The Nord Stream Conspiracy

Chapter 1: Chapter I: The Earthquake

Overview

It’s just past two in the morning on a Monday in late September 2022 when something goes terribly wrong beneath the Baltic Sea. The Nord Stream pipelines—those sprawling, controversial arteries meant to carry Russian gas to Europe—aren’t even flowing at the time. Russia had already turned off the taps on Nord Stream 1, blaming Western sanctions for supposed technical troubles, and Nord Stream 2 had never gone live. But the pipes were still pressurized, still full of gas. All four of them. And then, one by one, they ruptured.

Except for one line. A single pipe in the Nord Stream 2 system somehow escaped the damage, a quiet survivor amid the chaos.

In the hours and days that followed, confusion took root. There was no official word on what happened, no clear explanation. Into that vacuum rushed a flood of speculation, wild theories spreading across social media like wildfire. The pipelines had never lacked for enemies. Consecutive U.S. administrations had lobbied hard against them, even slapping sanctions on Nord Stream 2. So when people started looking for someone to blame, two camps quickly formed.

The first camp pointed a finger at Washington. Just months before the attack, President Joe Biden had made a stark promise: if Russia invaded Ukraine, “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2 pipeline. We will bring an end to it.” His staff later insisted he meant sanctions, not sabotage. But that sound bite became the smoking gun for anyone convinced the U.S. had a hand in the bombing.

The other camp, of course, looked east. But that story was only just beginning.

Key Takeaways

• The Nord Stream attack occurred on September 26, 2022, while the pipelines were shut down but still pressurized with gas.
• One of the four pipes—part of Nord Stream 2—miraculously survived the attack.
• The lack of official information created a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, quickly amplified online.
• Two primary theories emerged: one blaming the United States (citing Biden’s earlier threat to “end” Nord Stream 2), the other pointing to Russia or other actors.

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Chapter 2: Chapter II: The Investigators

Overview

By the time the Nord Stream pipelines blew, Dieter Romann had already spent a decade atop Germany’s Federal Police, an agency with forty-five thousand employees and the capacity to tap communications even inside Russia. His European colleagues called him Methusalem—not for his age but for his tenure—and within the force he was simply known as P, for President. A lawyer by training, Romann had written his doctoral dissertation on when a civil servant could refuse orders from a superior, a skill he’d deployed under Angela Merkel when he pushed back against her open-door asylum policy. He’d also personally retrieved a fugitive murderer from Iraq, a move that landed him in court (unsuccessfully). Those contacts across government and Europe, and his deep knowledge of various legal systems, were about to become crucial. When the first briefings on the pipeline explosions arrived, Romann immediately grasped the stakes: this case would reverberate far beyond his office, straining political masters and international alliances alike. Legally, jurisdiction lay with Denmark and Sweden—the blasts occurred in their exclusive economic zones—but the pipelines landed in Germany and formed a critical part of its energy infrastructure. Romann correctly predicted that within days the federal prosecutor would open a probe. He understood this could be the biggest case of his life, certain to trigger a political earthquake regardless of who was behind it.

Shadows on the High Seas

Within a week of the attack, Romann and his military contacts assembled a small flotilla to investigate the scene. The police sent the coast guard flagship Potsdam BP81; the navy contributed the support vessel Mittelgrund and the minehunter Dillingen, equipped with a DSQS 11M sonar and two types of underwater drones, the Sea Fox and the Sea Cat. Elite police divers from GSG 9—among the world’s most renowned tactical units—joined the mission, packing gear comparable to what Navy SEALs and the British Special Boat Service would use. On October 9, they steered toward the first known blast location in Danish waters. By then, multiple ships and at least one submarine had been logged in the area, including a kilo-class Russian submarine escorted by the support ship Sergey Balk, shadowed by a Swedish corvette. Sweden and Denmark initially barred Russia from accessing the sites, provoking protests and claims of a Western cover-up. They also banned the Nord Stream operator from surveying its own pipeline. The second hypothesis, favored by investigators, was that the attack was carried out by a small team of professional divers deployed from a small boat—thousands of which floated across the region in September, none required to identify themselves to marine traffic systems.

