Nord Stream AG has sued its insurers Lloyds&Arch for not paying damages to be used for repairing the pipelines. In the arguments published right before the trial, team Lloyds summarizes the opinions of several geopolitics experts engaged by the parties.

It is agreed between the geopolitics expert witnesses that there are only four potential perpetrators of the attack:

(a) Russian state actors;

(b) Ukrainian state actors;

(c) a group of sub-state actors from Ukraine (alone or with assistance from Ukrainian state actors); or

(d) US state actors (working alone or in support of Ukraine).

The Defendants do not need to establish which of the above possibilities is correct, because any one of the four possible scenarios plainly satisfies the War Exclusion.

Team Lloyds interprets the insurance policy such that if the pipeline destruction was an act of war, they don’t need to pay. They also don’t think they need to prove who was responsible for the sabotage. They avoid the attribution question by listing four “possibilities”, as a summary of the views of “geopolitics expert witnesses”. But are all those four alternative scenarios listed in Lloyd’s expert summary still “possible” today given all disclosure in the three and a half years since the big explosions in the Baltic? Are the main proponents behind each scenario acting in good faith, actively searching for the truth, or is perhaps the confusion and permanently unsettled state the real objective for some? Let’s take a closer look at the scenarios.

Scenario B: Ukraine state actors did it alone.

In Germany Ukrainian SBU officer Serhii Kuzniezov is awaiting trial accused of being the commander on a sailboat where Ukrainian hobby-divers placed the bombs on all four Nord Stream pipelines and managed to destroy three of them. The German prosecutor allegedly has strong evidence of this, collected by an investigation which has been confidentially shared with expert witnesses in the London insurance trial. There are European arrest orders for all crew members on the sailboat with the name Andromeda. The German federal court of justice has officially released a statement that “with high probability” the Andromeda crew acted on behalf of the Ukrainian state.

Major media outlets go a step further and claim there is solid evidence that Ukraine was the state actor ordering the attack carried out by the sailboat crew. Bojan Pancevski, a WSJ journalist who uses chief investigator Dieter Romann as a main source in his book, claims with confidence that the “respected” general leading the operation reported directly to Zaluzhny, the commander in chief, and president Selenskij approved it.

Germany’s prosecution and its friends in the media have selected scenario B, and they dismiss all other scenarios above. The soldiers and amateur divers on the boat are prosecuted, and the state leadership of Ukraine is not, but that’s not because they are innocent. The crew members aren’t prosecuted as rogue actors. They are suspected of following orders from Ukraine but are guilty anyway, Nuremberg style.

Poland sees it differently, and Serhii K’s fellow crew member on Andromeda Volodomyr Zhuravlev was quickly given functional immunity. He had lived happily in Poland since the attack but was suddenly arrested, put on trial and released right after after the arrest of Kuzniezov in Italy. It was likely a performance intended to create a precedent to block Kuzníezov’s extradition on similar grounds. Polish leadership stopped short of claiming Ukraine was ordering the attack, but “if they did”, Zhuravlev was innocent. They even praised the attack and said it was in the interest of Poland. The Italian lawyer trying to stop Serhii K’s extradition from Italy to Germany also fought for functional immunity but failed because Ukraine never officially admitted. Serhii’s lawyers in Germany tried the same and failed.

Grok (an LLM presumably a leader in legal matters) summarizes:

Poland invoked an ancient philosophical tradition (Just War) to justify the act itself as non-criminal in a defensive war.

Germany applies a strict, post-1945 positivist reading of international humanitarian law and customary international law, forged in the Nuremberg era, that denies combatant/functional immunity for covert sabotage that fails the tests of distinction, proportionality, and open state attribution.

Many observers find the story of the amateur divers an annoying distraction to the geopolitical context where the Nord Stream story belongs. I agree with that. True or not, the sailboat story belongs in Hollywood. It’s hilarious that normal friendly and very likable hobby divers are turned into fearless commandos in just a month. With a ridiculously low budget, they successfully executed the greatest sabotage of the century. Read more about it in Bojan Pancevski’s book.

It was an operation so difficult and demanding that many experts and commentators conclude it must somehow be fake or just a cover for someone else who placed the bombs with proper equipment. Here I disagree. I know several divers who say they could have done it too, and the method they would have chosen would be similar. I think the story of the divers is great and I’m looking forward to the movie. But besides the opportunity to interview them further in prison to get a better script for that movie I don’t see much point in prosecuting these Ukrainian patriots. It does nothing to resolve the real conflict and lay bare the motives behind the Nord Stream sabotage which has ruined the German economy. I find it wrong to blame the saboteurs for the fact that the pipelines are still out of operation after almost four years. If it wasn’t for European and US sanctions it would have been up and running again in 6 months. It’s dishonest to blame the divers for the destruction of the German economy. Their importance diminish with time.

Scenario C, “sub-state actors” (dead)

I’m not aware of anybody seriously proposing that rogue actors bombed Nord Stream. The narrative probably made it to the pool of “possibilities” in the London trial just because of the way the Andromeda sailboat mission was first reported to the public. The initial emphasis was on the amateur divers, the bomb making on the dinner table of a sailboat, and a claim that president Zelenskij of Ukraine had no idea. Scenario C has been absorbed by scenario B, It’s dead.

Scenario A, Russia! (not a theory)

For some reason, both the Swedish and German investigations were presented with leads pointing to Russia as the perpetrator, and both investigations looked carefully into the accusations and concluded there was no evidence pointing to Russia. Russia as perpetrator was the dominant media narrative in the period after the attack, and many western leaders talked about it in a way that signalled Russian responsibility to the public. Even after it was clear that the German investigation pursued the Ukrainian lead, the political leadership of Germany considered it likely that the Andromeda mission was in fact a Russian false flag. But there has never been any physical evidence pointing to Russia, just several attempts to fabricate evidence. It is and has always been a disinformation operation, and that’s why treating it as a theory and trying to falsify its claims never works.

The Danish podcast Frihedsbrevet recently aired a hilarious interview with a military analyst, Anders Puck Nielsen from Forsvarsakademiet (Royal Danish Defence College). Puck is an “expert” with credentials, and he still holds Russia as the most likely perpetrator. The interviewers Frederikke Ingemann and Andreas Munk had made deep dives into the Nord Stream story and its background in 23 episodes of the podcast prior to this interview. The questions were calm and sharp and mr Puck wasn’t able to contradict any of the factual circumstances presented to him by the interviewers who, in this unusual case, were much more knowledgeable in subject than the “expert” they interviewed for almost a full hour.. Puck the expert never articulated a theory of how Russia did it, he just diverted questions and shrouded the Andromeda story in a cloud of uncertainty. At one point he seemed to suggest Andromeda was a Russian false flag, but when asked by the curious interviewer to follow through in the thought he backed off. That tells us that scenario A isn’t a theory or a valid hypothesis. It’s never followed through by its own proponents. They want us to believe Russia blew up their own pipeline , and they manage to create many true believers, but there has never been a single serious investigator who supports this theory and follows through by articulating hypotheses which may or may not survive scrutiny. The hoax survives for another and a much more fundamental reason, namely the belief that Russia had a motive.

The Danish “expert” kept coming back to the presumed Russian motive in the interview. This was the one thing he would never give up. He claimed Russia was gaining the most from the sabotage, and they revealed their objectives already in the summer before the attack by shutting down Nord Stream 1. . Although his first assertion might have some truth to it, the second claim that the pipeline closing summer 2022 was some kind of prelude to the bombings, is probably the most underreported and dangerous misconception of the Nord Stream saga.

The Siemens turbine and pipeline shutdown in Summer 2022.

The fact that Russia and Gazprom decided to shut down the Nord Stream pipeline in the summer of 2022 has been widely reported as evidence of Russian energy blackmail and the existence of a Russian motive to destroy the pipelines. It’s a spin which is so central to the narrative of Russia bombing their own pipeline, that it’s questionable if the narrative could even exist without it. Therefore I feel I have to cover the summer 2022 episode in some detail.

In June 2022, the turbine had been stuck in Canada for three months after completed service because of Canadian sanctions on Russia and Ukrainian lobbying to keep it in Canada.

Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko wrote a letter in June 2022 lobbying Canada not to return the turbine. He argued that Russia had sufficient capacity via other routes (including Ukrainian transit) and that returning it would undermine sanctions.
Reuters

The Ukrainian government formally opposed the move, with the Foreign Ministry expressing “deep disappointment” after Canada’s exemption announcement on July 9–10, 2022. They called it a “dangerous precedent” that would embolden Russian “energy blackmail” and urged Canada to reverse the decision.
ferl.org

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy personally raised the issue with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and publicly criticized the decision as unacceptable.
Politico

The turbine finally arrived in Germany and on August 3, 2022 German Chancellor Scholz posed in front of the serviced turbine, sending the message that the Russians had no excuse to keep choking the gas flow. Germany claimed there were no “legal barriers” to delivering the turbine while Russia claimed that sanctions still prevented the shipment to Russia. Scholtz’s media stunt is very clear to the west and the German general public. His message to them is that delivering gas is now up to Russia. But the messaging is not very clear to Russia which the following simple observation shows:

1. The Ukrainian government said in the summer 2022 that the turbine shipment would embolden Russian “energy blackmail”.

2. Scholz’s message is that Russia does “energy blackmail” by NOT accepting the delivery of the turbine.

Scholz, in his public messaging, was completely ignoring the threatening nature of sanctions when he said that there are no legal barriers. The consumer of mainstream news with pictures of Scholz in front of the pipeline may not see those threats, but Nord Stream AG, Gazprom, and Russia’s leadership certainly do. They know that the institutions crafting sanctions are the same institutions that decide on, or support, more “kinetic”, war-like actions. Sanctions are not “legal boundaries”. They are instruments of extortion, and for Nord Stream it’s pure energy blackmail: Stop buying gas from Russia or something much worse will happen! When Zelenskij called it “unacceptable” to return the Siemens turbine to Russia, he knew about his own country’s plans to destroy the pipeline. He had approved the initial plan in June, and according to WSJ, he had been told by his Commander in Chief that the operation could not be stopped.

Already on July 26, Zelenskij slammed Russia for choking the flow of Gas as a response to the turbine debacle:

“As it is clear to everyone that this is intended Russian price terror against Europeans,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday. “Using Gazprom, Moscow is doing all it can to make this coming winter as harsh as possible for the European countries.”

Was the plan to blame Russia for the explosions already in the making when Zelenskij made this statement? It sure sounds like that, and there are plenty of other signs that the campaign to blame Russia for the attack was prepared in advance. And was the real sentiment in Ukraine that it was Germany that needed punishment for carving out an exception to the sanctions which allowed the gas to continue flowing? In the new light of revelations that Ukraine blew up the pipeline, Zelenskij’s summer 2022 bashing of Russia for turning it off look like preparation to blame Russia for the attack, while his simultaneous comments on the turbines stand out as warnings to Germany which were to be followed up with real action. I’m not saying that Zelenskij was an important player in the Nord Stream sabotage, but I am saying that the threat of destruction was embedded in the sanctions. Russia had all reasons to be unimpressed by Scholtz’s media stunt in front of the turbine. They were hit by sanctions from the USA, the European Union, Canada and Britain. American officials had said threatening things, like Nuland’s “one way or another”, or Biden’s “we will put an end to it”. Bojan Pancevski, the author who published the most detailed account yet of how Ukraine planned and carried out the attack on Nord Stream was asked about those warnings in the German TV show “Lanz” right after his book launch. His answer was that Biden “obviously spoke about sanctions”. I disagree. The threatening rhetoric is not just about announcing the sanctions. It’s a signal that worse things will happen if the sanctions for some reason are not followed or are not effective.

There was a clear precedent. The first Trump administration had imposed sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 construction in 2019, but Nord Stream 2 was able to finish the construction anyway with the help of Russian vessels. American lawmakers and officials were furious about the ineffective sanctions and asked for more. Here is a compilation of such calls for action. The spirit of the pipeline’s enemies cannot be mistaken. The goal was not to put in sanctions, the goal is to permanently stop the pipeline, whatever it takes. If sanctions fail, like they did in 2019, then something else will happen which gets the job done.

While Scholz talked about legal boundaries, Russia wanted Germany to help remove the threats to the pipeline operation. Russia choked the flow through Nord Stream 1, but offered at the same time to deliver gas through Nord Stream 2 which was ready and powered by Russian turbines. Russia was putting pressure on Germany to remove or ignore sanctions on Nord Stream 2. This wasn’t energy blackmail from Russia, It was a test to see if Germany could stand up to existing energy blackmailing from the USA and the European Commission, and Germany failed the test.

