Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, approved a plan to blow up Russia’s TurkStream pipeline in the Black Sea, Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday. The sabotage was supposed to occur simultaneously with the Nord Stream attack, but failed, the paper said.
The German outlet previously reported that Zaluzhny had authorized the September 2022 attack on Nord Stream. Western media have since repeatedly claimed that a small team of Ukrainian divers were behind the sabotage.
According to Der Spiegel, a team of US-trained Ukrainian intelligence officials, who had “longstanding ties to the CIA,” developed the initial plan to attack Nord Stream and showed it to Zaluzhny. The general reportedly “liked operation ‘Diameter’ so much that he even wanted to expand it.” He supposedly wanted to target the Russian gas pipelines in the Black Sea as well, the magazine reports, citing sources allegedly involved in the operation planning.
The TurkStream gas pipeline runs from Russia to Türkiye via the Black Sea and then continues to the border with Greece and supplies several other EU countries with Russian gas. Last month, Hungary said it imported a record volume of natural gas this year via the pipeline.
Der Spiegel did not reveal why the Black Sea operation failed, adding only that Kiev’s operatives ended up “concentrating on Nord Stream.”
Moscow was well aware of Kiev’s plans to attack the TurkStream pipeline, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Wednesday, commenting on Der Spiegel’s story. Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly spoke about Ukrainian attempts to attack both it and Blue Stream – another Russian gas pipeline which runs under the Black Sea to Türkiye.
“Yes, that is what Putin was talking about,” Peskov said on Wednesday when asked to comment on the article. In September 2023, the Russian president stated during a press conference that that ships protecting Russian pipelines transporting natural gas to Türkiye were under constant attack by submarine drones that were being launched from Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
However, Peskov clarified that the president spoke only about the attacks on ships and not on the pipelines themselves.
In September, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also said that “there is information that there are attempts to blow up [the pipelines in the Black Sea] just as the Nord Stream was blown up.” Moscow had to launch naval patrols to those areas and its ships faced attempted attacks by Kiev’s forces as well, he said, adding that all of them were successfully repelled.