Mafia State Sues Insurers For Refusing Payout On Suspect Pipeline Blasts
London court to consider Nord Stream conspiracy questions
Lloyd's Insurance Company, better known as Lloyd’s of London, and a European company called Arch Insurance have denied a claim by the Russian state for coverage of the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline blasts.
Based in Switzerland, but majority owned by Moscow, the Nord Stream company filed a €400 million ($436 million) lawsuit in London this week over what it calls “a contractual dispute” with both insurers.
“Nord Stream's lawsuit also says one of the pipelines looked ‘mangled and deformed’ in one area where it had been damaged, but ‘appeared smooth and to have been cut’ in another,” Reuters observes.
Get that? There were two kinds of explosion under the Baltic Sea. Vladimir Putin’s mafia state is on the record that one pipeline is consistent with internal explosion, like a pipe bomb, and the other pinched cleanly, as though by external explosion. Remember this, it will be on the quiz.
Mafia organizations are known to commit arson on empty real estate in order to claim the insurance coverage. Lloyd’s and Arch suspect the Russian mafia state of blowing up their own pipeline in order to claim the insurance coverage, which was substantial.
I am not a lawyer, nor an expert on international insurance. But I don’t have to be a pipeline engineer to understand the suspicion. I don’t have to be a detective to make the same deductions they have.
When this “mysterious” series of explosions occurred, there was gas in the pipeline, but no flow. Germany had stopped buying Russian hydrocarbons and started building LNG terminals to access the global gas market. Germany’s government was discussing the option of cutting the pipelines at their end, or else connecting the pipeline to other Baltic sources.
Nord Stream was not making any money for Russia. From the perspective of Putin’s mafia state, the pipeline was a big, empty, fully-insured piece of real estate that could very well end up piping someone else’s gas.
From the strategic perspective of Ukraine, there was little incentive to attack Nord Stream. Their current drone campaign against Russian petroleum infrastructure is proving effective precisely because it is aimed at working oil and gasoline production facilities. By my count, there have been fifteen Ukrainian drone sorties since 9 January, all aimed at active complexes instead of defunct infrastructure.
During 2023, however, the world heard a wonderful, delightful rumor that Ukraine had been responsible for the blasts. German prosecutors investigated the story and someone even obtained DNA samples from Ukrainian citizens. These did not match samples found on a sailboat which investigators say had traces of explosives onboard.
Someone in Ukraine had rented the boat, they surmised, and then packed it with six divers, their equipment, and 1.5 tons of explosives.
Thus armed, the team undertook multiple dives in 24 hours at sites located many nautical miles apart. If true, it would be the most spectacular combat diving operation in history. What are the chances?
The pipelines pass through four different jurisdictions, three of which started investigations. Sweden dropped their investigation in February. German prosecutors have still not charged anyone in Ukraine because none of their investigative leads have panned out. That leaves Denmark.
I have said all along that this story stinks of Russian fabrication, that Putin’s intelligence services are prone to mutilayered deceptions. I have invoked the spywar and hybrid warfare and maskirovka, the Russian doctrine of battlefield deception.
The real story may be simpler than that, however. What I had thought was a clever, plans-within-plans attack on the West might just be plain old insurance fraud.
We return to the fact that two different methods were used to attack the pipelines: one from the outside, and another from the inside. There is quite simply no way Ukrainians got explosives inside of a pipeline.
Only Russians would have been able to do that. No one else had the means, motive, or opportunity to shunt explosives into the pipeline. It was as simple for them as putting bombs in pipeline pigs.
Ukraine might attack a Russian pipeline, but they would not coordinate an attack on a Russian pipeline with Russia. Spywar creates some strange bedfellows, to be sure, but wartime enemies do not coordinate their commando raids.
Indeed, we have a much likelier alternative explanation for the two modes of attack on the pipelines: Russians did them both. It was an inside job.
A Russian submersible was near the scene of the explosions just four days beforehand. The supporting flotilla had its transponders off and avoided shore radars on their way to the site, but was unable to avoid detection by the Danish Navy, which intercepted them off the island of Bornholm and took 26 photographs.
To date, SS-750 is the only vessel with any diving operations capability that anyone has confirmed was anywhere near the explosion sites during the days preceeding the demolitions. She would not have been used at all if Putin had not intended to cast suspicions away from Russia.
You know. For the insurance money. That’s what it was all about.
Bombs blowing up inside of a pipeline are not mysterious at all. Insurers would never pay the claim. They would point to the physical infrastructure of the pipelines and ask how the bombs got inside it.
Bombs blowing up on the outside of a pipeline are only marginally more mysterious, thus the rented yacht and its mysterious passengers who don’t seem to really even exist.
Metaphorically speaking, the Baltic is a small sea and a surface flotilla has a very hard time staying unseen. This was the biggest risk that Putin took, and the effort at secrecy was only spoiled by a single tugboat that had somehow been left out of the operations order, so that the captain left his transponder turned on.
If that effort at secrecy had suceeded, then the explosions might seem far more mysterious than they do.
Of course, Putin does not admit any other explanation than a complex operation by the United States. He was explicit on this point in his interview with Tucker Carlson and he is almost alone in the world saying so.
Multiple law enforcement, intelligence, and defense organizations have all investigated the blasts, according to the news organizations that report the same. Yet none of them have found an American connection. Open source analysts have scoured navigational data records for a hint of American complicity and found nothing.
There is only one other person in the world besides Vladimir Putin making this spurious charge.
Seymour Hersh is either a serial fabricator or a willing stovepipe of Kremlin disinformation. The journalism profession must come to grips with this fact and reassess his latter-day career in a new light.
Personally, I think it was the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq that broke Hersh. His writing has smacked of Russian deza since 2007. His so-called journalism on chemical weapons in Syria reads like Cold War revisionism because that’s what it is.
Hersh is old. He should have to account to the profession for his sins while he is still living.
Reporters will be covering this legal affair. They will notice which conspiracy theories are floated and torpedoed in court. Perhaps the whole thing will be dismissed, or go to trial, but we can be confident that Lloyd’s knows more than we do, and that they are confident in the outcome, or else they would settle.
The oldest, biggest insurance company in the world has access to people and information that normal mortals do not, for the work of their underwriters frequently crosses into criminal and security domains. Due dilligence is always necessary, especially so when the claim is this sketchy.
Just as an insurance agent would confer with fire investigators after a suspicious fire in an empty warehouse, Lloyd’s will come to court prepared with facts that are not available to the public. They denied the claim on the basis of what they know, that we do not. Rest assured that I am watching this space.
Reminds me of a story:
So, I knew this bartender and one day I walked into his bar and I notice he's doing the books and growing visibly angry about it by the moment.
So, I asked him if he was okay.
"This goddamn bar! It's a fucking albatross around my neck! I'm losing money hand over fist"
I thought about it for a moment. "Gee...sounds like you ought to torch the place and collect on the insurance."
Two weeks later, scanning the local paper, I notice there was a byline that a certain bar burned to the ground. Arson investigators couldn't find anything proving it was arson - concluded it was an electrical fire.
It could very well be a coincidence, right?