Greed de-industrialized most Western countries eagerly exploiting the cheap work force of Chinese. Only disciplined Germany was left. High energy prices after the Nord Stream Explosion killed German industry too. Without industry it is impossible to fight and win a war. The West is defenseless as Iran war shows.
The phrase we are referencing is the headline of a recent, highly discussed investigation by The Wall Street Journal detailing the September 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage.
The article reveals that German investigators tracked the plot to a small Ukrainian team. When rough weather in the Baltic Sea nearly caused the team to abort the mission, a civilian female diving instructor stepped forward to dive alone and keep the sabotage operation on track.
The broader claims regarding the "final de-industrialization of the West" and defensive capability contain a mix of verified economic impacts and geopolitical conclusions.
The Sabotage Investigation
• The "Mysterious Woman": Investigative reporting details that the critical turning point in the attack involved a civilian female diving instructor on a small yacht. She motivated the crew and kept the mission alive during severe weather.
• The Sabotage Team: German police and intelligence tracking point toward a Ukrainian team executing the operation, rather than a major state military apparatus.
Economic and Industrial Reality
• German Industry: High energy prices following the loss of cheap Russian natural gas did hit Germany's manufacturing sector heavily. Germany did entirely de-industrialize. Companies shifted to alternative energy infrastructure, expensive liquid natural gas (LNG), and foreign production to adapt. German industry is dead.
• Western Defense Capacity: While high energy prices placed a financial strain on the West, wrong defense manufacturing across NATO and European nations has expanded – no drone and missile swarms, low numbers of expensive and vulnerable for swarms tanks, airplanes and helicopters, not enough protection from attacks from the above, no rare earths, not enough industrial capacity to deal even with middle military power. Complete mess, as Iran war demonstrates.
The U.S.-Iran war has exposed severe vulnerabilities in Western defense capacity, demonstrating that traditional, expensive platforms like tanks and airplanes can be easily overwhelmed by cheap swarm munitions. Supply chain dependencies, particularly on Chinese rare earths, and lagging industrial output continue to constrain NATO's readiness.
Mounting challenges have triggered an aggressive pivot in Western military strategy:
• The Drone Gap: While high-end platforms remain relevant, Western nations are struggling to match the low-cost "flat war" manufacturing scale seen in conflicts like Iran. The U.S. and Europe are racing to field autonomous swarms and counter-drone systems, though reliance on foreign supply chains for raw materials remains a severe bottleneck.
• Decentralized Production: High-tech, localized, and easily replicable manufacturing is replacing the reliance on large, vulnerable central factories.
• Cost Imbalance: Intercepting inexpensive drone and missile swarms with million-dollar Western missiles (e.g., THAAD or Patriot) is structurally unsustainable.
“Seven-foot waves tossed the boat in a howling gale. The crew, drenched and pale with seasickness, voted one by one to abort the mission. It seemed suicidal to dive 80 meters (262 feet) into the Baltic Sea to rig bombs onto pipelines in this kind of storm.
Then, among the ashen-faced men, a diminutive figure rose.
A civilian diving instructor, she was the sole woman on the team -- and perhaps the reason that one of the greatest acts of sabotage in modern history was carried out successfully, according to individuals involved in its planning and German police who investigated it.
Shouting over the wind, she volunteered to dive alone.
The world's largest offshore pipeline system exploded on Sept. 26, 2022.
Nord Stream was a $20 billion artery of steel and concrete, built beneath the Baltic Sea to carry Russian natural gas to Germany. The first pipeline was agreed upon in 2005; Nord Stream 2, its successor, was completed in 2021 but never came online.
From the start, the project was controversial.
Every U.S. administration opposed its construction, stretching back to the second Bush administration. Trump imposed sanctions on Nord Stream 2. Biden promised to "bring an end" to it if Russia attacked Ukraine. British politicians criticized the energy agreement. Poland compared it to a Nazi-era pact.