Russia never had a motive to destroy the pipelines, and the successful campaign to persuade the populations of Europe to believe in such a motive was hardly in good faith. It was never a theory pursued by investigators who actively sought the truth, so listing it as a “possibility” by the expert witnesses in the London trial was intellectually lazy and deceptive. It gets even worse when you look into the attempts to put substance behind the claims of a Russian plot to bomb Nord Stream.

The ship Sibiryakov was featured in the 2023 Nordic investigative documentary series Skyggekrigen (English: The Shadow War / Putin’s Shadow War). The series (a high-profile joint production by Denmark’s DR, Sweden’s SVT, Norway’s NRK, and Finland’s Yle) highlighted Russian naval research vessel Sibiryakov as one of the ships present in the area close to the future explosion sites. It arrived around 14 June 2022, positioned itself near the pipelines, stayed for about a day, and conducted maneuvers (including at low speed over the pipelines). The documentary notes that the Sibiryakov is capable of underwater surveillance, seabed mapping, and launching small underwater vehicles — scary graphics and music insinuated that Russia had placed the bombs during that trip. But Bojan Pancevski’s inside story from the ongoing “Project Diameter” in Ukraine tells a different story. A Swedish SÄPO agent had been contacted by Roman Chervinsky and helped book a sailboat for the Ukrainian crew so they could place bombs planned to explode on June 19th at the place where Sibiriakov was found patrolling. Bojan writes (AI translation from German)

Over time, the plan was also discussed with other Baltic Sea coastal states—conversations that were intercepted by Russian spies. By this stage, Russia had infiltrated the BND at a high level by recruiting the head of the agency’s Technical Intelligence Division as a double agent. It was a move straight out of the KGB playbook, one the General would surely have approved of: fine wine and meals at expensive restaurants, followed by a trip to Berlin’s largest brothel. Plus thick envelopes stuffed with cash. This double agent within the BND was arrested in December of that year after passing crucial information to the Kremlin.

By Bojan’s account, Sibiryakov was patrolling the pipeline to protect it from an upcoming Ukrainian attack which Russia had caught wind of inside Germany’s BND! To be fair to Bojan, he also writes the Swedish warships were patrolling and protecting the pipeline, but a second incident with Russian ships on September 21-22, puts the real purpose of the Swedish and Danish warships over the pipeline in question.

Bojan writes that this time “The Colonel” (Bojan’s pseudonym for Roman Chervinsky), called “The Captain” (Bojan’s name for Serhii Kuzniezov, now detained in Germany awaiting trial) on the sailing yacht when it was about to place the final bombs. Chervinsky was following the ship traffic from Kiew and saw around noon on September 21 a Russian tugboat heading towards the pipelines at a speed which would get it there late in the evening on September 21. The tugboat was part of a small convoy with a larger ship of type SS-750 carrying a white orange/white striped submarine.

There was no way Chervinsky could have learned about the SS-750 with a submarine from “AIS only” as Bojan has been informed, because the AIS on the SS-750 was turned off during the entire trip. Chervinsky must have received the warning from other “partners” in the Baltic. What’s even worse with Bojan’s account of this episode is that the Russian flotilla posed no threat to the Andromeda mission in the days of September 20-21 when Captain Kuzniezov diverted the boat to Nexø in Bornholm on Chervinsky’s command. It was not until the early morning of September 22 that the SS-750 actually was a potential threat to the mission and from that perspective Andromeda set sail for the final bomb placement at the worst possible time. What made Chervinsky approve the mission that day? Well, at the same time as Andromeda left Nexø, Danish patrol ship Nymfen and Swedish warship Visby were speeding towards the Russian ships and were aggressively pushing them away. Nymfen photographed and archived photos of the Russian ships which later became “key evidence” of a Russian plot to bomb its own pipeline although it had crossed the path of the real Nord Stream bombers just hours earlier. In contradiction to Bojan’s story, experts working for the Danish defense maintained that Russia had a motive to blow up the pipeline and they sowed suspicion that this actually happened.

We now know that intelligence insiders in the west were fully aware that the threat to the pipelines came from Ukraine and other countries like the USA and Poland had a strong motive, but Russia definitely did not. It sure looks like the plot to blame Russia for the explosions was already in the making before they happened.

A final rather silly but prominent assertion in the Russia narrative was that only three out of 4 lines were bombed by Russia to keep their “energy blackmail” capability. This narrative could have easily been killed by Swedish and Danish investigations who found just weeks after the explosions that also the forth pipeline had been bombed although this bomb was not successful.

Did Sweden and Denmark know? And did they help the operation to bomb Nord Stream? It looks like some coordination was in place.

Scenario D: US state actors (working alone or in support of Ukraine)

“The primordial interest of the United States for over a century has been the relationship between Germany and Russia. Because united, they are the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen.” George Friedman 2015

The final scenario in Lloyds list of “possibilities”, is what many critics see as the only sensible explanation. A small nation like Ukraine simply doesn’t have the option to attack Germany by cutting their gas supply without the support of a superpower. If Ukraine had been an independent nation, and international law was followed by the others, the pipeline would have been repaired and recommissioned in six months. It would have just been a small hiatus in the gas flow, and Ukraine would have faced retribution to make sure they or some other trouble making nation wouldn’t do it again. But Bojan reveals a very different story. The “General” (his real name Vasil Burba isn’t revealed by Bojan but it was published earlier by Der Spiegel and Washington Post ) , Bojan’s main source in his book, was Chervinsky’s boss and the man who first suggested blowing up Nord Stream in the Ukrainian covert operations group. Burba was close to the CIA who paid for his armored vehicle after he was fired as chief of HUR. Here’s how Bojan introduces him (AI translation from German)

A skilled networker, the general established personal contacts with senior colleagues in the American intelligence services and traveled to the U.S. and Europe to meet with them. He met with representatives of the Trump administration, such as then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo and his deputy and successor, Gina Haspel. They attended sporting events together and went out to dinner afterward. At a hockey game in Washington, SBU and CIA agents chanted in unison, “Putin khuylo” (Putin is an asshole), a popular Ukrainian slogan.

Bojan further reveals that Burba was close to the CIA station manager in Kiew, who approved funding to the special ops group where Burba was active. The CIA station manager “liked the idea” of blowing up Nord Stream until the Russians learned about it in June 2022 through a leak and CIA chief Burns himself called the Kiew manager to stop the operation. This is the same William Burns who as US ambassador to Russia in 2008 wrote the “NYET means NYET” memo. Thanks to WikiLeaks we know he wrote “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” But still, as Burns presided over CIA in 2022, Ukraine had de-facto become a NATO member and Burns agency approved of support for Burba’s and Chervinsky’s sabotage endeavors in Russia. Bojan wants us to believe that the CIA and the USA seriously believed that Ukraine had cancelled the project for good in June and were totally taken by surprise when it happened on September 26, but this is, at best, irrelevant to actual US complicity. Many analysts believe the US knew and others go a step further to assert the USA assisted by placing some of the bombs and theorize that the Andromeda mission was just a cover operation. Personally I’m not going that far, but I think this widespread opinion makes it paramount that the German investigation releases technical evidence binding the accused to the actual crime scene. For instance that home-made dive-bottle bombs of the type described by Der Spiegel and Bojan were actually used.

The coordinator in Bojan’s book, Roman Chervinsky was also close to the CIA:

In Langley, where the CIA has its venerable headquarters, the colonel—who by that time was already a highly respected figure in intelligence circles dealing with Russia and Ukraine—was even granted access to the inner sanctum. CIA agents who had worked with him in Ukraine called him “the Crazy One” because he devised operations with unshakable calm and great methodical precision that seemed completely insane to them. They presented him with Operation Neptune Spear, the CIA-led mission to kill Osama bin Laden. The hosts showed the colonel a model of the building complex where bin Laden had been staying. The operation had been planned using the replica. They described every detail to him.

Obviously both Chervinsky and Burba were fully aware of USA’s well documented and long standing wet dream to destroy Nord Stream. They had received confirmation before June that the CIA liked the idea, and they correctly predicted that the action afterwards would receive praise from their American backers. Bojan rejects the importance of this, and maintains that the motivation of the General and the Colonel was purely patriotic to help their own nation Ukraine in their struggle for freedom from Russia.

Next to the hoax that Russia had a motive to blow up its own pipeline stands the idea that Ukraine blew it up on their own for their own benefit. It’s equally laughable. Although there’s some truth to Ukrainian war benefits of cutting Russia’s revenue stream, this narrative ignores the geopolitical realities just as badly as the blame Russia narrative. It’s often pointed out that Ukraine and Poland enjoyed transfer fees on the gas transport through their countries and disliked the competition from Nord Stream because it was hurting their business. But no. A small country can’t successfully boost its business by blowing up a competing business from a much bigger country. You only do that if you think you can act on behalf of the biggest bully in the yard. That’s in itself a reason why the USA can’t escape responsibility for the attacks.

The Nord Stream attacks simply would not have happened without US consent and power, regardless of how much the USA knew or helped the actual attack. The Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski broke the obvious truth when he tweeted “Thank You USA” right after the attack. The husband of prominent neocon Anne Applebaum, was forced to remove his tweet, but he still maintains that the USA knew about the attack and didn’t stop it.

The view that USA is responsible for the Nord Stream attack gained popularity after legendary journalist Seymour Hersh published a story with many details about how they did it with involvement of high US officials including CIA chief Burns, foreign minister Blinken and President Biden himself. Norway should have been of assistance. A source with a long relationship and good track record had dropped the information to Hersh. His story was met with much harsher vitriol than the much more harmful and financially backed blame-Russia narrative which added to Hersh’s credibility in circles with understanding of the broader context. Even in Bojan’s account and Der Spiegel’s reporting, it’s not a secret that the USA had a plan to blow up Nord Stream and they presented it to the Ukrainian team before they came up with the sailboat plan. Maybe Hersh was told about such a plan from a source who honestly thought that plan had been implemented when he heard about the explosions. I don’t know. I just think it makes little difference in the larger context.

The geopolitical ambition to prevent Russia + Europe to become a strong unit goes back a long time. British geographer Halford MacKinder wrote a seminal essay in 1904 called “The Geographical Pivot of History” where he launched his so-called Heartland Theory . His central idea was that Russia, if allowed to control the steppes of Eastern Europe, would eventually control the whole world. This was before WW1 and the communist revolution in Russia and MacKinder despised the autocratic rule of the Tsar and the German Kaiser alike. His ideas had limited influence in Britain, but gained traction among American policy makers between the world wars and during WW2. Soviet control of Eastern Europe after WW2 was seen in the US as confirmation of MacKinder’s ideas, and after the cold war it became imperative to keep Germany and Russia apart to prevent the rise of a global challenger to the USA.

Grok summarizes the post cold war MacKinder influence:

Brzezinski’s Revival (1997)

Zbigniew Brzezinski explicitly revived and adapted Mackinder in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997). He described Eurasia as the world’s “grand chessboard” and argued that the US must maintain geopolitical pluralism there — i.e., prevent any single power or alliance from organizing the Heartland (roughly Russia + Eastern Europe/Central Asia). Key points from Brzezinski that echo Mackinder:

• Control of the Eurasian landmass (especially the pivot/Heartland) remains the key to global primacy.

• The US must manage Europe (particularly Germany as its economic engine) while keeping Russia contained and fragmented.

• Ukraine is geopolitically vital as the “pivot state” on the edge of the Heartland; losing it could allow Russia to re-emerge as a dominant Eurasian power.

This framework directly shaped post-Cold War US policy: NATO eastward expansion, support for color revolutions, and opposition to any Russia-led integration projects in the former Soviet space.

How the Theory Survived in US Circles

The core Mackinderian logic — prevent any Eurasian hegemon or powerful continental bloc — became embedded in mainstream US grand strategy:

• Wolfowitz Doctrine (1992 leaked draft) and subsequent Pentagon planning documents warned against allowing any peer competitor (or coalition) to arise in Eurasia.

• Think tanks, the foreign-policy establishment, and both Democratic and Republican administrations have treated Eurasia as the decisive theater. The goal: keep the “World-Island” (Eurasia-Africa) divided so no combination of land power (Russia/Heartland resources + manpower) and industrial/technological power (Germany/EU) can challenge US maritime and financial dominance.

• This explains persistent US pressure against deeper Germany-Russia economic or political ties (e.g., Nord Stream pipelines were frequently criticized in Washington not just for energy dependence but for forging exactly the kind of continental partnership Mackinder warned against).