The Collision of Law and Politics

By the time the German ships returned, the federal prosecutor had opened an investigation into sabotage intended to harm the constitutional order of the state—just as Romann had predicted. The violent attack on the country’s energy supply could “impact the external and internal security of Germany,” the prosecutor’s office declared. It was a grave charge, one that added political weight to the investigation and ensured no politician would ever interfere. Romann also knew it could have been much worse: legally, the attack on critical infrastructure could have been interpreted as an act of war. On October 19, German investigators set sail again, this time to the Swedish site, accompanied by criminal technicians from the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), a separate force of around seven thousand officers specializing in criminal investigations. They used a Federal Police ship, the Bamberg, and a German research vessel.

Key Takeaways

• Dieter Romann’s long tenure, legal expertise, and network across European law enforcement made him uniquely positioned to lead the investigation.
• The initial flotilla blended police and naval assets, with GSG 9 divers and advanced sonar, despite jurisdiction resting with Denmark and Sweden.
• A Russian kilo-class submarine was logged near the blast sites, but investigators favored the theory of a small team of divers deployed from a civilian vessel.
• The German federal prosecutor’s charge of “sabotage intended to harm the constitutional order” insulated the investigation from political interference and underscored the severity of the attack.

Chapter 3: Chapter III: Nord Stream: From Peace Through Trade to All-Out War

Overview

Olaf Scholz became chancellor in December 2021 and asked for contingency plans in case Russia cut off gas. His aides searched high and low. There were none. No German government, not even under Angela Merkel, had ever prepared for a world without cheap Russian gas. The story reaches back to the 1930s, when Hitler and Stalin first laid the foundation for energy cooperation, and follows the twisted thread through the Cold War, Ostpolitik, and the post-Soviet era, showing how faith in “change through trade” became Germany’s untestable dogma.

The Pipes That Built a Bond

The Soviets, despite their space program, could not manufacture reliable pipeline pipes. In the 1960s, they relied on West German steel to build Druzhba (“Friendship”), the world’s longest oil pipeline, connecting the Urals to Eastern European satellites. Washington saw the danger immediately: the Kennedy administration forced West Germany to ban pipe sales to Moscow, the first of many American attempts to sever the growing energy tie. But by 1970, Chancellor Willy Brandt—himself a former American spy—launched Ostpolitik, a policy of reconciliation with the USSR. By 1973, the first pipes-for-gas deal was signed. Gas began flowing to both West and East Germany that same year.

The core belief, Wandel durch Handel (change through trade), held that commercial relations would eventually liberalize and tame Russia. It was a secular faith, inherited by every subsequent German chancellor. The US repeatedly warned that dependence was a trap, but the logic felt bulletproof: the Soviets always honored long-term contracts, and Germany would never again fight a war with Russia over energy.

Nord Stream: Built by a Western European Consortium

Nord Stream 1 was not simply a Russo-German project. The consortium included Gazprom, Germany’s Wintershall Dea and E.ON, the Dutch state-owned Gasunie, and France’s ENGIE. The German government guaranteed the construction loan. When the pipeline opened in 2011, Merkel stood alongside the leaders of France and the Netherlands and Russia’s then-president—a picture of European unity. Nord Stream 1’s capacity: 55 billion cubic meters per year. Nord Stream 2, completed later, added another 55 billion. Together, they were designed to pump Russian gas into Western Europe for at least half a century.

When Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, Merkel made a fateful choice: insulate the energy trade from sanctions. She did not pause Nord Stream 2. Instead, she allowed Gazprom to acquire Germany’s largest gas storage facility and let Rosneft take a majority stake in a major refinery. A confidential government report obtained later warned that Nord Stream 2 would give Gazprom 60 percent of the German market and that “the EU’s dependence on Russian gas would then be impermissibly high.” Merkel and her coalition partners ignored it. Her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was himself a noted Russia-friendly figure who later called the pipelines “the last bridge between Russia and Europe.”

