investigation, they learned to respect their targets and that they were driven by patriotism. I think this is something the police has recognized that these are no conventional perpetrators. They're not obviously criminals in the conventional sense. I think whether or not they will eventually stop to ponder the moral and the ethical issues of this. I think that might happen following the verdict, whatever the verdict may be, and then we'll see how they cope with that.
Sasha Ingber: And now, it's in the prosecutor's hands. As a last question, do the Ukrainian saboteurs, do the Ukrainian people think that the Nord Stream attack was worth it? Especially, when we consider that gas prices have risen because of the US war on Iran. And now there is the question of whether or not Russian gas and oil has a place in the global economy again.
Bojan Pancevski: I mean, the war in Iran, as you said, has changed the landscape, and in many ways the energy trade is a zero-sum game. I mean, it's a fact of life that Russia is the second-biggest exporter of oil, and I think the biggest exporter of natural gas perhaps. The saga of Nord Stream is not over by any means. Vladimir Putin has been trying to fix and reopen the pipelines ever since they were blown up. He wasn't able to do that because there are American and European sanctions now imposed on the pipeline system. But he's trying, he's put it on the table during the negotiations with the Trump administration. And it's one of the preconditions, in fact, for a settlement.
Whether or not the Ukrainians think it was a good idea, I think the people... At least I would say, some of the people who actually with their own hands blew up the pipelines do not think now it was a good idea because of the consequences they and their families are facing because of this. Because they not only fear international arrest warrants, German prosecutors, German police, they are starting to fear their own government. Because when they see their government has disowned them, they're thinking, "Well, what if I am made to disappear one day what if I get a knock on the door?"
And finally, they fear Russia as well because Russia has a tendency of bumping people off if you do something to them. So they live in fear, essentially. They think perhaps it wasn't a great idea for us to do that. Their commanders, the masterminds of the operation, however, they do think that it was a strategic necessity to destroy the pipeline. They do think that sooner or later, the pipelines would've been supplying cash to Vladimir's Putin war machine, and that it was right to switch them off to blow them up to remove the possibility of Europe being tempted to enter a trade with Russia again. And I think the war in Iran is just reinforcing that sense their analysis. So I think they are unrepentant in that sense, but not all of them. Obviously, the people who are directly affected by the German investigation, some of them have in the meantime changed their minds.
Sasha Ingber: Go figure. And now we know what the Russians want to do with Nord Stream and where it stands still in disarray on the seabed of the Baltics.
Bojan, thank you so much for taking the time to unfold all of the complex layers of this story. Really appreciate the work that you've done and you're sharing it.
Bojan Pancevski: Well, thank you ever so much for inviting me. It was a great pleasure.
Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. If you liked the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it really helps. If you have any feedback or you want to hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and this show is brought to you by N2K Networks, Podville Media, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.