Who Explicitly Emphasized “Germany and Russia Cannot Be Allowed to Join Forces”?

The clearest and most direct public articulation in recent decades comes from George Friedman (founder of Stratfor, later Geopolitical Futures), a prominent US geopolitical analyst whose views reflect long-standing realist thinking in American strategic circles.In a February 2015 speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Friedman stated (verbatim):

“The primordial interest of the United States for over a century has been the relationship between Germany and Russia. Because united, they are the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”

He framed this as the underlying US strategic objective across World War I, World War II, and the Cold War: keep German industrial/technological/financial power and Russian resources/manpower/manpower separated. A Germany-Russia bloc would combine the two elements that could organize the Heartland and challenge US primacy. Friedman explicitly linked this to NATO’s historic purpose (“keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”).This view is widely shared in US strategic analysis (though rarely stated so bluntly in public). It underpins:

• Opposition to German-Russian energy deals.

• Support for NATO expansion and forward military presence in Eastern Europe.

• The broader goal of “geopolitical pluralism” in Eurasia.

In short, Mackinder’s warning about a potential Russo-German alliance has been modernized into a core tenet of US grand strategy: Eurasia must remain fragmented so no competitor to American global leadership can emerge.

Ola Tunander, Research Professor Emeritus at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, details here and here how hardliners in the US foreign policy establishment like Dick Cheney, Victoria Nuland and John Bolton have consistently pushed against both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. History has shown that these “hardliners” eventually get their way, even when it contradicts statements from higher US officials. A famous example is when US Secretary of State James Baker (under President George H.W. Bush) told Mikhail Gorbachev 1990 that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” in the context of a united Germany remaining in NATO. But at the very same time, the US defense secretary Dick Cheney was pushing for NATO expansion and cutting of the energy trade with Europe. It was Cheney’s policy, not Baker’s, that prevailed. As vice president in 2006, Cheney tried to stop the construction of Nord Stream 1, and his protégé and National Security Advisor at the time, Victoria Nuland who was deeply involved in the Ukrainian regime change coup in 2014, celebrated the destruction of the pipelines in 2022. It’s noteworthy that the NATO expansion which led to the Ukraine war was pushed by the same US officials who have consistently pushed for stopping both Nord Stream pipelines. Claims that other US officials tried to stop the Nord Stream sabotage simply cannot be taken at face value given the long history of US hardliners ignoring statements from higher officials and eventually having it their way.

Ola Tunander makes another crucial point in his articles and recent interviews on the subject. European fear of Russia has been, and still is, crucial to maintain American influence over Europe. The idea that Russia has imperialist ambitions and will conquer Europe unless we crush them in Ukraine and arm ourselves to the teeth is deliberately and constantly promoted to European leaders and populations in order to maintain the US influence. I subscribe to this view. There is ample evidence from the money flow to various NGO’s and media organizations in Europe. It is also my main hypothesis that recent events like “Russian drone sightings”, and “Russians cutting off cables in the Baltic”, are operations performed with the same purpose; to sow fear of Russia. In spite of hundreds of media reports, not a single event in this category has been found to actually have been instigated by Russia. The frequent “false alarms” and “false flags” are direct indications of an ongoing effort to implement MacKinderian policy in today’s Europe.

But is spite of well documented American motives and public statements, and in spite of American warships being present near the pipelines at the time of the bomb placements, and in spite of the Americans arriving early to the crime scene potentially cleaning it up after the explosions, they were quickly dropped as suspects by the Germans. The CIA memos saying the USA tried to stop the attack in June were taken as evidence of US innocence, although the attack was just put on hold because Russia had learned about it and was about to foil it.

Bojan reveals in his book that the USA as well as the military from the Nordic countries were completely uncooperative with the German investigation. They did not provide critical data to the investigation like hydrophone recordings, movements of military ships and aircraft prior to the explosions, position data from Kuzniezov’s satellite phone, or the results of an American on site investigation from Norwegian offshore vessel Normand Frontier. If the Americans were completely innocent, why couldn’t they assist the German investigation with their data? The ship track of Normand Frontier shows that the Americans knew the locations of interest before their November 2022 survey, although I’m told the Swedish and German investigation did not communicate with the Americans.

And finally, how is it possible for a journalist like Bojan Pancevski to travel to Kiev and interview the perpetrators, and then go back to Berlin to drink margaritas with chief investigator Dieter Romann and be told troves of classified secrets? Why do both perpetrators and prosecutors agree to publish almost the full story right ahead of the trial. The perpetrators still deny everything. And I still have questions.

As a retired 65 year old engineer, I never though I’d experience this feeling again. But I just did. For the past two weeks I’ve been addicted to the new paradigm of AI programming using the English language as the only means of interacting with the coding agent. I’m using Claude Opus 4.6 from Anthropic, but I’ve heard GPT 5.3 Codex from OpenAI is a valid alternative. There is competition and a breathtaking pace of evolution.

I started using Claude with moderate expectations, but ended up asking it to build 3D structural mechanics and fluid dynamics models to simulate the full sequence of events from the bomb explosion breaking the pipeline, the rise of the huge bubbles and updraft of the pipe, followed by the “loose garden hose” dynamic of the broken pipeline and the cascading of ruptures.

My first modest goal was to improve a Matlab program I had “hand programmed” (a thing of the past), to simulate the blowdown process when the gas was vented out of the pipelines after the blast. My model had a good match to the pressure drop data I had obtained in a FOIA request, but it wasn’t perfect. Now I’m expecting higher resolution data soon, and I wanted to fix the remaining kinks. Claude quickly pointed out I’d made an error in applying partial derivatives on some gas constants which turned into functions when using real rather than ideal gas properties. Then he helped me model transient heat transfer to the pipe walls. The result was a perfect match to the real measured data, and that’s when I realized Claude was serious. I was still in a domain which I knew, and asked Claude for things I could have done “by hand”, but it had taken me months to get it right. Modeling real “yamal mix” natural gas properties in large interpolation tables is just hard work, and very similar to things I’ve been sweating over in other projects, so I could appreciate how much labour Claude was saving me. Next I cloned a program for seismic airgun simulation from Eric Dunham’s homepage at Stanford and gave it the same treatment. Claude converted form Matlab to C and tried an acoustic airgun with Nord Stream dimensions and real natural gas properties. In just 15 minutes I had figured out that the acoustic energy generated by a real natural gas bubble was more than twice that of air. At that point I decided to let Claude have a go at larger simulation projects from scratch.

I asked Claude, is there anything Abacus can do that you can’t do for me? Abacus is a large and expensive Finite Element Analysis software which people use to simulate the mechanical strength of materials and how they break when you stress them over the limit. Claude answered with confidence, “there’s a huge penalty to generality”. "Writing a program from scratch around a specific geometry can give better results. I really think Claude has an important point here, and I predict the death of these general packages.

I have written about the observations of deformed pipeline fragments on the Baltic sea floor, so the obvious first question for me to ask Claude is what size, type and placement of bomb would generate the exact deformations we observed. After telling Claude about the pipeline geometry and properties, I asked him to find the bomb details that would produce the damage we had observed. Claude started with a 3D FEM model and keeps refining it, details about crack propagation speed are checked against published literature, steel properties like “anisotrophy” and “triaxiality” are modelled, and Claude goes on to make parametric studies until the exact same simulation program reproduces the result at two very different internal pressures.

(Video above simulates the explosion at Nord Stream 2, string A which happened 17 hours after the first explosion on the same string. Pressure had decreased to 35bars and catastrophic opening did not occur. Compare with the video before which simulates the first explosion on the same pipe, 79km downstream)

An Euler solver was added to model the shock wave in the gas inside the pipeline. After a longitudinal crack travels at 200 m/s along the pipeline until the crack suddenly turns in a circumferential direction and the wall opens like saloon doors at supersonic speed (1000 meters/second). All this happens in the first milliseconds after the blast and inside a bubble of reaction gases (not shown here). The natural gas rushing out from the opened pipeline fills and continues to expand the bubble walls in the water, and the rise of this bubble generates an enormous updraft.

The gas flows at sonic speed through the open ends of the pipeline, and as the pressure gradient and water flow under the bubble lifts the ends of the pipeline. Initially, 20,4 tonnes of natural gas flows at 300 meters per second through the last sections of pipeline, as that flow gets in the bend, the so called “garden hose forces” come in play, working against the updraft forces of the rising bubbles, they break the pipe in pieces. Claude finally got this to work after almost two weeks of arguments with me. It proved to be much more challenging than the 3D Navier-Stokes multigrid simulation to compute the updraft, which Claude managed in less than an hour.

The Nord Stream pipeline is a rather stiff and heavy garden hose. The 26.8 mm steel is covered by 10cm reinforced concrete giving an outer diameter of 1.4 meters. 12.2 meter long sections are welded together at 60cm wide joints which are only covered by soft polyurethane foam giving no structural strength. As the steel pipe bends at the joints it “ovalizes” and cracks the concrete. Claude had to dig deep into literature on buckling and what actually happens when you bend a pipe. That process slowed down the cascading, and arrested it after some 140 meters, when the gas flow forces had declined to a small fraction of the original strength. You can see the forces in the charts below the animation. Note the cooling of the steel due to adiabatic gas expansion. It lowers the failure threshold, and created the characteristic brittle fractures observed. 282 and 249 meters of pipe got demolished in the two 165bar Nord Stream 1 strings respectively, so 130-140 meters on each side of the initial blast were destroyed. The curling of the broken off pieces is just a schematic. In reality the broken off pieces are pushed off dramatically by the gas jet and uplifted by the plume currents. That’s for future version. My main takeaway from this was that the pipeline is actually stable with respect to the garden hose forces. It’s the plume driven updraft that starts the cascading and is crucial to keep it going, although the internal gas forces help with the extra push to actually break the pipe.

I want to keep this text short, as it is what it is, just a first impressions account of me using and AI programming assistant to simulate some fascinating physics. If I tried to do more it wouldn’t age well I guess, because this technology is evolving super fast.

I did it partly to prepare for the upcoming trial in Germany of a alleged Nord Stream bomber Serhii Kuzniezov. According to German law, all evidence is required to be made public, and we’re still missing any evidence which ties the accused to the actual crime scene. Der Spiegel has published details about the bombs the Ukrainian divers were supposedly using. According to Spiegel, a retired bomb expert called “Opa” (grandpa in German) turned dive bottles into linear cutting charges by dividing the interior into two chambers, one to be filled with explosives and the other with the materials to make it into a cutting charge. 2kg of a proper cutting charge would have been enough to break the pipeline, but the deformation of the depressurized pipeline points to a 25kg omnidirectional charge or a 12 kg directed charge. Maybe that’s what Opa did, but then there is plenty of evidence for that collected by the investigators on the seafloor. Fragments of the dive bottles pushed into the concrete, and such things. If they can’t show that, the theory the the sailboat trip was a cover operation and the military did the real job in the background will stay alive.

I took a second look at the sonar side scan footage from my May 2023 expedition, and there it was! Captain Patrik Juhlin had towed the side scan sonar transponder over the southern cut of the Nord Stream 2 A pipeline, and at the end of the same scan it captured a perfect image of the bomb damage on the B-line.

Unlike all other bombs, this one was NOT placed on a so called welded field joint. According to Der Spiegel, the divers who placed the bombs went down along a guiding line and then swam to the nearest field joint. They knew that the joints were weak points since they were covered by soft polyurethane foam instead of the reinforced concrete between the joints. But for some strange reason, bomb six was placed on the concrete, almost in the middle between two joints. The mistake is strange because the joints are very easy to see, and the saboteurs had successfully located them several times before misplacing bomb six. Spiegel further writes that the bombs were modified dive bottles filled with explosives, and their understanding is that the dive bottles were put standing in the mud next to the pipeline, leaning towards the pipeline with a “silicone pillow” in between. I had previously assumed that the bombs were put on top of the pipeline and some of them had slided off to the side. I still think so based on the geometry of the deformations we have been able to examine, but there is no great confidence in this. I’m thinking that the purpose of the silicone pillow was perhaps to prevent a longitudinally placed dive bottle to roll off the pipeline, but I might be wrong here. The sabotage divers are now allegedly heroes in Ukraine, and I’m sure they will reveal to us the remaining details of how they pulled this off.

The explosion on the concrete did not deform the actual steel pipeline, which supports my previous assertion that the bombs were precisely calculated in order to create an opening at a joint, and let the internal pressure do the rest of the damage. This has been confirmed to me by two very different sources familiar with two different photometric surveys of the damage.