The Biden Administration’s “Park Russia” Strategy

When Joe Biden took office in 2021, his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, devised a new approach: “park Russia.” The idea was to sideline Moscow as a regional nuisance while the US focused on China. To make the parking work, America would throw Russia a bone—Nord Stream 2. This mirrored earlier US efforts under Bush, Obama, and Trump, each of whom initially tried to pacify Russia before pivoting. The result was the same: Putin saw a window of opportunity.

By the time Russian troops crossed into Ukraine in February 2022, Berlin was paying Russia roughly €200 million per day for energy. That cash flow blunted every sanctions package the West tried to impose. When the pipelines exploded in September 2022, Nord Stream 1 was already offline—throttled by Putin’s economic brinkmanship—but Berlin still assumed the flow would eventually resume. There was no Plan B because no one had ever believed Plan A could fail.

The Unlearned Lesson

The core failure: Germany’s change-through-trade approach changed nothing about Russia’s imperial self-conception. The policy assumed that reconciliation with France—a fellow stable democracy that had renounced empire—could be replicated with Moscow. It could not. Russia remained fundamentally different in a way German policymakers refused to see. The crash came anyway, not because of a leaky sanction or a rival pipeline, but because the faith itself was built on a false premise.

Key Takeaways

• Germany had no contingency plan for a Russian gas cutoff because successive governments treated cheap Russian gas as a permanent axiom of European security.
• Nord Stream was a Western European project, not just a Russo-German one; Dutch and French state-owned companies were co-owners, and the German government guaranteed the loan.
• After the 2014 Crimea invasion, Merkel actively insulated energy trade from sanctions, allowing Gazprom and Rosneft to acquire critical German infrastructure.
• The Biden administration’s “park Russia” strategy deliberately used Nord Stream 2 as a bargaining chip to focus on China—a miscalculation that emboldened Putin.
• The policy of Wandel durch Handel failed because it assumed Russia would liberalize like postwar France; Russia’s imperial dynamics were fundamentally different and were ignored.

Chapter 4: Chapter IV: The Masterminds

Overview

The SBU and the HUR are Ukraine’s intelligence services. Two men embody their contradictions: The Colonel and The General. These are not James Bond figures. They are products of a system born from the KGB, yet driven by a cause that sets them apart from their peers. The chapter shows how they think, what made them, and how their personal feuds and ambitions have shaped the war in ways few outsiders understand.

The SBU: A KGB Inheritance, Refitted for War

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) is a hybrid beast unlike anything in the West. It combines the functions of the FBI, CIA, and NSA into one military-structured organization, with nearly 30,000 employees at the start of the full-scale invasion. It conducts surveillance, runs prisons, fights corruption, catches spies, and launches drone strikes deep into Russian territory. The Alpha unit, its elite special forces, carried out a landmark operation in June 2025: sending 120 small drones some 3,000 miles into Russia to destroy irreplaceable strategic bombers like the Tu-95 “Bear.” Each drone cost around €1,000; the assets they destroyed were worth billions. That attack, planned by former subordinates of The Colonel, changed modern warfare—no asset, no location, was safe anymore.

But the SBU also has a darker side. Its structure allows for a system of krysha—a “roof” of protection that permeates Ukrainian society. A senior SBU official can shield a business from tax authorities; a politician protects the SBU official in return. Many of the agency’s higher-ups live in luxury, own foreign assets, and wear watches worth more than their annual salaries. The Colonel never took that path. For him, fighting corruption was inseparable from fighting Russia. He believed that Russia’s most potent weapon was its ability to corrupt foreign elites—a system he saw at work in Germany’s Nord Stream pipeline.

The Colonel: From Peasant Roots to Sabotage Master

The Colonel grew up in western Ukraine, in a working-class family with no love for the Soviet regime. His father was a builder, his mother a grocery store clerk. He joined the SBU after graduating from the Institute of International Relations in Kyiv—but not before losing his temper and knocking out a senior lecturer who insulted him. That cost him a year of army service and taught him a lesson in discipline. “In the army, absolutely nothing makes sense, but you have to pretend it does and say ‘yes sir,’” he later said.

