Will Chamberlain talks with Bojan Pancevski, the Wall Street Journal's chief European political correspondent, about his book The Nord Stream Conspiracy and the small Ukrainian team that blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022. Pancevski explains how a seven-person crew on a rented sailing yacht destroyed one of Europe's most expensive pieces of energy infrastructure for about $250,000, and how German investigators tracked them down. The conversation also digs into Germany's long bet on trade with Russia, the Russia and CIA theories, Poland's refusal to cooperate, and what American conservatives misunderstand about Putin.
In this episode:
Pancevski recounts the September 2022 explosions, first registered as an earthquake, that tore through the world's biggest offshore pipeline system
He traces Nord Stream to Germany's decades-old "change through trade" policy toward Moscow and to Merkel's post-Fukushima nuclear shutdown, which deepened the reliance on Russian gas
He describes how a small group of Ukrainian intelligence and special forces veterans drew up a list of targets meant to choke off Putin's oil and gas revenue
He walks through how the team recruited civilian deep-sea diving instructors and tested them with wiretaps, hidden cameras, and staged arrests
He explains how the operation was paid for almost entirely by private donors, and what is known about who in Ukraine's chain of command approved it
He lays out why the theory that Russia blew up its own pipeline never made sense
He argues that Biden's pledge to end Nord Stream 2 referred to sanctions, which have kept the pipelines offline more effectively than explosives
He reports that senior CIA officials were relieved when Putin blamed the United States rather than Ukraine
He tells how German detectives cracked the case by combing through thousands of speed-camera photos and running one driver's face through recognition software
He explains why German prosecutors charged the suspects with war crimes ahead of the Hamburg trial that opens October 14
He describes how Poland obstructed the investigation, including a Polish judge who refused extradition and called the sabotage part of Ukraine's just war
He closes on what he thinks American conservatives get wrong about the war and why commercial deals will not move Putin
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Bojan Pancevski: The Wall Street Journal · @bopanc
Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain
Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod
00:00 Ukraine's target list
02:28 What happened to Nord Stream in September 2022?
05:25 Germany's change-through-trade bet on Russia
10:21 Merkel's nuclear shutdown and the gas addiction
12:46 How he got inside both the plot and the investigation
14:52 The Ukrainian team behind the sabotage
18:28 Recruiting and testing civilian deep-sea divers
21:28 A privately funded operation, and who signed off
27:44 Did Russia or the CIA do it?
32:07 What Biden meant, and why sanctions beat explosives
36:54 The German investigation and the speed-camera breakthrough
41:52 Arrests, the Hamburg trial, and the war crimes charge
46:12 Poland's refusal to cooperate
49:43 What American conservatives get wrong about the war
55:09 Why deals will not move Putin
