Denmark Claims Nord Stream Sabotage Investigators Found ‘Traces of Subsea Explosives’ on Yacht

A private yacht at the center of a European investigation into the saboteurs behind the Nord Stream pipeline explosions in September 2022 has been found to have explosive residue, the Danish Foreign Ministry said earlier this week.

The letter was delivered to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday at a meeting requested by the Russian government. Although the Danish Foreign Ministry delivered the letter, it represented the combined efforts of Sweden and Germany as well.

Denmark 🇩🇰, Germany 🇩🇪 and Sweden 🇸🇪 have sent a new joint letter to the UN Security Council 🇺🇳 on the Nord Stream explosions with a status of the separate, national investigations, in light of the upcoming meeting on the issue 👇 pic.twitter.com/9LrJGrxnDC

— Denmark MFA 🇩🇰 (@DanishMFA) July 11, 2023

According to the letter, the biggest news overturned by the probe thus far has come from Germany, where the yacht “Andromeda” was alleged to have been rented by a pro-Ukraine group and used to carry out the bombings.

“In connection with the suspicious charter of a sailing yacht the investigations found out that the boat had been chartered in the name of a person who used documents provided in order to hide the identity of the real charterer. Whether this person was in fact subsequently on board has not been established and is the subject of continuing investigations,” the letter said.

“The boat’s precise course has not been definitively clarified and is the subject of continuing investigations. It is suspected that the boat in question may have been used to transport the explosives that exploded at the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the Baltic Sea on 26 September 2002. Traces of subsea explosives were found in the samples taken from the boat during the investigation. According to expert assessments, it is possible that trained divers could have attached explosives at the points where damage occurred to the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, which are laid on the seabed at a depth of approx. 70 to 80 meters.”

“At this point it is not possible to reliably establish the identity of the perpetrators and their motives, particularly regarding the question of whether the incident was steered by a state or state actor. All information to clarify this matter will be pursued during the course of investigations.”

The yacht was first reported on March 7 in concurrent reports run in the New York Times and Die Zeit, which claimed that a pro-Ukrainian group with possible ties to the Ukrainian government was behind the pipeline sabotage. However, those reports only emerged after acclaimed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article firmly pointing the finger at the US Navy SEALs, which Western corporate media nearly completely ignored and the White House denigrated as “false and complete fiction.”

However, other Western outlets have also questioned the veracity of the yacht story, noting that even the anonymously-quoted intelligence figures admitted there are huge holes and numerous question marks in the theory.

For example, the tiny Andromeda lacks the capacity to haul the roughly 1,500-2,000 kilograms of explosives used in the attacks, and it lacks the kind of decompression chamber that would be necessary for divers to safely return from the 80-meter depth of the pipelines.

Hersh called the story a “parody” akin to Piltdown Man, a paleoanthropic fraud touted for decades as the “missing link” between apes and man, only to be revealed in the 1950s as a deliberate assemblage of bones from humans and orangutans.

The explosions tore open all but one of the Nord Stream pipes, leaving just one of the Nord Stream 2 pipes able to carry gas. However, while the pipelines still had gas inside them and Nord Stream 2 was not in use at the time, Russia had already turned off the flow on Nord Stream 1 several weeks before the explosions in protest of a unilateral price cap instituted by the European Union.

The leaks took six days to plug and caused the single largest release of methane into the atmosphere of any industrial accident, equivalent to the entire output of the country of Sweden in a year. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, judged to have 80 times the warming capacity of CO2.