I would say that the observations in the field so far are consistent with the stories published in WSJ and Der Spiegel, although I can’t completely exclude the possibility that the Ukrainian story tellers have been briefed on the investigative results and made up a story consistent with the observations.

An American chartered offshore Norwegian offshore vessel, Normand Frontier, sent divers to all explosion sites between November 20 and November 20 2022. The Americans went straight to all the interesting spots, including the Dent and bomb 6. They never surveyed the area, and an American coast guard ship, USGS Hamilton chased away other ships. A Greenpeace activist on their ship Beluga has told the story.

It is unlikely the Americans knew about the disclosed bombs because they communicated with the national investigations. Sources tell me that there was no communication at the police level between the U.S. and the national investigations. Maybe the Americans did their own secret sonar survey with their AIS off, or they learned about the exact positions directly from the perpetrators. The Ukrainians on the sailboat allegedly brought their own high precision GPS and also a sonar, so they would have known where they had placed their bombs. Rumors has it that the Germans in the investigation were upset with the Americans who knew all along who did it, but did not provide their information to the investigation.

Why Six?

Both the Dent and bomb six were placed adjacent to a successful bomb, only 75-95 meters away on the sister pipeline. The targeting of both pipelines at two of the four sites, and the information from WSJ that one bomb was dropped, suggests that the sailboat crew had materials for seven bombs on the boat. Seven is a very odd number to plan for, but it would make total sense to bring eight bombs and plan for two on each line to make sure of a success. I’ve thought a lot about this since Seymour Hersh mentioned eight bombs in conversation with journalist Fabian Scheidler. Hersh claimed that the Americans had picked up the bombs that didn’t explode. I dismissed this idea for a while, but now that one bomb seems to be missing, we must again ask what happened to it. According to WSJ and Spiegel, a bomb was dropped by the female diver who missed to snap a carabiner supposed to secure the bomb to the guiding line down to the pipeline. This bomb, I call it bomb 7, probably exploded since the timers and detonators would have been set before she got in the water to commence the dive. The military hydrophones would have detected the positions of all explosions and if Der Spiegel is right about dive bottle pipe bombs, there would be debris to collect and verify the story. It is also possible that the whole reason for the saboteurs to dock in Poland on September 19, after placing 4 bombs and dropping one, was to pick up more bombs.

Why did one southern bomb explode 17 hours before the bombs in the north?

We know exactly when the successful bombs exploded, both form seismic analysis and pressure drops in the pipelines. But for the bombs not rupturing the pipelines we still don’t know exactly. Since the perpetrators knew about the internal gas pressure, and depended on it for good effect, they hardly planned for a 17 hour delay. We now know that they had two bombs on at least two pipelines, so why set the timers so that one of those bombs would be ineffective? This question remains. If it was a mistake made on the boat, it’s weird if the same mistake was made twice, so it’s interesting to find out exactly when bomb 6 exploded. I have previously speculated that the bombs were triggered by sonar signals like in the plan published by Seymour Hersh, and that this signal was, at first, only picked up in the southern area. This theory would be falsified if bomb six exploded simultaneously with most of the bombs and NS2AD was the sole mistake. Another speculation could be that the two final bombs picked up in Kolberg were somehow different, so they only managed to set the timers to midnight UTC. These are very vague speculations, but what happened in Kolberg on the 19:th remains very relevant to the story.

How can we know that the three successful bombs were also small?

Some people have pointed out to me that although the failed bombs were provably small there is no conclusive evidence that the bombs causing seismic events and dispersing pipe segments over a distance of up to 280 meters, were actually big. Up to now I have had no good counter argument to this assertion since we haven’t found any direct bomb damage proving that the bombs at the big destruction sites were also small. But I’m sure that evidence will som be published in full.

I have had private communication with professor Eric Dunham of Stanford University who recently held a seminar on the topic. I missed the seminar, but Dunham was kind enough to tell me the highlights of his findings. Eric Dunham has previously done work on so-called “air-guns”, which the oil industry is using to create their own seismic waves. They then record reflections of these waves on different layers of sediments kilometers deep in the ground, in hope of finding new petroleum reserves. A breaking pipeline with pressurized methane gas works like a giant air-gun which initially fooled some seismologists into thinking the bombs must have been very big.  But what professor Dunham has done is to modify his air-gun model to the conditions of the breaking pipeline, and combine it with a model of the explosion. By solving a so-called “seismic wave propagation problem” he could create synthetic seismograms and compare those with the actual data.  Seismic airguns are well understood, and Dunhams models have been validated by practical experiments. The same is true for underwater explosions and Swedish seismologists have fine tuned their models on seismograms of explosions with known yield on the Baltic seafloor. The news with Dunham’s work is that it explains the physics of the combined effect of the bomb and the following gas-gun. Dunham writes (private communication with me):

“The blast accelerates the water, so that when the gas is discharged, the explosion bubble is already moving outward, quite rapidly. This increases the seismic radiation, which is related to the expansion rate of the bubble. In other words, bubble expansion from gas discharge alone contends with more water inertia, which limits the expansion rate.

Our best fitting models for the first, southeast event have yields 10-30 kg, probably closer to the smaller end of this, though there is uncertainty from the seismic wave propagation modeling. The second, northeast events are more complicated but again yields in that general range seem to match reasonably well”

Dunham’s work is solid first principles modeling. It’s about working out the fundamental physics, mainly conservation of mass, momentum and energy in the seconds following an underwater explosion followed by gas discharge. These are things which can be modeled, so the idea of 500kg bombs is dead. All bombs were small, and could very well have been dive bottle pipe bombs placed by divers from a sailboat.

But I didn’t quite understand what I saw in my own film. Michael Kobs’ 3D model, which he created from subsequent frames suggested there could be a rather big hole into the pipeline, and the reason we couldn’t see the red inner walls was that piece of the protective sheet-metal for the joint was blocking the view. But a big hole was hard to reconcile with the modest bubbling of gas from the site. A Danish military helicopter flew over all four sites just five hours after the northern blasts, and observed the small leak for the first time. I estimated that at least 99% of the gas was bypassing the NS2AS site. Another twelve hours later, around noon on September 27, the Swedish coastguard photographed the NS2AS leak and it looked really tiny, but the same airplane made a little detour to NS2AD right after where the sea was still boiling like this. I tried to explain the phenomenon with a powerful venturi effect as the pipe was choked into a nozzle like shape which would have accelerated the flow around NS2AS. I also hypothesized a “suction” effect at the NS2AD opening, created by the powerful bubble plume and fast water currents. But even with venturi effect at NS2AS and zero pressure at NS2AD, I couldn’t explain the tiny gas flow. I ended up concluding that the investigation divers must have cut out the piece of pipe that was closest to the bomb.

It wasn’t until last month, when I received a document produced by Nord Stream 2 AG, that I realized that there hadn’t been any major tampering at the site.

The Nord Stream 2 images were taken by an advanced ROV launched from the offshore survey vessel Glomar Worker. They had strong lighting and could use photometric techniques to create an accurate 3D model of the damage. The 26.8 mm thick steel had been pushed inward along a horizontal (longitudinal) line over the joint. At the point of maximum indentation, the steel had moved 57 cm inwards from its original position to a point close to the center of the cylindrical pipeline, and deformed the cylinder into a butt shape.

I felt a bit stupid I didn’t see this in my own film, because once you know what you are looking at, the shape of the indentation is pretty obvious in my footage too.

I got very excited when I first saw the butt shape, because the longitudinal orientation of the crack was perpendicular to the direction of maximum stress from internal pressure, so it was the perfect way to almost surgically open up the pipeline with a minimum amount of explosives. Had the pipeline been pressurized to 103 bars like it was at NS2AD when the bomb exploded there, a force of about 500 metric tonnes would have pulled the two cheeks apart. And that, I now believe, is exactly what happened when the first bomb exploded, and I’m not the first one to think so.

The First Explosion South East of Bornholm

Danish journalist Niels Lykke Møller wrote an excellent article analyzing a similar butt shape on the southern explosion site. In the sea of nonsense mainstream articles about Nord Stream, Møller’s piece stands out as a marvel of forensic analysis. The southern butt shape was filmed by Trond Larsen of Blue Eye Robotics, in a June 13 expedition with consortium of European media organizations, and just a week later Møller published.

The Danish TV2 piece from June 20, 2023 goes on to interview a whole bunch of explosion experts whereof two, Ditte Bilgrav Bangsgaard and Lars Nøhr-Nielsen, are particularly relevant since they’ve actually done work on blowing up real pressurized pipelines in a safety/testing context.

Ditte and Lars explain that the unfolding of the sheet metal is called “avsnøring” in Danish, and it’s simply what happens when you apply a charge like in the picture. Military experts interviewed in the same article points out that it takes great skill to apply a linear charge to a pipeline, but Ditte and Lars solved it elegantly with duct tape. I wonder how the saboteurs of Nord Stream handled this challenge?

We’ll get back to the challenge of fixing the bombs to the flat pipeline, but first I must point out two other observations which support the theory that the NS2AD bomb was placed at the locations suggested by Møller’s investigative team. I have to praise him because he negotiated a deal with the broadcasting consortium where I received all of their raw footage in exchange for the bathymetry and sonar images taken by captain Patrik Juhlin of Baltic explorer in my expedition. I studied the raw footage in cooperation with analyst Michael Kobs , and concluded that 3 meters of pipeline was missing next to the butt shape. The originally 12.2 meter long section next to the butt shape now measured only 9 meters, and right below the missing pipe, Kobs discovered a pattern on the seafloor. It was most probably a footprint of the unfolded metal sheet resulting from the “avsnøring”, which was then removed by the Danish investigation.

The final peace of evidence which points to a bomb location at the field joint of the southern end at NS2AD, is actually the most convincing one to me. The location of the deep craters at the site reveal that the pipeline must have first ruptured at the southern end. To understand the gravity of this argument, its important to understand how these craters are formed. Watching Michael Kobs’ 3D animation based on films and my bathymetry is a good introduction to the crime scenes. The large deep formations are not bomb craters. They are formed by strong water currents propelled by the chimney effect of light bubble filled water rising in a so called plume. The effect was described by Fanneløp and Bettelini in this report from 2007. I wrote about it last year on my substack. The high vertical water speeds were evident in photographs and films of the high water fountains above the leaks. The first photo taken of NS1BD by Captain Jürgensen only 10 minutes after the blast showed water thrown 60 meters high up in the air.

Now look at the bathymetry at NS2AD. There are two large craters and none of them are placed in a position such that they could have been carved out by the plume of the short pipe end towards Germany.

The only way I can explain the position of the southern crater is that the now flying end of the 9 meter pipe segment was pushed into a the position of the red line in Fig 10 right after the explosion. At that time the Northern crater did not exist. I believe that the violent wobbling of the pipeline eventually broke it so the main outlet moved to the North. Only after the Northern crater had expanded so that the center of gravity of the 9 meter piece had moved North of the support point, it tipped over. Alternatively, the investigators tried to lift it but gave up, leaving it in its current position. In any case, since the southern rupture happened well before the northern rupture, and the open southern end is at a field joint, the bomb was most likely exploding right there.

The Dent

Just a few weeks ago I learned about a small previously unreported bomb in a court filing against insurance companies Lloyds&Arch. There are no pictures of this but the Nord Stream’s claims document describes it:

“Line 2 [line B of NS1] sustained damage in the form of a circumferential indentation at KP998.743 on the south side of the pipeline (the “Dent”). The Dent has a length of about 0.8m, a width of about 0.5m, a depth of about 0.15m and is estimated to penetrate the pipeline’s internal diameter by about 17%”

The circumferential orientation is perpendicular to the longitudinal directions of both cracks at NS2A. Had the linear shaped bomb, originally placed on top. perhaps fallen off, and was leaning vertically against the pipeline when exploding? This is a good time to discuss the saboteurs’ challenge of securing the bombs to the optimal position at the top of the pipeline.

What did the saboteurs do to attach the bombs to the pipeline? Maybe they had duct tape as the experts, or other adhesives, maybe magnets, or maybe they tried to drive nails through the thin sheet metal around the polyurethane shrouding the welded joints. I don’t know, but whatever they did, I can easily imagine the bombs cutting loose and dropping down to the side of the pipeline. In my expedition we saw tracks of fishing trawlers crossing the pipeline all over. If the bombs rested on the pipes for a long time, it’s not unlikely that some of them were pushed off. I now believe the NS2AS bomb had accidentally rolled off and was lying on the seabed next to the pipeline when exploding. The “Dent” bomb had dropped a bit further away from the pipeline and caused just a smaller indentation. Maybe some wave phenomenon from the enormous gas explosion just 90 meters away threw it off the pipeline.

