The New Nord Stream Plot Twist Is The Weirdest And Most Wonderful Yet
The New Nord Stream Plot Twist Is The Weirdest And Most Wonderful Yet
Inject this into my veins please
Spy war, energy war, wartime politics and paranoia. Yes, this movie will have all the things in it. I must see it. Why is it not already being made? According to German prosecutors, ‘Vladimir S.,’ noted as the “main suspect” in their investigation of the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, “was sitting in a white Citroën that was caught speeding near Rügen on the night of September 8, 2022” as he drove a commando team to the yacht Andromeda. Then this team of professional divers boarded the “Bavaria Cruiser 50” and “set sail from Rostock's Hohe Düne harbor” to conduct the most amazing combat dive operation in human history. I demand to see the inevitable blockbuster cinematic version of this story produced by James Cameron, if true. Inject it into my veins, if true. But first, I demand to be completely convinced of something that is frankly too good to be true. - This content will be locked for one month.
Issued in June, the arrest warrant for “main suspect” Vladimir S. is “is confirmed by statements from witnesses who describe how a private chauffeur service” took “a group of Ukrainians via Poland to Germany.” Prosecutors have “descriptions of the crew from several sailors who had happened to meet the ship in the harbor in September 2022” and a “list of suspected fake names that the Polish border guards had noted during an inspection of the yacht in Poland.” The commando team also produced “several million log-in data from cell phones that were logged in on the Baltic coast in September 2022.”
If true, signal geolocation could establish that the Ukrainian diving commandos actually reached all three locations where detonations later occurred. The Andromeda is after all a 15-meter sailboat. How did six people stuff themselves inside this watercraft with 1.5 tons of specialized explosives? How did they reach all three locations on the Baltic Sea within 24 hours, conducting three separate, highly-technical dives? Or else how did they go unobserved in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes?
I am not a diver. According to actual divers, the Baltic is demanding. It is a cold sea (37-48 degrees Fahrenheit), while the pipeline explosion sites are 80 meters (262 feet) deep. Because the Andromeda is not equipped with a diving bell or a submersible, each dive would require hours of decompression to avoid the bends. Divers would breathe hypoxic air (less than 16 percent oxygen) to work at that depth. Too much exertion would be life-threatening. Only a truly crack team of diving commandos, or human-dolphin hybrids, could pull off three complex dives like that in one day at three widely-spaced locations and return to port alive.
Too good to be true? Or amazing true story, for which my joy shall be boundless?
German forensic specialists were able to recover DNA residues from the Andromeda. Investigators even obtained DNA from the son of a Ukrainian man, ‘Valeri K.’, who was suspected of being one of the commando divers, but it did not match any of the DNA from the yacht. Now a new “main suspect” — who may or may not have been just a driver, instead of a diver — has reputedly gone into hiding. “It is not known why Poland did not honor the European arrest warrant within the legally required 60 days,” Die Zeit reports. “ARD pointed out that there have long been accusations from German authorities that while Warsaw did not participate in the attack, it tacitly condoned it afterward.”
What a tantalizing prospect. Poland has up-armed like no other NATO state, purchasing hundreds of HIMARS-style systems, nearly 100 AH-64 Apache helicopters, and inviting the alliance to position nuclear weapons inside the country. Poland also played a key role in building up “free Russian” forces that tested the border regions of Kursk and Belgorod in 2023 and 2024. Polish assistance has been instrumental in building up Ukrainian air defense capacities. As a percentage of GDP, Poland spends more on defense than any other member state in the alliance. Perhaps Warsaw played an outsized role in the Andromeda operation, if true.
And there lies the rub, because Lloyd’s of London, the world-famous insurance company, and their European partner have denied the insurance claim for the Nord Stream pipelines. As a result, the Nord Stream company filed a €400 million ($436 million) lawsuit in London during March. In their filing, the Russian-owned company claims that two different types of damage were observed to their pipelines. Vladimir Putin’s mafia state is on the record that one pipeline was pinched cleanly, as though by external explosion, while another blast scene is consistent with internal explosion, like a pipe bomb.
The world’s greatest diving commandos cannot put a bomb inside of a pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Only someone who controls the shunt at the shoreline, where the pipeline goes under the water, could possibly place a bomb inside of it. Furthermore, a Russian underwater operations vessel equipped with a submersible was photographed in the area of the explosions four days beforehand. Put simply, the only suspect nation in this story with means, motive, and opportunity to attack the Nord Stream pipelines from inside and outside, and at the same time, is Russia.
In fact, I have always regarded the Andromeda story with a healthy dose of skepticism because it seems like exactly the sort of false trail that a complex Russian intelligence operation would create to encourage cognitive dissonance in the West. My confidence in that assessment has grown over time as German prosecutors have failed to make their case. If ‘Vladimir S.’ does not pan out as the commando team’s driver, it will be disappointing, but not surprising.
Notably, none of the German outlets covering the new story have connected Vladimir S. with Col. Roman Chervinsky, the controversial Ukrainian spymaster identified by the Washington Post last November as the mastermind (“coordinator”) of the alleged Andromeda diving operation. Chervinsky deserves to be a main character in any cinematic portrayals. Arrested on charges related to a plot to hijack a Russian bomber that resulted instead in a missile attack on a Ukrainian airbase, Chervinsky was released on bail in July.
Perhaps he went off the reservation with the Poles, and together they came up with the plan for the Nord Stream attack. Alternately, the German prosecutors might be getting snookered by a complex Russian deception plot, and the Poles are not interested in helping them get it wrong.
In other pipeline news, China has finally admitted that a Hong Kong-flagged vessel, the Newnew Polar Bear, was responsible for the “accidental” destruction of a subsea pipeline and cable between Estonia and Finland.
The reader might read all of this news and expect the Biden administration to take the protection of underwater infrastructure seriously, but instead they want to “strip $10 million in annual funding for the Maritime Administration’s (MARAD) Cable Security Fleet (CSF), which protects the underwater infrastructure powering America’s connection to the internet” and use the money for “equity” and “environmental justice” projects.
Which brings us to the best, most amazing thing about Vladimir S. and the Andromeda, if true: it is the absolute end of all the silly vatnik talk about Ukraine as a western puppet. The West, especially Washington, has been fundamentally unserious about supporting Ukraine. Attacking Russian pipelines under the Baltic Sea — even if those pipelines were inactive at the time — is a very un-puppet thing to do.
If the story is proven to be true, then all the fairy tales from Seymour Hersh about American responsibility for the Nord Stream blasts are proven to be false. A whole lot of lies will have to die, if true. I want it to be true, so I shall remain a skeptic to compensate for my bias.
Yeah, unless they have a decompression chamber on board there's no way to have made that kind of dive.