Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved a plan to blow up Russia's Nord Stream gas pipeline, but backed down at the request of the United States, a report said. A report from the American Wall Street Journal Released on Wednesday (14).
The Nord Stream 2 substation exploded in September 2022. A symbol of European-Russian energy integration, it suffered unprecedented damage.
The cause of the explosion was not known until recently, and although investigations by Germany, Denmark and Sweden pointed to a deliberate attack, no one has claimed responsibility.
But late last year, a joint report by another American newspaper, The Washington Post, and the German magazine Der Spiegel suggested that the person responsible for coordinating the operation was a Ukrainian military man, former intelligence agent Roman Chervynsky, 48, who denies the accusation.
A Wall Street Journal report released Wednesday details the planning for the attack based on the testimony of four Ukrainian soldiers who were aware of or directly involved in the operation.
According to these people, the attack cost around US$300,000 (around R$1.7 billion in current conversion) and involved a chartered yacht with a crew of six.
Among them were professional divers with no connection to the military, and one woman whose presence sought to create the illusion of a group of friends having fun.
People claim that the plan was initially verbally approved by Zelensky.
When the CIA learned of the matter through warnings from its Dutch counterpart, it warned the Ukrainian president to stop it, and he did.
But Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhny, the top Ukrainian military commander at the time who was put in charge of the raid, went ahead with the strike, say the people who spoke to The Wall Street Journal.
Zaluzhny, now Kyiv’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, told the US outlet that he was aware that no such operation had taken place and that any suggestion otherwise would be “just a provocation.” He also said that the Ukrainian armed forces could not have been involved in the action because they are not authorized to carry out missions abroad.
A senior official in the Security Service of Ukraine, Ukraine's domestic spy agency, denied that his government had anything to do with the gas pipeline explosions, and said Zelensky had not approved any such action on third-party territory.