Until I change my mind again, I will hold onto the theory that the saboteurs packed eight 60 centimeter explosive rods in their dive bags. Their plan was to blow up all four pipelines in four dives, by placing one bomb on each string per dive. They dropped one bomb as reported by WSJ, and two didn’t go off. Five of the bombs exploded.

Alternatively military divers did it in one or two dives supported by scooters, a submarine and a compression chamber. The operation was designed to make the sailboat story plausible, even if it was just a cover. A key piece of evidence which would confirm Seymour Hersh’s account of US responsibility, is if one of those unexploded bombs are found, or bomb fragments are found, which show the gadget which enabled remote triggering of the explosions.

Maybe the bombs were placed on top of the pipelines to make sure the sonar trigger signal was picked up? Maybe the first attempt of remote triggering was only picked up at the southern site, and the famous P8 flight from Iceland dropped the buoy that set off the Northern bombs? Unless the German investigation can provide hard evidence of the Ukrainian sailboat story, common sense points to the USA.

“officials in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark had decided shortly after the pipeline bombings to send teams to the site to recover the one mine that has not gone off. He said they were too late; an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials”

If only one out of eight bombs had failed, there would perhaps be some traces, like craters, from the seven bombs which actually went off. In our expedition, we scanned wide areas around the explosion sites but we couldn’t find any traces from more than four bombs. Two of those bombs had been placed on the same pipeline, and I concluded that that was probably a mistake. The earth’s magnetic field was almost reversed in the area near the steel pipeline, so it was plausible that the divers got disoriented. I got disoriented with my camera drone, and so were BBC who went there to make a map but ended up showing it upside down. The discovery that a blunder saved one of the four pipelines from destruction somewhat discredited the idea that “Russia must have done it, because they left one string undamaged on purpose”, but on the other hand, it supported the idea that the sabotage was done in a low budget sailboat operation. The Atlantic had a chapter describing “The Mistake” in this context, as well as several other newspapers which have reported on our findings. I myself, have said multiple times on various podcasts that I don’t believe in the eight bombs any more. I thought it was exactly four bombs, and if not for the mistake, all four pipelines would have been destroyed.

Well, I thought it was exactly four bombs until two weeks ago when I received a court filing made by Nord Stream AG in their ongoing lawsuit against insurance companies Lloyds&Arch.

In Nord Stream’s amended claims document I read:

“Line 2 sustained damage in the form of a circumferential indentation at KP998.743 on the south side of the pipeline (the “Dent”) “

“Line 2” in this context is what Nord Stream 2 calls “String B”. In the pair of pipes that make up Nord Stream 1, “Line 2” is the south eastern pipe. I call it “Line B” or “String B” to be consistent with the NS2 terminology. The KP998.743 notation depicts the distance along the pipeline from the Russian landfall station, and luckily the claims document also gave the location of the open end of the rupture which we knew was 6.18 km downstream of the same pipeline. Therefore it was easy to figure out the exact location of the Dent by measuring the distance on the nautical chart. The Dent was on the B-string, and very close to the successful bomb on the A-string.

Nord Stream AG avoided in their claims document to assert that The Dent was caused by another bomb. I find it an entertaining feature of this dispute, that the Nord Stream lawyers, shrewdly in my opinion, are forcing the defendants to prove their case by revealing details which have previously been hidden to the public. This had happened in their exchange of written documents before, when Lloyds wrote that Nord Stream’s terrorist coverage wasn’t valid because a government did it.

By saying that all bombings were ordered by the same government in a single event, the insurers explained that they were not liable to pay, but if the court would decide otherwise, they should only pay for a single occurrence, not once for each rupture as Nord Stream’s had claimed. It was on this background that Nord Stream AG presented the Dent as possibly caused at another point of time by some unknown external force. The insurers didn't buy it . Their response filed on September 30, 2024 showed extraordinary insights into the forensic secrets of the Nord Stream investigations. They write:

“The Defendants aver that the Dent was caused by an explosion on or about 26 September 2022, as part of the attack on the NS1 Pipelines that also caused the Rupture Damage. The Defendants will rely upon, inter alia, the following matters: (a) the lateral force required to cause the Dent could only have been (or, at least, was more likely than not to have been) generated by an explosive device; (b) the Dent is located at a welded field joint on Line 2, and the explosions that caused the Rupture Damage also occurred at welded field joints (which are the weakest points of the NS1 Pipelines); (c) the location of the Dent on Line 2 is adjacent to the location of the Rupture Damage on Line 1 (the distance between the two being approximately 90 metres); and (d) the presence of unexplained objects and/or debris on the seabed immediately adjacent to the Dent indicates the use of an explosive device. The Defendants will rely upon expert evidence as to the cause of the Dent in due course”

The insurers had access to some technical details which I don’t think the sonar and photographic surveys performed by Nord Stream AG could reveal. I have spoken to sources at Nord Stream 2, and learned that they have requested information from the Swedish investigation but this has been denied. They appealed and it was denied again. I didn’t think Nord Stream AG had any possibility to determine that all bombs were placed on “welded field joints”, since the investigations seemed to have collected the debris in the central area of the Nord Stream 1 explosion sites, and the open ends which have been photographed show no signs of direct damage from explosives. But the information provided by Lloyds&Arch in their defense document leaves little doubt that the Dent was caused by a bomb. I was wrong of me to assert that there were exactly four bombs. We now know that there were at least five bombs, and the placement right across another bomb also suggested a mode of operation which made perfect sense for divers who needed to optimize the use of their limited time at the bottom. The two strings run just 90 meters apart, and for Nord Stream 2 they are just 40 meters apart in the area, so it would be efficient to rig both strings with explosives in the same dive.

I was of course disappointed that we didn’t find the Dent in our own expedition in May 2023. Our sonar image of The Dent showed a meandering pipe in bad resolution because we did it on our last evening at the sites when the wind had picked up. Waves made it impossible to keep a constant speed with the survey ship, so the “sonar fish” which is towed near the bottom was swimming up and down, degrading the image quality. The 15cm indentation wasn’t visible to us, but now that we know about the Dent, we notice a small crater revealed by the sonar shadow of the pipeline.

I put red question marks in Fig. 1 above at the locations where the saboteurs would have placed bombs if their operational plan was the same as it was at the Dent. I still maintain the possibility that there was no bomb at NS2B near the NS2A bomb, and for that reason, an extra trip was made to the southeast of Bornholm to place a final bomb. I think they placed that bomb on the A-string, because their compasses had told them that the B-string was already rigged with a bomb. I’m not abandoning that theory, but since we now know they had more than four bombs, and had placed bombs on adjacent pipes in one location, we must also maintain the possibility that they might have done the same at other sites as well. Maybe there were unexploded bombs, and maybe they were picked up by the Americans who knew exactly where to look. I’m not saying that’s likely. I’m just saying it can’t be ruled out anymore after the discovery of the Dent.

The judge in the Lloyds vs Nord Stream case has put the parties on a tight schedule allowing Nord Stream to file an amended reply and Lloyds to file a “rejoiner” before the first case management conference which is fixed for November 7. In the amended defense, Lloyds&Arch argued bluntly that the attack was ordered by the Ukrainian government in an act of war against Russia. I wonder if Nord Stream AG will find a way in their next reply to effectively counter that claim. Legal Scholar Said Mahmoudi has explained to me that the way the insurance policy is written, the insurers must prove, not only that a government did it, but also prove which government it was. I wonder if they must prove that Ukraine did it on their own, and not with help and supervision of the USA. After all, USA is not officially at war with Russia, but Russian officials have repeatedly said that the USA was behind the attack. Would it be possible for a British judge to rule that USA committed and act of war against Russia or Germany, and would that also be a valid reason to not pay damages?

I look forward to the next move by Russian owned and Swiss incorporated Nord Stream AG. Will they demand irrefutable evidence from the insurers that Ukraine did it all on their own and by their own motivation?

Filing is due tomorrow October 7.

1. Nord Stream, if fixed, would supply as much energy as 73 nuclear reactors.

2. The initial thrust from exiting gas after the explosions exceeded that of a Falcon space rocket.

3. In the year since the explosions, human flatulence has emitted the same amount of methane to the atmosphere as was released from the three ruptured pipelines.

To get a feel for the magnitude of something, you need to compare it to something of similar magnitude which you know. I miss this type of elaboration in the reporting around the Nord Stream sabotage, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea about the basic magnitudes important to the event. Therefore I’m writing this post although most of it is probably trivial and boring to many readers.

It’s often reported that the Nord Stream 1&2 pipelines were designed to deliver 110 “bcm” of natural gas annually. A bcm means a billion cubic meters of gas, but how much is that really? How are we supposed to put this number in a context where we can make relevant comparisons? I don’t care about volume, I want to know how much energy it is so I can compare it to the production by other means and the consumption of different countries.

Looking up  bcm in Wikipedia I’m relieved to see “bcm” is not a measure of volume but one of energy. One bcm of Russian natural gas is 10.6 TWh of energy. So there it is, the Nord Stream pipelines would have delivered 1166 TWh of energy per year. TWh is the standard unit for reporting energy use on the country level, so all of a sudden we can make a lot of comparisons and get a good feel for how much energy supply was actually lost by the Nord Stream sabotage.

The 1166 TWh is the heat content of Nord Stream gas delivered in a year at full capacity, and if all of it was used for electricity production in modern German power plants it would render 641 TWh of electricity annually. That’s more than  Germany's total electricity consumption of 500 TWh. Wind and solar in Germany is about 170 TWh, which is impressive, but it isn’t making up for the loss of 640 TWh, and gas has a lot of other good qualities too. It burns clean and can be used for direct heating with small investment. The gas power plants can be dispatched quickly to balance the unpredictable wind and solar, and the waste heat of the power plants can be recovered for residential heating since, unlike a nuclear plant, a gas plant can be placed where the heat is needed.  No matter how you count, the loss was huge. 

Nord Stream 1&2 could have delivered a third of Germany’s total energy needs and all of its electricity. One of the four Nord Stream pipes would be enough to replace all of Germany’s wind and solar power. To replace Nord Stream’s ability to produce 640TWh electric energy with nuclear reactors you would need 73 of them.  (one GW is a typical electric power output of a nuclear reactor which corresponds to 8.76 TWh  if it runs continuously the full year). Germany has about 30000 wind turbines producing 123 TWh annually. To match the annual energy production of the Nord Stream pipelines, Germany would need 156000 wind turbines (assuming they are of the same size as the current ones, and ignoring that fact it doesn’t work to have such a big share from intermittent sources). 

Apparently, five men and a woman on a sailboat were able to terminate the equivalent of 73 nuclear power plants or 165000 wind turbines with a few kilos of explosives.  It was a big bang for the buck, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that “intelligence operatives”  think this was  "a neat operation" .

The Power of the Compressed Gas

It takes energy to transport energy and gas pipelines are no exception. To transport the equivalent power of 73 nuclear reactors, you need the equivalent of at least one nuclear reactor to compress the gas and push it through the pipelines. In absolute terms, 1 GW of net power output just to compress gas is a lot and it should give us a hint that a lot of power was unleashed when the pipelines ruptured and the gas suddenly expanded.

At 19:04 on September 26, the Chief Officer of Cellus, a German cargo ship, saw a gigantic plume rise up from behind the horizon. He called his captain, Helge Jürgensen who took a photo with his iPhone 8 minutes later. They were then 6.9 nautical miles away, and the water fountain had lowered and widened. Captain Jürgensen sent me the original photo with metadata . He pinched his fingers on the iPhone screen to zoom to 3.8x before taking the photo. That’s “35mm sensor 100mm equivalent focal length”, allowing us to compute each pixel to be 1.1x1.1 meters and the water fountain could be determined to be 350 meters wide and 56 meters high. 

Helge Jürgensen mapped out the positions of the plumes, warned other ships and contacted the authorities with a finished analysis that both plumes were right above the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. That’s how the Swedish JRCC got to know about the explosions so they could issue a marine warning and inform other agencies.  When Captain Jürgensen  took the photo above, the rarefaction wave traveling at 400 meters per second  inside the pipeline,  had not yet reached the German shore. The pipeline operator had no means of knowing anything was wrong. The military with its network of hydrophones would know pretty soon as the sound travels almost 4 times as fast in the water, but all we know for sure is that they didn’t bother to tell anyone.

I’m getting back to the power of the blast in the last section of this text with a quick update on our effort to simulate the fluid dynamics of the event. But first a note on the environmental impact.

