Explosions at Nord Stream 'can only be attacks'

Like an Earthquake with a Magnitude of 2.3 on the Richter Scale

For example, monitoring stations in Sweden registered explosions at the bottom of the Baltic Sea on the Danish Island of Bornholm on Monday evening. There is no doubt that they were explosions: they punched holes in the two Nord Stream gas pipelines that play a crucial role in the energy chess game between Russia and Europe surrounding the war in Ukraine.

No gas flows through the pipes. Russia has shut down Nord Stream-1 on the pretext that Western sanctions are blocking a significant repair. And Germany refused to give Nord Stream 2 the green light just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of millions of cubic meters of natural gas in both pipelines, which are released. Gas prices skyrocketed.

"Our imagination no longer allows for a scenario where this is not a targeted attack," a German government official told Tagesspiegel on Tuesday. Poland and Denmark also assumed sabotage; it underlines the vulnerability of energy infrastructure. Denmark and Norway have tightened security measures around energy nodes.

Such an attack, which goes beyond using gas as a political weapon, carries all the elements of 'hybrid warfare.'

There is wild speculation about the perpetrator and motive. But the timing was salient: one day before the opening of Baltic Pipe, the new gas connection from Norway via Denmark to Poland. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was in Poland for the opening ceremony on Tuesday.

Norwegian gas must compensate for missing Russian gas. "The leak in Nordstream-2 [southeast of Bornholm] is close to the Baltic Pipe," Tom Marzec-Manser, an energy consultant, told the Financial Times. "Norwegian gas means a new dawn for European imports, but twilight for Russia."

Negotiation Room

Aslak Berg, a Norwegian economist, said on Twitter that he saw only two possibilities: a scenario in which "a friendly nation carried out the attack" to prevent Germany from having a "negotiating room with Russia" over gas. And two: Russia did it "to show what it is capable of." "If the gas supply from Norway is interrupted, everything will be in jeopardy," Berg said.

The latter also seems plausible to Julian Pawlak, a German defense analyst. The goal is to "send a message," he tweeted. "Anyone who can paralyze a pipeline through which no gas flows can also hit active infrastructure." Such as oil and gas pipelines that lie all over the North and Baltic Seas or power cables to offshore wind farms and data cables, which form the backbone of the interconnected economies.

There is no doubt that Russia is capable of such operations. It features submarines, human-crewed and crewless "underwater vehicles," and so-called combat divers. Russian ships have also been repeatedly found performing suspicious maneuvers at submarine cables. Cutting a data link between Norway and a satellite station on Spitsbergen early this year was almost certainly the work of Russia. With the Belgorod, a 'submarine mothership,' Russia has a specially equipped vessel for this.

But it is precisely the shallow Baltic Sea is being closely observed by "adjacent countries and their navies," according to H.I. Sutton, an authoritative maritime analyst. It is virtually impossible that the Belgorod (with a length of more than 150 meters) "could operate unnoticed there," said Sutton.

Dutch Tanker Plane

Significantly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, surveillance has been sharpened enormously. ADS-B Exchange, an open-source aircraft movement tracker, showed Western military aircraft patrolling the Baltic Sea on Tuesday. Even what you did not see was significant: above the area of the explosions, a military tank plane registered in the Netherlands circled for hours. But the plane that was supposed to refuel the A330 in the air — almost certainly a military aircraft capable of detecting underwater activity — was not visible because it had its electronic beacon turned off.