US Navy vessels were operating near the Nord Stream pipelines shortly before the explosions that crippled the connectors in the Baltic Sea, Danish newspaper Politiken has reported, citing a local harbormaster. The newspaper added that their transponders – used to locate vessels for safety purposes – had been switched off.
The crucial energy infrastructure, built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe, was ruptured by underwater blasts in September 2022.
The piece by Politiken was published on September 26 but largely went unnoticed. However, it resurfaced on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, with claims being reposted by Glenn Greenwald and other prominent journalists.
According to the article, American warships had been operating in the area east of the Danish island of Bornholm a few days before the explosions with their transponders off. The circumstances prompted a local harbormaster at the nearby Danish port of Christianso, John Anker Nielsen, to launch a rescue mission.
However upon reaching the scene they saw that the vessels in question were US Navy ships, Nielsen said. The Naval Command then told Nielsen and his colleagues to turn back, the harbormaster recounted.
Nielsen told the paper he decided to share details of the events of September 2022, despite initially being “not allowed to say a thing” about them.
Politiken said Nielsen does not believe Western media claims that Nord Stream was sabotaged by Ukraine, supposedly using a yacht, named Andromeda, and a small crew to carry out the sophisticated attack.
According to the paper, the harbormaster instead has “some faith” in the version of events provided by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
In early February 2023, Hersh authored a report claiming that US President Joe Biden had given the order to destroy Nord Stream. According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives that were detonated on September 26, 2022 had been planted at the pipelines during the previous June by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise called ‘Baltops 22’. The White House denied the report, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Senior Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have previously pointed the finger at the US as the possible culprit behind the Nord Stream explosions. They have argued that Washington had the technical means to carry out the operation and stood to gain the most, considering that the attack disrupted Russian energy supplies to the EU and forced a shift to more expensive US-supplied liquefied natural gas.