The Methane Release

518000 tons of natural gas was released from the three ruptured pipelines and almost exactly 500000 tons of that gas was methane. It’s almost trivial to compute this number, but just almost, not quite. There’s a little caveat to computing the density of natural gas which I’d like to point out before trying to put the 500000 tons in perspective.

The geometry of the pipelines is readily available on the web. NS1 were two 1224 km long cylinders with a cross-sectional area of 1.044 square meters. NS2 was one cylinder 1230 km long. The Swedish coast guard gave me this spreadsheet which shows the starting and final pressures of each pipeline. The surprise (for me), was that natural gas doesn’t behave like an “ideal gas” at all. The product of pressure and volume isn’t constant. One cubic meter of natural gas compressed to 165 atmospheres doesn’t have the same mass as 165 cubic meters of gas at 1 atmosphere. At 165 bars and 6 degrees Celsius (average bottom temperature along the pipes) you get 35% more gas into the pipeline than you would if the gas was “ideal”. You need to compress 223.5 cubic meters of natural gas from 1 bar to 165 bar for the volume volume to be 1 cubic meter. Big difference. Luckily there are online calculators allowing you to compute the density and get the correct answer.

So now, how how much is half a million tonnes of methane?

In terms of volume it is 0.73 billion cubic meters which isn’t much compared to the 110 billion cubic meters which the Nord Stream pipelines could deliver per year. You can argue that losing 0.66 percent of your annual gas production in a worst case assault is an acceptable risk. The environmental impact must always be put in relation to the utility, and just looking at the absolute amount isn’t a good metric.

But methane is known to be a nasty greenhouse gas trapping 84 times more heat than CO2 for the same mass, so how does the Nord Stream emissions compare to other sources of atmospheric methane? I found this blogpost to answer this and many other questions relating to atmospheric methane. The post reveals that the world’s livestock emit 120 million tonnes of methane every year, so not even during the 3 days of heavy outgassing in the Baltic was Nord Stream able to outpace our burping cows. Even human flatulence is just about to match the Nord Stream emissions. The blogpost teaches us that since the attack a year ago, the human race has farted half a million tons of methane -exactly the amount of emissions from the Nord Stream ruptures.

Simulating the Event

We’re far from being able to simulate the full mechanics of the event, but I think it’s possible and worth pursuing. A full simulation would have to involve not just the gas flow and thrust, but the structural mechanics of the pipeline and the fluid dynamics of the surrounding water. The shape of the seafloor and spread of debris bear a many clues and could verify if we get all these parts of the physics right. I’m intrigued by the fact that the NS1A and NS1B pipelines, both pressurized to 165 bars, have left almost identical marks on the seafloor. NS2AD is much smaller and NS2AS smaller still. It seems like the effect is almost entirely a function of pressure and the size of the bombs didn’t matter. I also believe that just one bomb was placed near the middle of each site, but it would be good to know for sure, so we keep working on it.

The first step is to simulate the gas flow out of the pipeline. My son Aron was kind enough to help his dad with a Matlab program that does just that. You can check it out yourselves here: https://github.com/arona888/Shock-Tube.git

The simulation reveals that when the Nord Stream 1 pipeline was split up, gas was erupting at the speed of sound with a mass flow rate of 19.5 tons per second from each end. The first second after the split, 39 tons of gas was coming out with a kinetic energy of 3 billion watt-seconds, so the “power” of the flow was 3GW, or the equivalent of the power output from three nuclear power plants. That’s a lot of power and it’s not even counting the power from the subsequent expansion of the gas which was still at 50 atmospheres when leaving the pipe. 

The graph above shows the mass flow out of one pipe end of NS1 which was pressurized to 165 atmospheres.

19.5 tons per second at sonic speed is a quite impressive number if you’re into jet propulsion. The mass flow times the change of speed equals thrust and in this case it would be 19500 (kg/s) *400 (m/s) = 7800000 N. That’s about 800 metric tons, and on top of that the cold gas erupting at the speed of sound still has a pressure of 50 bars adding another 500 metric tons to the thrust from a 1 square meter opening. The total thrust of 1300 metric tons is roughly twice the thrust from a SpaceX Falcon 9 space rocket.

No wonder the pipeline was torn in pieces and thrown around. The seafloor has traces of a breakup sequence starting with an explosion at the center of each site. My guess is that this initial phase was settled in the first minute leading to two open ends 250 meters apart on NS1 and about 45 meters apart for NS2AD .

When Helge Jürgensen took the picture 8 minutes after the blast, the total  flow from the two ends had already sunk to 8 ton/s from the initial 39 ton/s . When the first aerial footage was taken 4 hours later from a Danish military helicopter dispatched from Roskilde airport, the flow was down to 400 kg/sec from the German end and 1200 kg/s from the Russian end. 

In the graph above, the brown curve represents the gas flow out of the Russian end and the blue is the flow out of the pipe section coming from Germany. The sound has to travel 230km to Germany and back again before the flows from the two ends can start to separate. 

Bubble Plumes

The giant bubble plumes above the leaks are fascinating in their own right. I couldn’t find any relevant research on the subject but Göran Broström at the marine science department of Gothenburg University sent me a quite relevant paper with the title   Very Large Deep-Set Bubble Plumes From Broken Gas Pipelines . Fanneløp and Bettelini had tried back in 2007 to figure out what would happen if a pressurized gas pipeline ruptured completely under water. I don’t know if the authors are still alive or if their calculations were preserved anywhere  in the memory of pipeline operators. The risk of a complete rupture seems to have been considered too small to be listed as a scenario in Nord Stream emergency procedures. That’s what I’ve heard anyway.

Small bubble plumes are well known and used as water “gravity pumps”  by divers and offshore workers. When gas bubbles are immersed in the water,  the resulting mix is lighter than the surrounding water so it becomes buoyant and rises in a “plume”, just like a plume of hot air rises in a chimney and continues straight up in the air when there is no wind. To send water 56 meters up in the sky, it needs to have a speed of 33 meters per second at the surface. That’s  120 km per hour, faster than you’re allowed to drive on the motorways in Sweden.  That speed is quite consistent with Fanneløp and Bettelinis calculations although they don’t consider any scenario with such huge mass flows as Nord Stream had the first few minutes.  When the photos and films were taken 4 and 17 hours later the 400kg/s flow led to 20 meter high fountains. Fanneløp concludes that the plume is unstable, sometimes narrow and sometimes wider and this causes the geyser type eruptions. It’s also often called a “boil”. Fanneløp wanted to provide a tool to estimate the mass flow from the pipe based on the height of the plume. 

From what we can observe in the sparse footage and our flow simulations, his theory holds up well. The gas flow can be estimated from the height the fountain, but the diameter stays almost the same in a big range. Someone who didn’t get that was the Swedish coast guard who monitored the leak with fancy planes and cameras, but totally missed the only relevant metric in their public reporting.

The part I find the most interesting though is that in some of the scenarios Fanneløp and Bettelini consider, the speed of water flow is much higher at the bottom than near the surface. They also seem to think that the momentum from the gas blown out in a horizontal direction is negligible compared to the gravitational pull from the plume. The shape carved out in the hard glacial clay of the baltic seafloor supports this view. 

The “crater” at the Russian end is deeper but not wider than the crater around the German end of NS1S and seen above. The first half hour with many tons per second of gas blowing at sonic speed was identical between the two ends, but the Russian end continued to leak for another four days, and carved the same diameter crater twice as deep. I think maybe some of the upper soft “post glacial” mud on the seabed was blown away by the gas jet, but the carving out of the round craters in the hard glacial clay was due to the water currents driven by the buoyancy of the plume. The edges of the crater were not altered in the 4 days of additional leaking from the Russian end, and therefore I believe the water came from above, flushed the bottom and turned upwards behind the rising bubbles. The craters are round and just as steep in front as behind the flow. Therefore I believe the momentum of the water rushing in behind the bubbles dominated the momentum of the air flowing out horizontally from the pipe ends, and that happened pretty soon. I believe the bottom is shaped by fast flowing water pulled by the buoyant bubbles. It wasn’t like giant leaf-blowers blowing the mud away.

The fast moving water has another intriguing effect. Bernoullis principle tells us that the sum of kinetic energy and internal (pressure) energy stays constant in a “steady flow”. I think this is applicable here. If water flushed by the opening at speeds as high as 40 meters per second, the pressure must have been almost zero and stayed so for a long time. This made for larger bubbles and even bigger draft in the plume. The outpouring gas also stayed very cold for the first two days of leaking.

To check that the simulation was correct I requested the pressure drop curves from the Danish Energy Authority and they delivered here and here . Kudos to them. It allowed me to calibrate the pipe friction coefficient and get a good match.

A bird has told me the curves for the German side exist in a much higher resolution. I heard you can even see a spike in pressure leading the drop. Can’t wait to see that. It must be the sound of the initial chemical explosion, and it might tell us a lot we didn’t know about the bombs and the timing.

Our Route and Naming of Sites

We started at  5PM on Monday May 22 and returned at noon May 25. The boat made only 6 knots, so there was a lot of transit time. We spent most of May 23 on the Southern site. And worked from the morning to 1AM on the northern site. Each sonar survey was about 4 hours, and then there was filming for 1-2 hours. Wind and waves picked up in the late evening of May 24 making sonar work difficult. We had prioritize and skipped the underwater filming of the Nord Stream 1 sites.

The four different explosion sites on the map above are named NSXYZ,

where,

X = 1 for “Nord Stream 1”, and X = 2 for “Nord Stream 2”
Y = A for “String A” and Y = B for “String B” (each line has two pipes called “strings”)
Z = D for “Denmark” and Z = S for “Sweden”. This letter depicts the economic zone of the site.

NS2AD  At 2:03:20 LT the 26:th of September 2022. From the seismic signature, this was a single explosion, or possibly two simultaneous explosions. This occurred on “String A” of NS2, the line closest to Bornholm. String B is undamaged at this site, and everywhere else too. The B-line is currently pressurized to 50 bars. String A was pressurized to 104 Bars at the time of the explosion according to the NS2 corporation and Reuters. 

NS1AS At 19:03:50 LT the same day an explosion was registered at this site, and 7 seconds later there was a second explosion of similar magnitude on the same site 200 meters away. This explosion (or pair of explosions) has only damaged the A-line of Nord Stream 1.  The B-line is intact at this site. The A-line was pressurized to 164 bars at the time of the explosions. The distance between the open ends of the pipeline is 249 meters and there are 5 distinct craters. 

NS1BD At 15 seconds after the first NS1AS explosion, there was an explosion which the seismologists have attributed to this site in preliminary analysis. The signal is too blurred at this stage to say if there was a single or multiple explosive events. Only the B line of Nord Stream 1 was affected here and the distance between the open ends is 284 meters. The pattern of 5 craters is almost identical to the pattern found at NS1AS.

NS2AS This explosion is not registered seismically in a way where the relative location to NS1AS and NS1AD can be determined, but I assume that it happened in the same noisy short time period as it otherwise would have been discovered with its own signature. The pipeline is not significantly displaced here,  but we have documented the primary damage from an explosion. The bomb was placed on a seam and the concrete was blown away on the side of the seam in a two meter wide area. Our footage from this site is the most valuable as its analysis will likely reveal the placement, size and magnitude of the bomb(s) . As the explosion occurred on the same A-line of Nord Stream 2 that had already been ruptured 17 hours earlier, there was no significant overpressure and thus no thrust forces that could throw the pipe around as on the other sites. It’s clear from the size of the hole though, that IF the pipe had been pressurized, it would have looked similar to the other sites. 

The Materials

This chapter is organized into one section for each explosion site, and then there are subsections for sonar maps, film and models. The sonar mapping was performed in two phases by Patrik Juhlin with the assistance of Rico Friis. The objective of the first phase was to get a depth map of the areas and it was performed with a regular echo sounder shooting a narrow beam towards the bottom while the boat passed back and fourth over the sites. The result are “point clouds” which are provided below as CSV files with three columns (Latitude, Longitude, Depth). This data has been Delaunay-triangulated by my friend Tommy Bohlin to the CAD format. STL. Tommy used that to do 3D prints of the topography which I used in the interviews with Die Zeit and ARD. The STL files are also provided here in downloadable format. At the time of this writing I have not been able to use the original data points for interpolation and some information is lost in the interpolation performed by DeepVision’s proprietary software.

The second phase of sonar mapping used a towable “side scan sonar” which produces something resembling a photographic image of the bottom.

