Baltic Pipeline Discussion (Current Events)

German state prosecutors trying to solve the mystery of who blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea in 2022 have issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor.

The suspect has been named as Volodymyr Z by German media, who have treated the sabotage like a sensational true crime drama.

Ines Peterson, a spokeswoman for Germany's prosecutor general, declined to confirm the arrest warrant, telling the BBC that her office never commented so as not to jeopardise the investigation by giving the suspect a chance to escape.

But the Polish prosecutor general's spokeswoman, Anna Adamiak, in Warsaw told the BBC's Adam Easton that a European Arrest Warrant had indeed been passed to them by German prosecutors.
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bbc
Edit: i have dropped my probability that it was Putin to 0
 
qed said:
Now that's a much better Metabunk quality answer than your earlier.
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Such as this acknowledgement of mine at the very beginning of the discussion:

"Anyway, you're entitled to your interpretation. Let's just wait for the Swedish investigation to run its course and see if there's harder evidence forthcoming. And if such evidence points to another power, I will eat the humble pie. I've said it."

Turns out there's no smoking gun evidence even at this point clearly pointing at anyone.
 
Polish involvement at the highest levels claimed by Hanning.

Article:
German investigators are now accusing Poland of not executing the European arrest and search warrants issued against Z. by Germany's Federal Court of Justice in June. Germany's federal criminal police and Federal Public Prosecutor's Office are displeased. An official familiar with the investigation made a serious accusation to WELT AM SONNTAG, claiming that Poland was sabotaging the investigation. Another person familiar with the investigation called the episode "obstruction of justice."

That's not an uncommon view in Germany.

"The Polish government obviously let him go in order to cover up its own involvement in the attack on the pipelines," August Hanning, the former head of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, told WELT AM SONNTAG. He is convinced that the presidents of Poland and Ukraine, Andrzej Duda and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, were aware of the attack plans. "Operations of such dimensions are inconceivable without the approval of the political leaders of the countries involved," said Hanning.
 
LilWabbit said:
Polish involvement at the highest levels claimed by Hanning.

Article:
German investigators are now accusing Poland of not executing the European arrest and search warrants issued against Z. by Germany's Federal Court of Justice in June. Germany's federal criminal police and Federal Public Prosecutor's Office are displeased. An official familiar with the investigation made a serious accusation to WELT AM SONNTAG, claiming that Poland was sabotaging the investigation. Another person familiar with the investigation called the episode "obstruction of justice."

That's not an uncommon view in Germany.

"The Polish government obviously let him go in order to cover up its own involvement in the attack on the pipelines," August Hanning, the former head of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, told WELT AM SONNTAG. He is convinced that the presidents of Poland and Ukraine, Andrzej Duda and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, were aware of the attack plans. "Operations of such dimensions are inconceivable without the approval of the political leaders of the countries involved," said Hanning.
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Careful - evidence of involvement in a cover-up after the event isn't evidence of involvement in the event or planning thereof, which is where the thread started.
 
FatPhil said:
Careful - evidence of involvement in a cover-up after the event isn't evidence of involvement in the event or planning thereof, which is where the thread started.
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Hence the qualifier "claimed". According to Hanning the Polish government is covering up its own involvement in the pipeline attacks.
 
August Hanning's (the former head of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service involved in the Nord Stream investigation) own ties to a Russian "oligarch" Piotr Kondrashev are discussed in this Spiegel article. Again, it obviously doesn't prove he's in bed with the Russians or Russians blew up their own pipeline.

Article:
At PNB Banka, things proved rather bumpy for him from the very beginning. To finance his expansion plans, Guselnikov raised $75 million from Russian industrialist Piotr Kondrashev, who also wanted to obtain a stake in PNB Banka. But the two men had a falling out over the project. It was at this point, around 2016, that August Hanning came into the picture.

Tasked By a Russian Raw Materials Magnate

Kondrashev tasked Hanning with mediating in the conflict. The two had come into contact through the Swiss consulting firm System 360 AG, where Hanning is a member of the supervisory board. The company employs former security policy personnel and touts its "extensive knowledge of the various types of corporate crime."
​
Hanning should have been skeptical right from the start. Kondrashev had grown rich through the privatization of a Russian state-owned company involved in raw materials. His investments are difficult to track. Is he an oligarch? A spokesman for Kondrashev denied the label when contacted. Kondrashev, the spokesman said, had worked his way up from being a simple miner to a successful businessman, without political connections.
 
Matt33 said:
However, it's just another uncorroborated story. Remember the article from Simon Hersh? Pure fiction in my opinion.
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There was no arrest warrant issued on the Hersh story.
While I stand by my statement that a definitive answer needs a trial verdict, the arrest warrant means there is fairly solid evidence proving the Ukrainian's involvement.

LilWabbit said:
Poland's role has messed up all my subjective probability maths on this
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That you don't put the probability of Poland co-operating with Russia on this at 0 puts you in a special class of people, I think.
 
Mendel said:
There was no arrest warrant issued on the Hersh story.
While I stand by my statement that a definitive answer needs a trial verdict, the arrest warrant means there is fairly solid evidence proving the Ukrainian's involvement.


That you don't put the probability of Poland co-operating with Russia on this at 0 puts you in a special class of people, I think.
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I must admit Donald Tusk's and other Polish official's statements in the aftermath of the German arrest warrant seem much more like cover-up than sincere. Even without access to other evidence possessed by the agency responsible for investigation. And if indeed the case, the likelihood of Russian involvement decreases crucially.

Trial verdicts however are not definitive answers in terms of scientific evidence. We'll probably never get undisputed evidence on who ordered the attack. But it certainly looks like Ukrainians were involved at deep official levels.
 
LilWabbit said:
August Hanning's (the former head of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service involved in the Nord Stream investigation)
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August Hanning is almost 80 years old. He left the BND in 2005, and left government altogether in 2009.

The agency investigating the Nordstream explosions is the BKA, not the BND; the investigation is led by the German Attorney General.
 
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