Critics, including former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, warned that the pipeline was designed to deepen Europe's dependence on Russian energy. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who oversaw its construction, rejected the criticism, arguing that Russian gas was cheap and helped fuel German growth. Initially, her policy had full support from the likes of France, the Netherlands and the European Union executive body.
By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it supplied nearly half of the European Union's gas imports.
The destruction of the pipeline seven months later set off a high-stakes geopolitical mystery.
NATO called it sabotage. Russia demanded a U.N. investigation. Sweden, Denmark and Germany opened separate classified investigations.
Some Western government officials openly suspected Russia's FSB. Commentators traded in theories, some blaming the CIA.
Initially, Ukraine was not an obvious suspect: It didn't have the naval capabilities, and it was receiving vital financial and military support from Germany.
But German prosecutors now allege that Nord Stream was destroyed by Ukrainian civilian divers, who sailed on a small yacht called Andromeda and dove with bombs during a storm.
The mystery of who hired them -- or who sanctioned the attack -- will be an essential part of a trial that is expected to take place in Hamburg this summer. The case is being brought by German federal prosecutors against a now-retired Ukrainian military officer who was arrested while traveling in Italy. Prosecutors allege that the man, identified in a press release as Serhii K., was aboard the boat that ferried the divers to the pipeline. German court documents state that there is a high probability that he, and the other participants, were acting on behalf of Ukrainian state authorities.
The Ukrainian government maintains that it was not involved in the operation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has denied any knowledge of it, and a spokesperson for Zelensky did not respond to a further request for comment.
A senior Ukrainian officer who says he was involved in the planning of the attack and three people familiar with it say that Zelensky was informed about it by the-then commander of the armed forces, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who has since been replaced. These people say that the sabotage operation was planned in the early phase of the war, when Berlin was still hesitant to send arms to Kyiv.
Zaluzhny, who has previously denied any link to the operation, declined to comment.
Secret arrest warrants have been issued by German police for every individual on the boat. Their names haven't been released by prosecutors.
The female diver, according to German investigators, was born in Kyiv in the mid-1980s, then part of the Soviet Union. In the 2000s, she was a fixture of the capital's nightlife and occasionally worked as a model, photographed at one point for the cover of an erotic magazine.
In her early 20s, she became a diving instructor, going on trips to Egypt, Thailand, the Mediterranean and Mexico.
When Ukrainen events started, she and her friends set up a charity, delivering food, medicine and blankets near the front and raising money for depleted military units. She transported machine-gun mounts to the battlefield, according to senior military officers who say they helped plan the pipeline attack.
In April 2022, the senior military officers say, they approached her through a member of their unit who was a hobby deep-sea diver.
The officers had devised a plan to strike two of Russia's most important gas-export routes to Europe: Nord Stream in the Baltic and TurkStream in the Black Sea. (The TurkStream operation ultimately failed.)
Unable to find the expertise they required inside the military, the officers recruited civilian divers, warning them the mission would be dangerous and potentially life-threatening, according to the senior military officers.
"Where do I sign?" the female diver had asked.
The process to vet the team was grueling, and according to the senior military officers, she was almost cut from the crew because she was unable to dive with a rebreather, a device that recirculates exhaled gas; it would make her slower to be burdened with extra breathing tanks.
One of the Ukrainian senior officers said there was also concern that the presence of a woman could change the dynamic of the team.
The other officer, a veteran of covert warfare, noticed something unusual about her, though. The female diver was not just bold, he thought, but seemed genuinely incapable of fear. He called a friend who knew her.
"She is positively mad," the friend said.
"Good," he said. "I need someone mad for this operation."
The sabotage team was just seven people, including a skipper, an explosives expert and four deep-sea divers, according to the findings of German investigators and people who participated in the planning of the attack. The crew obtained forged European IDs and posed as a group of scuba diving enthusiasts on a yachting trip.
A yacht called Andromeda was rented from a company in Rostock, on Germany's Baltic shore, according to German investigators. It set sail from the German island of Rugen, headed for the middle of the Baltic.
