Jürgen Elsässer exposes the contradictions in the Nord Stream sabotage story and uncovers evidence pointing to a CIA cover-up.
New revelations about the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines: Respected journalists have spoken to the Ukrainian terrorists allegedly involved, and Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General has brought charges against two of them. But this cannot be the whole truth.
“The general arrived at our first meeting flanked by two burly bodyguards paid by the CIA. A former youth boxing champion, he was almost indistinguishable from his two protectors: broad chest, square jaw, and biceps as thick as children’s heads. (…) In the shadowy world of Ukrainian intelligence, the general was anything but an unknown figure. The youngest man ever to attain the rank of general, he was responsible for a whole series of covert operations against Russia worthy of a Hollywood thriller (…).” This is how the mastermind of Operation Diameter, the secret mission to destroy Nord Stream, is introduced in Bojan Pancevski’s new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World.
Pancevski conceals the man’s name, but other sources make his identity clear: Roman Chervinsky. He commanded the operation involving the divers who allegedly carried out the largest terrorist attack against European infrastructure since 1945. Pancevski continues: “And all this with a small yacht and a crew of seven: three soldiers and four civilians. Equipped with homemade bombs, ordinary diving equipment, large quantities of alcohol and cigarettes, and the courage to take on the vastly superior Russian adversary. Preparations took only a few weeks, and the total cost came to just 250,000 euros.” According to this account, the group chartered the yacht Andromeda in Rostock in September 2022 and sailed to the Danish island of Bornholm, where they attached explosives to the pipelines.
Pancevski has spoken repeatedly with everyone involved, and the same claim is made by Oliver Schröm and Ulrich Thiele, whose book The Bombing: The Nord Stream Attack, the Hunt for the Perpetrators, and Germany’s Betrayal of Ukraine covers the same ground. As the subtitle already makes clear, the two authors side with the Zelensky regime, and the same applies to Pancevski. His regular employer is The Wall Street Journal, and Friedrich Merz delivered the laudatory speech at an award ceremony honoring him. Any questions?
That does not mean, however, that these three journalists, despite approaching the subject from the wrong side, have done a poor job of investigating it. There is certainly more substance to the Andromeda story than I initially wanted to believe. The same goes, incidentally, for the Kremlin, which originally portrayed the Nord Stream bombing, like Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, as a purely CIA operation without any Ukrainian divers. “I fully agree with his [Hersh’s] conclusions,” Vladimir Putin declared in March 2023. Yet his own spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, revised this interpretation in late 2024, likewise speaking of “Ukrainian saboteurs (…) blowing up pipelines on the floor of the Baltic Sea.”
The strongest indication that there is something to the Andromeda story comes from Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General. Following almost three years of investigations by the Federal Police, arrest warrants were issued for the Ukrainian divers. A January 2026 press release from the Federal Court of Justice accuses them of an “act of sabotage commissioned by an intelligence service of a foreign state.”
A CIA Start-Up
Regarding the operation’s commander, General Chervinsky, Schröm and Thiele offer the following summary: “In early 2015, the CIA established a special unit of Ukrainian agents known as the ‘Fifth Directorate.’ Officially, its members belonged to the [Ukrainian intelligence service] SBU, but they were trained by CIA specialists. The ‘Fifth Directorate’ was an American intelligence service within the Ukrainian intelligence service. Chervinsky became head of the special unit. The ‘Fifth Directorate’ had a substantial budget, with funding provided by the CIA.” The unit’s assignments included assassination operations against pro-Russian separatists in Donbass, which are described in detail in The Bombing. Following Zelensky’s election as president in 2019, relations between Moscow and Kiev briefly thawed, and Chervinsky transferred to the military intelligence service HUR. After a botched operation to infiltrate the Wagner mercenaries, he was fired in 2020.