Our side scan sonar was embedded in a so called “fish” which was towed about 150 meters behind the boat and about 6-8 meters above the bottom. The Baltic sea is stratified with fresh water on top and denser saline bottom water that has a higher speed of sound. The difference in sound speed causes the sonar pulses to bend and blur the images unless the transponder is submerged into the bottom layer. Our side scan images provided here are revealing but not without artifacts. The transponder sends sonar pulses as the sides as it travels over the bottom and records the time and magnitude of echoes. Hard objects like the pipeline are white in color and the soft mud is brownish. You can see the “seams” of the pipeline in a darker color as they are covered by soft polyurethane foam. The computer software that turns the signals into an image works best when the bottom is flat. When there are deep craters below the “fish” the side of the crater can be at the same distance as the bottom and the pipeline therefore can appear to bend to the side although it actually bends down vertically. I’ve been working together with image analyst Michael Kobs to combine scans to the left and the right of an area to overcome this artifact and compute the correct geometry. Another artifact seen in our images are due to the surface waves which cause the boat speed to oscillate a little and the fish to move up and down. This causes straight objects like the pipeline to sometimes meander. Models with geometry corrections are linked in the model sections. This is work in progress. Models will improve over time, and hopefully new expeditions with different equipment, like multi-beam sonars and photometric ROV mapping will eventually sort out remaining question marks about the crime scene.

Finally there is some underwater footage taken on the two Nord Stream 2 sites, and again some geometric models created by Michael Kobs by combining video-frames from different angles.

NS2AD

Sonar Depth Point Cloud in CSV

Depth Mesh in STL

Side Scan From West.

Side Scan from East

(kudos to Michael Kobs for assembling lots of small screenshots from the “free viewer” to the above JPEGs which give an overview of both pipeline strings)

KMZ for Google Earth

Models:

Above is a preliminary layout of the scene by Michael Kobs. I agree with this rendition in terms of the general position of the pipe. There is very little displacement to the sides, and it is broken in at least two places. We are still debating the amount of pipe that seems to be missing in the “gap” between the northern end that’s flying at 73 meters depth and the southern end that’s resting on rock at 77.5 meters depth. The gap is 7 meters and I believe it’s displaced 4 meters because its projection on the horizontal plane is simply that much shorter when its bent up and down 10 meters. Three meters are still unexplained by this, and if you look at the sonar scans linked above you can see something looking like a seam about 9 meters from the end. Furthermore, footage by Trond Larsen from BlueEye Robotics on June 13 reveals a cut that doesn’t look like a seam on the northern end. I don’t think we can exclude that a bomb exploded here and that the primary damage of that explosion was removed by investigators along with 3 meters of pipe.

Film of Southern End

Film of Trench under Northern End

Trond Larsen from Blue Eye Robotics acquired better footage of both ends published here

NS1BD

Sonar Depth Point Cloud in CSV

Depth Mesh in STL

Side Scan from East

Side Scan From West

Geo Tiff

We did not send down our ROV to film this site as we had to do three sites this day and wanted to focus on NS2AS.

NS2AS

We did not create a point cloud or an STL mesh for this site since it’s almost completely flat. However, the brilliant Michael Kobs was able to produce a this model of the small crater geometry by simulating the shadow from the sonar scan by artificial lighting:

Sonar Scan from the North

Sonar Scan From the South

Film Please note in this footage that the damage is on the southern side of the pipeline, but the compass of the ROV is almost 180 degrees wrong. I was fooled by this when filming and kept looking for a hole on the wrong side since I had seen the crater on the sonar before diving. I think the compass failure might be systematic in the area. Trond Larsen had similar issues on the NS1AS site, and BBC ended up turning their map upside down and because of it. Since I was fooled myself, I think it’s likely the saboteurs were also fooled and placed this bomb on the wrong string.

NS1AS

Point Cloud in CSV

Mesh in STL

Geo Tiff

Side Scan from South

Side Scan from North

Note that the standing pipe documented by BBC is actually situated very near the original position of the pipe. The compass error caused BBC to turn the map upside down and falsely conclude that the vertical pipe had flown 150 meters away.

Eight Bombs or just four?

The Intercept article mentioned that my son Aron had helped solve “Euler’s equations in the geometry of the pipeline”. Here’s comes little background to that, why it matters, and a link to a paper with his calculations.

I always assumed that all sites were rigged in a similar fashion. I admit this is an assumption, I have no hard evidence, but there is also no evidence the bombs were different. I think it makes little sense to use different bombs in the different locations, especially if you are a small team and trained to finish a job under time pressure. You make your calculations and then you apply the same dose of the same medicine to all four strings of the pipeline. I’ll stick to this hard assumption until proven wrong.

When Seymour Hersh said there was a total of eight bombs, two for each pipeline I thought that was very interesting because it meant there must have been unexploded bombs somewhere, and the idea that someone came to pick them up after the blasts was intriguing. If you assume that there were two bombs for each of the four lines, there would either be two unexploded bombs on the NS2B line, or if the NS2AS bomb was a mistake that would have had an unexploded sister bomb close to it. Andreas Köhler’s abstract identifying two separate seismic events in the NS1AS area, just 200 meters from each other, implied that there had to be two bombs there. The operator of the pipeline made a press release after their first survey which was widely interpreted by the press as two bombs at the same site. In the early film footage from the NS1SQ site you could also see two bubble plumes, and the Danish authorities put two hazard markers, roughly 250 meters apart on the sea chart over the NS1BD site. There were lots of reasons to assume that each of the four lines was rigged with double bombs. Perhaps the perpetrators had planned for a bit of redundancy to make sure their mission was successful.

But there is still no hard evidence of any line being rigged with two bombs. The two “craters” in the Gazprom press-release turned out to be trenches created by the stream following the rising gas bubbles. This is a known phenomenon often used by divers to clean surfaces from loose materials underwater. Actually there were five discernible holes along the open 250 meters of missing pipeline, and the Danish NS1BD site looks very similar. How would two bombs create five craters? Five is an odd number, so a single bomb causing a chain reaction sounds much more plausible.

For the highly pressurized NS1 pipeline, I have been told it was 164 bars, I now believe there was just on under the pipeline in the position of the central crater in the graphic above. The unleashed pressurized gas lifted that spot causing new ruptures by the intermediate craters, resulting in new lift forces and final ruptures by open ends which are now 249 and 285 meters apart in the Swedish and Danish NS1 sites respectively.

The single bomb theory isn’t proven by the above logic, but it’s the simplest assumption that fits with observation so it should be the working hypothesis. It’s an attractive hypothesis because it means we now know the location (at least approximately) of all four bombs. Also, if there were just four bombs, the idea that two of the four bombs were placed on the same pipeline on purpose falls apart completely. You don’t make an extra trip to a new location with lots of ship traffic, or a location with already rigged bombs for that matter, if your only objective is to be little closer to 100% sure your mission to blow up exactly three of the strings is successful. You don’t expose yourself to such tremendous risk if your upside is that small.

So what about the seismologists reports of double blasts in close proximity?

The seismologists don’t like it when I say this, but I know they thought in the beginning of June that both pipes had been blown up at NS1S because they assumed a pipeline had exploded it can’t explode again. Although that’s true for a balloon or any small pressure vessel, I wasn’t sure it was true for the pipeline. Maybe if a punctured pipeline broke in a new place a few seconds later it would create a new bubble which oscillates to produce a new seismic signal. If that was true, a single bomb could have created both of the first two seismic events around 19:04 on September 26, and there would be no seismic evidence of double bombs. This is was Aron was able to confirm by solving Euler's equations for the situation that a very long pressurized gas filled tube suddenly opens up. The solution was easier to understand than I thought. After the rupture, a (de)-pressure wave travels with the speed of sound towards Russia and Germany. But behind that pressure wave the conditions are almost constant. If it wasn’t for friction against the walls of the pipeline, gas would keep flowing out at 18 tons per second until the pressure wave returned. Friction soon becomes significant, but after 7 seconds, if the pipe is whipped around and breaks 200 meters upstream, a new bubble is filled in the water at similar speed to the first bubble.

The initial mass flow of 18 tons per second by the way, is 40 times higher than the mass flow at the time when the first photographs were taken of the “bubbling sea”, That bubbling the first minutes would have been quite a sight.

The big Mistake

All large media articles about the expedition have quoted me saying that the divers who placed the bombs were likely misled by their magnetic compasses and ended up placing two of the four bombs on the same pipeline. This saved the B-string of Nord Stream two from being destroyed. What’s my evidence of this?

My first hint was that I was fooled my my own compass and was arguing with captain Patrik Juhlin for two days after the expedition believing that the rupture on the NS2AS site was to the North of the pipeline. He was right and I was wrong. The GPS-compass calibrated geo-tiff images from the side-scan sonar are solid evidence.

So how did I get this wrong? My drone, a Chasing M2 hobby drone, has a built in digital compass that measures the earth’s magnetic field along 3 axes. You have to go through a calibration procedure before each mission:

Above is a picture of me calibrating the compass by watching an instruction film on the iPad and performing the suggested movements. It has to be wiggled around all 3 axes. But I wasn’t content with that. I also placed the drone above the cockpit where Patrik could report the boats true differential GPS heading through an open window. The readings were roughly the same.

Then I made a final check by driving the drone along the surface. It was around 6PM and the sun was in the west. The compass seemed right. If you watch THE FULL MOVIE this is also documented around 12:40 (the movie is an hour and a half and 13 Gb to download. It’s a rough cut. Mistakes and bloopers included)

The camera was also on when I returned to the surface after the mission, and careful analysis of that footage and comparison to the sun’s position shows that on the surface, the compass was OK.

But still, in the water when looking straight into the hole on the south side the compass in the lower left shows 146 degrees.

But I’m not the only one who experienced this issue. BBC posted an upside down map of the neighboring NS1AS area.

I reviewed all footage that was published from Trond’s expeditions from his two expeditions and his compass reversal was as consistent as mine. I would like to encourage BBC to publish all of his footage from their trip since I know Trond also filmed a pipe end that now lies in a North-South direction. The image above is form the western open end of the V-shaped segment in NS1AS. He also filmed the opposite end of the V-shape.

My conclusion is therefore that the saboteur divers were misled by their compasses and placed a bomb on the A-string that was intended for the B-string. This doesn’t mean that this bomb was placed last. It could have been that the saboteurs had to abandon their mission in the northern area before they had finished the job and placed the final bomb. But just like the BBC, they left the area believing they had visited the southern B-string of the pipeline. This misconception led them to rig the same pipeline again in the southern site, where all available footage shows correctly working compasses. That’s what I think anyway.

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(This text was originally posted by me on May 3 2023. I removed it a week later due to an offer to get a version published in a newspaper. Sorry for caving to such bad advice. It’s never OK to change history, even if everything I wrote here turns out to be wrong or irrelevant)

In the original article  “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline”, Seymour Hersh mentions one boat and one aircraft.  The boat was used to carry divers and place the bombs on the pipelines and the airplane was used to trigger the explosions.   In a later article called "The Nord Stream Ghost Ship" Hersh writes about yet another ship:

“an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials”.

A summary of the information given below is that Seymour Hersh’s story survives scrutiny based on “open source” information about ship and aircraft movements.  Of course it can’t be “proven” (using open source only), that the Alta mine hunter was used to place the bombs, or the P8-A “Poseidon” aircraft was used to trigger them or that USS Paul Ignatius was involved in cleaning the site from unexploded bombs. But we do see in the open sources that all of these vessel types were actually in the right place and the right time to carry out the roles ascribed to them by Seymour Hersh. His story stands this test, and reports of his story being “debunked” by open source information are greatly exaggerated. 

The Boat

“The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers”

The Vessel pictured above, KNM Hinnøy M343 is the very ship that best fits Seymour’s description above, and it also happens to be the ship that participated in the BALTOPS exercise. There has been some discussion about Hersh’s “Alta class mine hunter” designation. The “Alta Class” name is  supposed to be used only for the “sweeper” version of this ship, and the “hunter” which Hersh is referring to, is supposed to be called  “Oksoy class” .   The two ships have identical hulls and engines, but the “hunter” has divers on board and is obviously the one that’s more appropriate for the task of sabotaging Nord Stream.  But using the  “Alta” name rather than “Oksoy” is more informative in Hersh’s context.  The combat role of the ship is already expressed in the “hunter” designation, and Alta has a history with greater meaning in Seymour’s longer story of the US-Norwegian military relationship. 

So what did the Alta mine hunter KNM Hinnøy do around the BALTOPS exercise early June 2022? The short answer is it did a lot of things.

