European Investigators Say Poland Hinders Nord Stream Sabotage Probe

"BERLIN -- Polish officials have resisted cooperating with an international probe into the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural-gas pipelines and failed to disclose potentially crucial evidence, European investigators working on the case said.

Those Polish officials have been slow to provide information and withheld key evidence about the alleged saboteurs' movements on Polish soil, investigators said. They are hoping the new government in Warsaw, which took office in December, will help shed light on the attack.

European investigators have long believed the attack was launched from Ukraine via Poland. But they say Warsaw's failure to fully cooperate has made it hard to establish whether the attack happened with or without the former Polish government's knowledge, senior officials said.

Some senior European officials said they are considering approaching the office of Donald Tusk, Poland's new prime minister, for help in investigating the biggest act of sabotage on the European continent since World War II.

The Nord Stream pipelines, connecting Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, were blown up in September 2022. This added pressure on Germany and others to make themselves independent from Russian fuel supplies.

Any suggestion that Poland, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, might be concealing information about an attack on an ally (Germany) could undermine trust in an alliance that is facing one of the biggest tests since its creation. 

For Moscow, any behavior by Poland hinting at involvement in the sabotage could be seen as an aggressive act by NATO.

Investigators haven't offered evidence linking the Polish government to the explosions, and say that even if some Polish officials were involved, it could have been without the knowledge of the political leadership. Yet they say efforts by Polish officials to hinder their probe have made them increasingly suspicious of Warsaw's role and motives.

Most Western security officials believe that a Ukrainian crew, operating with or without sanction from Kyiv, was behind the sabotage. Ukraine has denied involvement. Russia said it thought the U.S. was responsible for the attack, which Washington denied.

Days after taking office, Tusk fired the heads of all the intelligence services, including those involved in the Nord Stream probe. European officials hope he will retain some police executives they think might have been under political pressure not to cooperate but might now be inclined to do so.

Polish prosecutors, who oversee the domestic investigation, said they were cooperating with other countries but found no evidence of Polish involvement. The border guard and the internal-security service declined to comment.

An investigation by Germany, Denmark and Sweden has so far found that the pipeline was blown up by a crew of six, including deep-sea divers, traveling on a leisure yacht called Andromeda. On its voyage, Andromeda stopped in all three countries, investigators said.

The boat, leased in Germany via a Polish company, contained traces of octagon, the same explosive that was found at the underwater blast sites, they said.

After mining parts of the pipelines, the crew docked in Poland's Baltic port of Kolobrzeg, where they spent a full day, said investigators who tracked the boat by analyzing its navigation-system data, the crew's mobile-phone communications, satellite imagery and witnesses' accounts.

A port official suspicious about the five men and one woman, all of whom spoke a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, alerted police. On Sept. 19, Poland's border guard checked the identification of the crew, who produced European Union passports and were allowed to continue their trip, sailing back up north, where they laid the rest of the mines, investigators say.

Polish authorities didn't share this information with European investigators until March 2023 -- and they only did so after being contacted by their German counterparts. Berlin was tipped off in January about the yacht's stay in Poland by the Dutch military intelligence service, whose information came from someone in Ukraine.

Several Polish agencies declined to share with European investigators footage of the suspects taken by CCTV cameras while the yacht was moored there, those investigators said. The investigators have established that the boat and its crew were exposed to security cameras during their stay in the port.

While prosecutors and the border guard, two of Poland's agencies investigating the case, appeared cooperative, officials from other branches including the internal security agency ABW, didn't answer questions, obfuscated or gave contradictory information, European officials said." [1]

1. World News: European Investigators Say Poland Hinders Nord Stream Sabotage Probe. Pancevski, Bojan.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 Jan 2024: A.16.