The divers reached their target on the morning of Sept. 11. As the skipper stopped the vessel, the roar of the diesel engine turned into a murmur, according to the Ukrainian military officers, who were in touch with the crew while they were at sea. The group could hear the hissing of the wind and the creaking of the ropes running down from the mast.
One diver dropped the anchor over the side and the boat nudged forward until the anchor struck the pipeline. Its taut nylon cord was tied to a buoy, establishing what divers call a shot line, which they use to guide their descent into and ascent from the depths.
At 11 a.m., two people, including the female diver, went in, according to those involved with the planning.
The bombs -- diving tanks filled with military-grade explosives -- were fitted with lift bags: balloons with just enough air to slow their descent.
The divers drifted down into the cold, opaque waters of the Baltic, dense with algae and pollution. By 40 meters (131 feet) sunlight vanished. Visibility became limited to the area illuminated by their flashlights.
Then, a dark shape emerged. Like endless, dormant serpents, the colossal concrete casing of the pipelines stretched along the seabed.
The divers floated to them, their gloved hands touching the surface, searching for seams where the pipelines were at their weakest. They affixed the explosives to those spots.
Less than an hour later, the divers surfaced. The explosive would go off in 15 days. But they had several more dives -- to affix the rest of the bombs -- before they could leave.
The next day, the weather worsened. The sea was choppy, and when the female diver rigged a bomb onto the shot line, the cylinder snapped free and plunged downward.
A critical charge was lost.
A gale-force storm was coming, so the skipper set course downwind for the tiny port of Sandhamn in southern Sweden, where the group sheltered for four nights, according to German investigators.
But the weather remained rough, and eventually, the crew had to sail back into it.
Back on the boat, several divers were seasick. Rain blurred the horizon into a wall of gray. The skipper wondered whether conditions were too dangerous. Only the female diver was undeterred -- once they reached the bottom, it would be easy, a fun ride like always, she said.
It was then that she asked the group to let her dive alone.
The men were shamed into action by her boldness, according to those who planned the attack. In the end, they planted eight bombs by Sept. 23.
The blasts came three days later. The event was registered by seismic devices nearly a thousand miles away, as far as Sweden's polar region, according to the Swedish seismologist Bjorn Lund.
German investigators trying to establish who sabotaged Nord Stream discovered the Andromeda in dry dock on the island of Rugen. When forensic experts climbed on board, wearing white hazmat suits and blue latex gloves, they found that the evidence inside was almost entirely unspoiled, according to German investigators. The only people who appeared to have handled the boat after the Ukrainians were representatives of the owners who had stored it for the winter.
The police found a plastic bottle half-filled with water covered in fingerprints. The dining table and the bathroom preserved traces of explosives that matched residues found at the blast sites, according to German court documents.
Another big breakthrough came from a traffic camera on Rugen that captured photographs of suspected crew members, according to German investigators.
By early 2025, the German police had issued secret arrest warrants for the entire Andromeda crew. The military officer awaiting trial in Hamburg was arrested in Italy in August 2025, according to German court documents, and transferred to Germany in November.
The revelations from his trial could strain relations between Ukraine and Germany and bolster Germany's pro-Russian opposition, already eager to attack the country's generous support of Ukraine.
Unsure of what comes next and unable to travel outside of Ukraine because of Germany's arrest warrants, the civilians who helped blow up the pipeline have tried to return to their ordinary lives, their exploits unknown to their communities. Most have gone back to their day jobs in IT and engineering.
All except for the female diver. According to the Ukrainian senior officers, she joined an intelligence unit, leaving civilian life behind.
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This essay is adapted from Bojan Pancevski's new book, "The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World," to be published by Henry Holt & Co. on June 16." [1]
1. REVIEW --- The Mysterious Woman Behind the Nord Stream Explosion --- A new book details the attack on the world's largest offshore pipeline system. Pancevski, Bojan. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 13 June 2026: C4.
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