He cut his teeth in counterintelligence by bugging a local sauna (banya) where the prosecutor, police chief, and mob boss met weekly to divvy up corrupt proceeds. He built a heat-proof listening device and caught them all. That operation set his pattern: patient, methodical, human-intelligence driven. He never carried a pistol—didn’t know where to put it, he said. His wife thought he worked in human resources.

In the occupied Donbas, The Colonel set his sights on the separatist commander Motorola. He studied his routines, identified the vulnerability in his elevator usage, and trained two agents in the abandoned town of Pripyat to place explosives on an elevator roof in under two minutes. The operation succeeded where bombs and poison had failed. His philosophy: routine suppresses fear. “The biggest problem for a clandestine agent is fear,” he explained. “Something will inevitably go wrong… success depends on whether they can suppress fear and anxiety and act with precision.”

The General: The Spymaster Who Gave Everything to the CIA

The General grew up in western Ukraine too, but in a different world. His father was a chemical engineer, his mother an academic and local politician. He became a youth boxing champion, then studied international relations in Kyiv. Unlike The Colonel, he rose through the diplomatic and intelligence ranks and eventually headed the HUR (military intelligence). In a move that no US operative could have pulled off, he compiled a massive file of top intelligence on Russia and simply handed it over to the CIA—asking for nothing in return. That act demonstrated Ukraine’s value and its willingness to ignore American red lines.

He deeply admired American technical and financial resources but believed in the supremacy of human intelligence. He methodically profiled every Russian embassy employee abroad, then recruited junior and mid-ranking officials, paying them for years without demanding immediate returns. “Russians will mostly do it for money,” he said. “They are like us: they respond well to cash.” The US had never managed to build such networks inside Russia.

The Nord Stream Dream and the Wagner Sting

The Spetsnaz, a close comrade of The Colonel, first proposed sabotaging Nord Stream in 2017—his plan focused on onshore sections of the pipeline in Russia, thinking an undersea attack too complex. The idea never left the drawing board but fired the imagination of everyone who saw it, including CIA personnel.

Years later, The General and The Colonel spent nearly two years planning an elaborate sting operation against Wagner Group mercenaries. The plan was to lure them to a third country and capture them. Xristo Grozev was brought in to document the operation for a documentary. But Ukraine’s own government—specifically President Zelensky and his chief of staff Andriy Yermak—postponed and then killed the operation. The mercenaries were eventually detected and arrested elsewhere. The Colonel and The General were aghast, believing the president’s office had sabotaged it intentionally, possibly under covert Russian influence. No evidence supports that, but it created a deep fracture.

Internal War: Budanov, the Syringe, and the Blood Feud

The conflict between The General and The Colonel on one side, and Zelensky’s government on the other, escalated after the Wagner sting failed. The General ordered an investigation into whether a Russian mole existed in the top echelons of the Ukrainian government, including the president’s office. Yermak called Grozev to try to suppress coverage.

Then Kyrylo Budanov, head of the HUR, summoned The General. Budanov claimed that a search of The General’s old office had turned up drugs and bloodied syringes with his DNA, proving he had been shooting opiates while in command. The General burst out laughing. Budanov insisted the blood was taken from the military hospital where he had been treated. The General leaned in: “I have orchestrated many such setups myself.” He only allowed himself to be treated abroad or by doctors he personally knew. The schism was complete.

Key Takeaways

• The SBU is a Soviet-derived agency with vast powers and a deep corruption problem, but also capable of historically audacious operations like the drone strike on Russian strategic bombers.
• The Colonel and The General represent two paths within Ukrainian intelligence—one ascetic and relentless, the other flamboyant and geopolitically shrewd—but both are united by a deep animosity toward Russia and a willingness to cross any red line.
• Human intelligence, not technical wizardry, remains the core of Ukrainian espionage, especially in recruiting Russians for cash over years.
• The biggest threats to these masterminds often come not from Moscow but from their own government’s bureaucracy, paranoia, and internal power struggles.