Yet his connections to Big Brother survived this setback in his career. “In Kiev, the general befriended ‘Santa,’ the CIA station chief at the time. (…) The two men discussed their operations while drinking and playing billiards late into the night. (…) Within a few years, the Ukrainians then presented the CIA with the greatest possible gift in the world of intelligence: they allowed the Americans to run their agents inside Russia,” Pancevski reports. According to his account, Chervinsky was even permitted to visit the CIA’s inner sanctum, its headquarters in Langley.
After the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, the general returned to the action. He assembled a group of approximately 20 men in his private apartment who headed to the front on their own initiative and carried out attacks against advancing Russian tanks. But they wanted more. “Among their projects was the destruction of Nord Stream, the world’s largest offshore pipeline.” Chervinsky later told Pancevski: “You could say we became a little ‘state within a state’—a deep state.” The author persuaded him that “start-up” was a better term, since start-ups are even harder to control in their activities than a deep state. “The start-up wanted to launch a war on two fronts: one against Russia and a second against key members of the Zelensky government, whom they regarded as traitors and criminals.”
The terrorists found a powerful patron in the then-defense minister, Valerii Zaluzhnyi. Angered by his dismissal by Zelensky in early 2024, they allegedly decided to tell their story to Pancevski and Schröm/Thiele. This, however, could also be a fairy tale designed to shield the president from responsibility for the Nord Stream bombing. Otherwise, German financial assistance to Ukraine would be even harder to justify than it already is. In any case, the story that the CIA and Zelensky ordered Operation Diameter to be canceled in early summer 2022, that Zaluzhnyi promised to comply, but that the terrorists never received the cancellation order because they had already gone underground, is highly implausible. Schröm and Thiele also object: “When the CIA warning arrived at the presidential palace in early June 2022, the operation was still nowhere near its critical phase. The crew had not even set sail; at that point, they were still in Ukraine. There were still three months until the ‘boom’—it should have remained possible to stop the operation for quite some time.”
Tall Tales from the Seabed
The claim that it would have been impossible to plant explosives on the pipelines using divers operating from a yacht has so far rested on two arguments. First, the estimated 1.5 tons of explosives would have been far too heavy for a small boat. Second, diving to depths exceeding 80 meters would have required a decompression chamber, which the Andromeda did not have. Drawing on the divers’ accounts, Pancevski attempts to resolve these contradictions as follows: First, a single 40-kilogram explosive charge per pipe was supposedly sufficient because, although it initially created only a small hole, the internal pressure of the escaping and exploding gas then produced the real blast. Second, the terrorists allegedly managed decompression using so-called rebreathers—small devices worn by divers that regulate the oxygen mixture according to diving depth. Yet Pancevski himself has to admit that the only woman on the team, codenamed Freya, who is portrayed as a veritable wonder diver, could not operate this technology and instead dragged no fewer than eight oxygen cylinders down into the depths. This is just as implausible as the claim that a diving time of only 20 minutes was sufficient in some cases to position the explosive charges.
In light of these inconsistencies, an alternative version of the Andromeda story becomes more plausible: that the Ukrainian terrorists were indeed operating in the Baltic Sea, but that they were carrying out a diversion rather than the bombing itself. The CIA then circulated the story through compliant journalists to conceal its own tracks. According to this interpretation, the actual operation was carried out by US special forces, possibly using miniature submarines, which corresponds to Seymour Hersh’s investigation.
While Pancevski presents the heroic story of an independent “start-up” operating outside state control, even one of the divers he interviewed holds a different opinion. “It was the Americans! They did it!” this diver, known as “Iceman,” told the author. But had he not claimed to have personally attached the explosives to the pipelines? Perhaps he had realized that he was merely an extra in a much larger game.
Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who has been named as a financier of the Andromeda mission, expressed a similar view. “Privately, however, he was convinced that the CIA was ultimately responsible,” Pancevski reports. Poroshenko himself declared: “They deliberately did it on my birthday, as a little thank-you for our good cooperation.”