It arrived in the Baltic Sea already on May 4, it visited Lienaya, Latvia and Klaipeda, Lithuania and performed exercises in their waters. Then visited Gdansk in Poland before going slowly over the pipeline in a convoy with Latvian, Estonian and Belgian ships to Stockholm. Then joining an even larger convoy of minesweeper/hunter ships back to Bornholm on June 8 for the actual BALTOPS.   The first days of the exercise, June 8 to 13 were intense 24/7 work. Every minute of Hinnøy’s movements are recorded and it looks very busy. Only the two last nights it spends anchored near Bornholm’s coast. The 15:th of June she leaves Bornholm and pays a visit to Kiel, Germany before finally going home to Norway on the 22:nd of June. Having investigated several dozens of military ships moving around the Baltic Sea around this time, I can confidently say that KNM Hinnøy M343 is by far the most transparent. Every moment of its 49 day visit in the Baltic sea was recorded in a constant stream of AIS messages. If the ship was truthful about its identity and position (unlike all other military ships I’ve looked at) it almost has an alibi exonerating it from being the prime sabotage suspect. “Almost”, because the divers operate from smaller speed boats which don’t need to broadcast their positions.

The purpose of AIS-position reporting for ships, just like the “ADSB” for aircraft,  is safety. Position messages are sent by VHF so surrounding civilian ships can  see them and collisions can be avoided. The military only uses AIS to coexist with civilian traffic. They don’t use the system to keep track of each other. Of course they don’t, since anyone with a VHF radio, and now the internet,  could then see where they are. IF Hersh is right and KNM Hinnøy was the culprit, the one thing they would NOT do is to broadcast their position while waiting for the divers to finish the sabotage. The military has many ways to manipulate the signal. For instance, it could have done the job in the night after the 13:th or 14:th of June, while continuing to broadcast the anchored position near Bornholm. Another trick would be to manipulate the speed while traveling in a convoy like here when Hinnøy passes over the crime scene in company with three other mine hunters in the middle of the night on May 31. 

 The Estonian mine hunter M314 sails alongside with Hinnøy for most of the exercise, but Hinnøy is a fast catamaran capable of 30 knots, so why not keep broadcasting a position in the middle of the convoy while staying a few hours to rig the bombs and then catch up?  Having your Baltic country  buddies cover for you is cool. They’ll never say a word about a mission they support and are complicit in.

These are admittedly conspiracy theories, unlikely and without evidence but that’s not my point. My point is that Hinnøy was within striking distance on many occasions the early summer 2022, with plenty of opportunity to carry out the mission while leaving a seemingly exonerating track in the worldwide AIS databases. That’s what I would have done if I were “tasked” with this mission. Simply turning off the AIS or spoof it wouldn't be good enough for the crime of the century.

Aircraft:

“On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission”

The P8-A is based on the civilian 737-800 and had a good excuse to fly over the Baltic to keep track of Russian submarines. 

It does so by flying slowly at low altitude and dropping so-called sono buoys in the water. The buoy can transmit and receive sonar signals and listen to submarines.

One or several of those buoys could have transmitted the magic code that set off the timers of the bombs that would later explode. 

Several P8-A aircraft, posing as or being US Navy aircraft were present at mission altitude over the pipeline three of the nights leading up to the explosions.  You can spot them on the popular website FL24 (“FlightRadar24”)  when replaying the days in question. You see planes with “no callsign” descending at high vertical speed right above the Baltic. Although FL24 sometimes honor requests to remove flights from the interface, the US Navy P8-flights prior to the Nord Stream sabotage are still there for everyone to see. They are also present in other places like

https://www.adsbexchange.com/

and a slightly different selection is found in 

https://www.radarbox.com/

In FL24 you can follow the high altitude portions before and after the mission itself:

The particular flight pictured above came from and returned to Germany , 

and spent four hours near the surface of the Baltic in the early morning hours of September 25. A perfect time to trigger the bombs to explode on September 26. I tweeted about it in February since another P8-flight arriving in the morning of September 26 turned out to be a few hours late. This much more famous P8 flight posed with Hex code AE6851, a US Navy designation,  and arrived a few hours too late to be able to trigger the first explosion. 

The fleet of P8 Poseidon aircraft can be followed around the world in the ADSB databases. When doing so, it’s obvious at a glance that they employ multiple tricks to conceal their origins, identity or the complete track all together. A “hex code”, supposed to be unique for an individual plane, can land in Japan, then pop up soon after in the USA.  On several occasions,  P8-A planes have used identifiers of civilian commercial aircraft to hide.  But just like in the case of Hinnøy, the P8-A aircraft were unusually transparent in the Baltic missions September 23-26.  

Saying exactly which individual P8 it was is a wild guess at best. The same hex code, AE6851 was recorded on the Sigonella air base on September 23, departed from there in the evening on September 27. 

The other P8 aircraft doing missions September 23-25 out of Germany, had hex code AE6893 and that plane also returned to the same air-base in Sicily. But who knows, AE6851 was also reported in Reykjavik, Iceland before the September 26 flight and before that it was seen on the Norwegian P8-base in Evenes

We can’t trust the identities of these planes, but they were definitely P8-A Poseidon aircraft and the flights definitely took place. I happen to know a  bit about the P8 since my job a few years ago was to develop aircraft performance models and trajectory optimization for a flight planning system. The military is not known to care much about fuel savings but in March 2014 there was suddenly a priority to get a very accurate performance model to extend the range of the P8 when searching for the missing MH3700 in the southern Indian Ocean. I was working from Sweden and we weren’t approved to learn any military secrets, but the P8 was based on the civilian 737-800 and it was a simple matter to extend our civilian system to military mission planning with peculiarities like changing weight and drag inflight (after dropping torpedoes) , air refueling and most relevant here,  “dark portions”,  of the missions. When you “file” a flight plan,  you only present the parts of your path that pass through controlled airspace. The actual mission for AE6893 for four hours near the surface of the Baltic sea was below controlled airspace and there is no requirement to report this part of the route to civilian air traffic control. Civilian authorities also don’t have any  means to track the whereabouts of the P8 aircraft without getting positions on radio. Only the military could have seen the planes with its radars. The dark portions of military flights were dark also for us managing the mission planning software. We had to know about speed, flap settings, altitude and any planned payload dumps, but the coordinates between entering and leaving the low altitude airspace were not important and were not stored in the system.  I can testify that the vertical profiles of the flights recorded in FL24 and described here are fully consistent with the P8-A performance characteristics. That part isn’t fake. 

USS Paul Ignatius

Danish media reported on October 7 that USS Paul Ignatius in company with support ship USNS William McLean operated near the explosion sites from October 6. It was photographed later and “OSINT Analyst” Oliver Alexander noted in the linked substack post that the ship appeared on the MarineTraffic website at the Northern explosion site on October 8. It was a moment of dense traffic and, I guess, reluctantly Ignatius or McLean had to turn their AIS on, but when doing so, it masqueraded as the Greek container ship “Elona”.

Looking at the adventures of “Elona” in Marine traffic over the period since June last year reveals it’s been extensively used as a cover for US warships. 

The first Baltic sighting of Elona in the MarineTraffic database is on October 8, and it’s only visible when turning on satellite tracking. MarineTraffic has revealed to me that they have contracts with a few of the providers of satellite tracking information. The same VHF signals sent out to neighboring ships for safety are picked up by satellite and MarineTraffic must pay for that information and in return they charge their customers. I find it a bit strange that Elona shows up only on satellite but wasn’t picked up by MarineTraffic’s network of terrestrial stations.  All the other ships close to it were seen in the terrestrial data as well. What has been going on here?

Parts of the answer came in late April 2023 as I found comprehensive AIS data collected and archived by the Danish Maritime Authority . DMA picks up AIS signals from antennas on Bornholm, and its archive is therefore the best terrestrial source for the Nord Stream explosion sites.  When looking for the same MMSI identifier as was matched to “Elona” in MarineTraffic, it turns out this (most certainly) American warship (or ships) arrived not on October 6 or 8 but as early as in the morning the 2:d of October. Since they are “dark” much of the time between October 8 and 12 and only visible from time to time,  they most likely arrived even earlier to the crime scene in dark mode. Possibly consistent with Seymour Hersh reporting: 

“an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials”.

The mine which Hersh is referring to was intended for the fourth pipeline.  In "The Nord Stream Ghost Ship"  article, Sy writes explicitly that all four pipelines were supposed to be blown up but one “mine” failed and had to be picked up. Here’s a plot of the positions of US warships a few days after the explosion.

The Wikipedia article on USS Paul Ignatius also mentions the visit but not how early it started. Wikipedia writes:

“In the autumn of 2022, Paul Ignatius conducted a routine patrol in the Baltic Sea, where she was accompanied by the support ship William McLean.^[13] The ship also passed the area in the Baltic Sea where Nord Stream gas pipelines have been sabotaged. According to Danish media, the destroyer assisted in "guarding the crime scene of the gas leaks".^[14][15]

Maybe she wasn’t just “patrolling”, who knows?  I wasn’t writing this to make specific claims of what the ships and aircraft in Seymour Hersh reporting actually did in detail.  My point is they COULD have done exactly what Sy Hersh reports they did. There is nothing in the open source record so far that "debunks" Seymour Hersh’s story as some commentators seem very eager to do.

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May 4·edited May 4Liked by Andersson Erik

Segueing a little. Some general, scattered (no clear thesis), thoughts.

1. If the bombs were laid months before they were detonated, it gives the US administration a lot of power to push past people concerned about the legality of the act. For the first op, all you're doing is giving a future option (like a back door). So people in DOD or even CIA, concerned on the legality wouldn't make a squawk like if it it was all done at once. But, of course, this then put a loaded gun in the hands. And very easy to just give the order for the sonobuoy drop.

1.5. For that matter, why the two different sites? Redundancy in case of discovery or execution fault? Some that were laid years ago and new ones more recently? Like this: https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/explosive-laden-drone-found-near-nord-stream-pipeline Efforts to be in both SWE and DAN EEZes?

2. I remain intrigued by the report by a YTer who said he got a report of scruffy specops looking guys doing extended duration diving (sans regular mine search gear) during Baltops. It was really interesting in that it came prior to the Hersch story. Wish someone would push on it more. Hersh dismisses this...but I remain intrigued.

3. It is interesting how flat and confident the denials of US action are by the administration. No equivocation. And laughing at the Hersch report. Makes me wonder if Hersch was wrong.

4. But WRT (3), I wish someone would ask them if they knew more about it than they were saying. Even if the US didn't do it or use an agent to do it...I get the impression they know what went down. But nobody has asked them this question.

5. It's interesting that the administration seemed MORE upset about Hersch claims that they didn't inform Congress than that they did the op. Makes me wonder if they did the op, but informed top Congresscritters. (Here it would even be possible to just inform of the placement, with the whole "camel's nose in the tent" point 1.)

6. There's gotta be a story with the 17 hour delay between the explosions. Perhaps signal didn't work at the further site and they needed a new signal? Perhaps they screwed up the signal reciever code and needed a new buoy drop? Perhaps they wanted to make sure shipping was clear (and it wasn't at one site) and so they had to redrop with a new flight later. Perhaps the second location was "backup bombs") and they noticed failure on one of the strings. Then triggered the backup bombs (to no effect since only an already blown string got severed). Or even Oliver's idea of the accident followed by a deliberate blowup, of waiting bombs.

7. It is impressive how the operation has been kept secret.

8. It's strange how the sailboat story came out. And how now the "photos of Russian ships" story came out. Definitely feels like they are being put out deliberately to distract. And they're not even mutually consistent!

9. Who is Oliver? Occam's razor says he's just a young dude who likes messing around with OSINT with standard neoliberal political leanings. But it's strange, no profile prior to the war, no LinkedIn page, no biography, etc. It's not like I want a date with him or to affect his personal life in any adverse way. He's probably just a nice kid. But still...kinda cryptic. Does he have a job? What is his academic training? Is that the real name? Etc. [And yes, I'm pseudonymous myself! But I really am just an Internet commenter!]

10. It's distressing (and intriguing) that so little information is/has been shared about the explosion investigations. We don't have good diagrams/maps/photos of all the different sites, showing pipes, debris, craters, etc. I wonder if this is because it would make amateur analysis easier. Some dots could be connected. At this point, it even becomes difficult to reconstruct it as the bottom will have been disturbed, debris picked up, etc. in terms of innocent changes (or even more significant alterations if we posit more nefarious deception). It sure doesn't seem like they want the public's help in figuring out this operation...more the opposite.

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Daniella

May 8

Thanks for responding, Erik. Could I email you somewhere? Or could I somehow give you my email?

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