The Nord Stream Conspiracy by Bojan Pancevski: 5-star review

Colin Freeman

In autumn 2022, a team of Ukrainian divers headed towards a yachting resort on Germany’s Baltic coast, primed for a top-secret undercover mission. Comprising four men and one woman, the group was equipped with scuba gear, explosives and possibly the daftest cover story in the history of espionage.

If stopped by police, the divers were ready to claim that they were making an aquatic-themed pornographic film. “This won’t be conspicuous at all in Germany or Sweden,” insisted their commander, a Soviet-era military-intelligence officer who had limited experience of Western Europe.

It seems unlikely that their story would have convinced the German authorities. At the same time, though, few would have believed the real mission, either: to dive to the bottom of the Baltic Sea and blow up the Nord Stream pipelines, the four 750-mile conduits designed to carry cheap Russian gas to Germany. For one thing, the pipelines lay 80m below the surface, twice as deep as even the best-trained special-forces divers normally go. And for another, to destroy Nord Stream would be the largest act of sabotage in modern history, destroying a $20bn (£15bn) project originally designed to cement Russian-German friendship.

Brazen as it was, the bomb plot went ahead, and was successful: two explosions wrecked three of the four pipelines beyond repair on September 26 that year. They have not resumed functioning since. Berlin’s friendship with Moscow had already soured in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The sabotage, coming seven months later, only cemented this, and helped ensure that Russia would never be able to blandish Germany again with offers of cheap Russian gas. Nonetheless, carrying the war into Europe’s coastal waters was still a colossal gamble. So how was the scheme dreamt up in the first place, and by whom?

All these questions and more are answered in The Nord Stream Conspiracy, a new book by investigative journalist Bojan Pancevski, which tells the remarkable inside story of the bomb plot, and the dogged German police investigation that ensued. Rather than merely relying on official sources, Pancevski gets plenty of his intelligence from the Ukrainian conspirators themselves – who tell him their story even as German prosecutors continue to hunt for them.

The strike, which left 350,000 tons of methane bubbling to the Baltic’s surface, sparked a vast geopolitical whodunnit. At the time, many in the West presumed that it was the work of the Kremlin, angry at EU energy sanctions and keen to show the bloc how vulnerable its power infrastructure was to sabotage. Meanwhile, plenty of others pointed a finger at the CIA. Successive Washington administrations had warned Germany that its reliance on cheap Russian gas left it beholden to Vladimir Putin’s regime, and a fortnight before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden, then the US president, had cryptically promised to “bring an end” to Nord Stream 2 if Russia crossed that border.

Putin himself, though never slow to blame Kyiv, seemed to suggest that Ukraine wasn’t capable of this one, blaming instead an “Anglo-Saxon” alliance. Whoever the culprit was, it was assumed that they must have had a level of technical expertise only available to the world’s great powers.

Yet as Pancevski reveals, the world was once again underestimating Ukraine. The Nord Stream Conspiracy expands on reporting conducted in his capacity as Berlin correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, where he broke much of the original ground on this story. It’s also the fruit, however, of years of earlier reporting in Ukraine, where he appears to have met, and diligently cultivated as sources, two of the military commanders behind the Nord Stream attack, codename: “Operation Diameter”.

These two men are identified here only as “the General” and “the Colonel”. They were not, it seems, taking direct orders from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, they formed, as the General puts it, “a tiny little deep-state”, operating largely on their own initiative. They brought a wealth of experience at the dirtier end of espionage: the Colonel, for instance, specialised in assassinating pro-Kremlin warlords in Ukraine’s separatist-held east, one of whom had had a bomb planted in his apartment’s lift.

To assemble the Diameter team, however, the men had to reach outside their usual battle-hardened ranks, and recruit specialist, civilian deep-sea divers – the only people capable of going down to Nord Stream’s 80-metre depth. Luckily, Ukraine has a large and patriotic Black Sea diving fraternity, from which volunteers were picked amid great secrecy. They included one female diver, “Freya”, a former model who’d once graced the cover of an erotic magazine.

The team practised for the mission in disused Ukrainian quarries, using explosives hidden in their oxygen canisters. They then travelled to Germany, where they hired a boat from a marina on the coast and posed as leisure divers exploring shipwrecks. (The Colonel’s suggested porn-film alibi had, at this late stage, been abandoned.) They headed out to plant the bombs at four separate sites off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm. Despite the storminess of the Baltic Sea, the planting of the bombs went like clockwork; as did, more literally, the timers that set off the undersea explosions several hours later (by which time the team had already driven out of Germany).

The Ukrainians were, however, victims of their own professionalism, and that of the German police. When detectives tracked down fellow marina users, one turned out to have been so impressed with the skipper’s sailing skills that he’d filmed him docking his boat, in the process capturing a glimpse of the team’s beige Citroën van. Detectives then checked local speed-cameras on the off-chance that the Citroën had been photographed speeding – and, after ploughing through around 5,000 images, they found one that showed the Ukrainian driver at the wheel.

To date, German authorities have only detained one suspect: the skipper, who was arrested while on holiday in Italy last August and extradited back to Germany. (He has since been named as Serhiy Kuznetsov.) Berlin also issued a warrant for a second suspect, based in Poland, only for the Polish authorities, who are more sympathetic to Kyiv’s cause, to tip him off. When a furious German minister complained, his Polish opposite number apparently retorted: “Instead of a warrant, any suspect like that should be given a medal.” The rest of the Diameter team, thought to number at least a dozen, are in Ukraine, which forbids extradition of its citizens.

The skipper is expected to face trial in Germany later this year, although political appetite for the case is limited. Berlin has become one of Ukraine’s biggest military backers, while the German chancellor Friedrich Merz has said it was a “mistake” ever to build Nord Stream in the first place. The trial may also focus attention on just how much Zelensky knew about the plot. Pancevski suggests that it was approved first by Ukraine’s top general, Valerii Zaluzhnyi – now ambassador to London – who then passed it to Zelensky for sign-off. The plan was briefly dropped after Western intelligence got wind of it, but then was apparently reheated. (Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi have denied ever sanctioning it.)

Pancevski hints that the CIA might have given the Ukrainians tacit encouragement. “Not all senior CIA officials who got wind of Operation Diameter were outraged,” he writes. “They weren’t necessarily averse to someone putting the pipeline permanently out of commission.” One ex-CIA man even sounds envious, telling Pancevski: “I spent my days dealing with diversity training. We don’t go around blowing things up like that any more.”

In such a shadowy world, it’s difficult to know what, or whom, to believe. Pancevski’s lively and well-written account, however, is about as close as we’re likely to get to a straightforward story of what happened under the Baltic Sea. It also testifies to the importance of old-school journalistic shoe-leather. While his Ukrainian contacts clearly wanted to tell their story, they would only do so to a tried and trusted interlocutor. Plenty of current-affairs books these days are trumpeted with the phrase “reads like a thriller”. The Nord Stream Conspiracy genuinely does.

★★★★★

The Nord Stream Conspiracy is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books