Even the German investigators long assumed, according to Pancevski, that the activities of the Ukrainian divers were “merely diversionary maneuvers intended to conceal a larger, more complex conspiracy.” For a time, the Federal Police referred to “Iceman” as “Lee Harvey Oswald”—the scapegoat who was made to take the blame for the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 in order to protect the real perpetrators.
The Derkach Testimony
An absolutely crucial document implicating the CIA receives only passing attention in Pancevski’s book. To appreciate its significance, one must read Georg Till’s Nord Stream: The Destruction of the Old World Order. Andriy Derkach served as a member of the Ukrainian parliament from 1998 to 2023, lost his citizenship by order of the Zelensky authorities, and has lived in Russia ever since. In May 2024, he told Belarusian television the same story about the divers as Pancevski, but with one crucial difference: according to Derkach, the Andromeda operation was merely a diversion, personally directed for that purpose by CIA operative Christopher W. Smith, then the second most important official at the US Embassy in Kiev and now an undersecretary at the State Department. Smith allegedly even supervised the crew’s diving training in a flooded quarry near Zhytomyr.
Derkach’s testimony could be dismissed as Kremlin propaganda were it not based, as Pancevski confirms, on a dossier compiled by the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU. The circumstances surrounding the creation of this dossier are highly revealing. After the Andromeda operation, the diver “Freya” initially found herself unemployed and applied for a position with the SBU. To convince the recruitment authorities of her qualifications, she revealed details of her role in the Nord Stream bombing. The intelligence service, which had not been involved in the operation (since the “start-up” had operated outside state institutions), drew up an official record of her testimony, which was also leaked to Derkach. Incidentally, “Freya” was accepted into the SBU and subsequently took part in sabotage operations against Russian ships.
The Trial Begins
Of the seven alleged participants in the Andromeda mission, two have already been apprehended thanks to the painstaking investigations of the German Federal Police. The yacht’s captain, Serhii Kuznetsov, was arrested in August 2025 while vacationing in Italy. He was traveling with his family—under his real name. His apparent lack of concern could suggest that he had not actually participated in the bombing itself but merely in a diversionary voyage, and therefore behaved like an innocent man. In Poland, Volodymyr Zhuravlev, whom Pancevski calls “Iceman,” also ended up behind bars in September 2025. Despite a German arrest warrant, however, he was not extradited and was soon released. This violation of EU law and the Warsaw government’s open protection of pipeline terrorism caused considerable outrage in Berlin, but ultimately amounted to little more than a storm in a teacup.
The remaining crew members continue to live happily in Ukraine, with the exception of one soldier who has since been killed at the front. The operation’s commander, Chervinsky, along with Zaluzhnyi and Zelensky, has not even been charged by the German judicial authorities. At the end of May 2026, the Bundestag rejected an AfD proposal to establish a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the Nord Stream bombing, with the established parties voting against it. All hopes for new revelations now rest on the trial of Kuznetsov, which is expected to begin this summer.
The spelling of Ukrainian names has been standardized in quotations from the books mentioned. Artificial coinages such as Kyiv and Krym have been replaced with the original versions, Kiev and Crimea.
The Hersh Investigation
Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh—honored for his investigations into US war crimes at My Lai in Vietnam and Abu Ghraib in Iraq—used sources within the Pentagon to reconstruct the Nord Stream bombing as follows:
As early as December 2021, a five-member task force was established under the direction of then-President Joe Biden to prepare the terrorist attack. Beginning in February 2022, special forces trained for the mission at a diving school in Florida. Under the cover of NATO’s major Baltic Sea exercise BALTOPS 22, explosive charges were attached to the gas pipelines beginning in June 2022. The detonation was triggered by sonar buoys activated by a radio signal transmitted from a Norwegian aircraft on September 26, 2022.
(Translated from the German)
Apparently, then, the ONLY chance to have an AUTHENTIC prosecution of this case would be that Germany will have an AfD-led Government -- or else that Russia will defeat the U.S.-controlled Ukrainian government and capture the other members of the operation..