177. Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline? (Ep 1)

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Classified – Ep 177: Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline? (Ep 1)
Release Date: July 19, 2026

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Overview

In this gripping episode, hosts David McCloskey (former CIA analyst and spy novelist) and Gordon Corera (veteran security correspondent) embark on a deep investigation into the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosions, which severed a critical link for Russian gas into Europe and set off a whirlwind of geopolitical intrigue. They are joined by Bojan Panchevsky, the Wall Street Journal’s chief European political correspondent and author of The Nord Stream Conspiracy. The episode dissects the shocking sabotage, the tangled web of actors involved, the political tensions underlying Nord Stream's construction, and the shadowy Ukrainian operatives allegedly behind the attack.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The Explosion and Immediate Fallout

• Underwater Sabotage:
  On September 26, 2022, both Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines under the Baltic Sea suffered massive explosions. At first, seismic detectors mistook the event for an earthquake, but experts quickly realized it was deliberate sabotage. The resulting gas leak was the largest manmade greenhouse gas release ever recorded.

  “The explosion was so powerful that in the, in the, in the first seconds the kinetic energy released was equal to the thermal output of a large nuclear reactor.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [08:47]

• Global Shockwaves:
  The event triggered significant diplomatic rifts, with initial suspicion on Russia, then shifting as the complex investigation unfolded. The story became an “information war” between allies and adversaries alike.

  “For many in the immediate aftermath, the prime suspect was Russia. But over time, the finger would gradually point somewhere else.”
  — David McCloskey [01:05]

2. Nord Stream’s Geopolitical Backstory

• Origins and Controversy:
  Nord Stream was conceived in the early 2000s as a direct energy corridor from Russia to Germany, thereby bypassing Eastern European “transit states” with whom Russia had fraught relations (e.g., Ukraine, Poland).

  “The idea behind Nord Stream was pretty simple. It was to circumvent Eastern Europe, the pesky little nations between Russia and Germany, … bypassing all that trouble and channel[ing] the gas straight from Russia … into Germany.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [12:42]

• Pan-European Project and German Policy:
  While often blamed on Germany, Nord Stream 1 was a shared European project with key players from France and the Netherlands. At its core, the pipeline embodied Germany’s “change through trade” doctrine (Wandel durch Handel), aiming to soften international tensions by deepening economic ties with Russia.

  “They saw Vladimir Putin as a normal leader of a country that needs money, ... It was a simple equation. We get the gas, he gets the money. We both need each other.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [14:46]

• American and British Skepticism:
  U.S. and U.K. administrations steadfastly opposed Nord Stream, warning it would increase Western European dependency on Russian energy and embolden Putin.

3. Spies at the Helm: The Unusual Corporate Cast

• Russian and German Intelligence Connections:
  Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB officer, filled key roles at Nord Stream with his trusted circle, including Matthias Warnig, a former East German Stasi officer, as chief executive.

  “Putin is an operative in the Kremlin. … Every single person that wields any kind of power in Russia, pretty much every single person, is someone he knows from back in the days in the KGB, right? Or their children, for that matter.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [20:13]

• Awkward Partnerships:
  The prominent Stasi background of Warnig, coupled with Angela Merkel’s own East German roots, created odd optics at the highest levels of German government.

4. Ownership Structure and Post-Crimea Shifts

• Nord Stream 1:
  A joint venture between Russia’s Gazprom and major energy companies from Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

• Nord Stream 2:
  Built after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, initially structured similarly, but strong U.S. sanctions forced Western partners to withdraw, leaving Gazprom in primary control.

  “It [NS2] then became fully controlled by Gazprom.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [24:33]

5. The Ukrainian Plot: Enter the Startup

• Formation of “The Startup”
  Bojan Panchevsky interviewed the operatives at the heart of the sabotage—dubbed “the Colonel” and “the General”—veterans of the Soviet-trained Ukrainian services who turned against Russia post-2014.

  “The Colonel was the absolute mastermind of the operation. He’s a veteran of the special services of Ukraine… The General is a friend of his and an ally. … In an interesting twist, these people are now probably the world’s most dangerous opponents of Russia and they were, in a way, created by Vladimir Putin.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [28:43]

• Startup Mentality and Deep State:
  These networks functioned like a startup—a flexible, entrepreneurial, and semi-autonomous “deep state” that blurred lines between state operatives, private business, and military innovators.

  “They call themselves, or they describe themselves as a little deep state … what you're telling me, that sounds more like a startup.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [34:18] “It is fascinating because it is basically a deep step. … Could you imagine in the UK if you suddenly had a kind of bunch of colonels and generals who are going like, let's just start up our own little club … and we're going to do our own sabotage operations?”
  — Gordon Corera [36:28]

• Ukrainian Innovativeness:
  Due to chronic underfunding, political fragmentation, and institutional chaos—especially during the 2022 Russian invasion—Ukrainian intelligence proved remarkably adaptive and decentralized, relying on private initiative, crowdfunding, and oligarch funding.

6. The Decision to Strike Nord Stream

• Target Selection:
  In the chaos after Russia’s full-scale invasion (Feb 2022), this group drew up “a list of almost a dozen high value targets,” prioritizing hits that would disrupt Russian hydrocarbon revenues—most notably the Kerch Bridge and both Nord Stream and TurkStream pipelines.

  “The priority was to hit, as they told them, the Russians where it hurts—to hit their revenues from the hydrocarbons.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [40:07]

• Command and Oversight:
  The group operated under confusing but official umbrellas within Ukrainian intelligence (SBU), military intelligence (HUR), and later the armed forces. The direct go-ahead (“green light”) for the Nord Stream operation came from Commander-in-Chief General Valeri Zaluzhny, who did not inform President Zelenskyy's inner circle due to mistrust and fears of a leak.

  “Illusiony greenlighted the operation at the time. And he even asked them whether they had told the President’s advisors about it and they informed him that they hadn’t. So he was quite happy because he did not believe that the presidential administration is reliable.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [44:08]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Information War After the Sabotage:

  “It’s really spawned, … an information war around this entire event that has become interesting all on its own, causing some very difficult and tense conversations between countries that are supposedly allies.”
  — David McCloskey [01:05]

• On Environmental Impact:

  “It was the largest ever recording man made or human made release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [08:47]

• On the Unusual German-Russian Ties:

  “He owns a yacht called Catherine the Great, which I find quite, quite amusing.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [22:52]

• On the Startup Model of Ukrainian Covert Action:

  “It would be entirely alien to a British or American civil servant or intelligence official or army officer. It’s very fragmented, it’s very atomized, it’s very self driven, self motivated to this very day … But I have to say while researching for my book and while reporting from Ukraine since 2014, I’ve noticed that that has served to their advantage. It makes them incredibly nimble, it makes them incredibly innovative, it makes them incredibly resilient.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [31:21]

• On General Zaluzhny Signing Off on the Operation:

  “He was quite happy because he did not believe that the presidential administration is reliable. He felt that if you tell them about something like this, they might leak it and the Russians might even find out about it. Such was the animosity between the two camps that they, you know, they didn't trust each other even with basic stuff like that.”
  — Bojan Panchevsky [44:08]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:25 — Introduction to the Nord Stream explosion and its context
• 06:34 — Bojan frames the magnitude of the explosion and initial global confusion
• 11:27–14:46 — Discussion on the origins, politics, and controversial nature of Nord Stream
• 20:12 — The role of ex-intelligence operatives on both sides of the pipeline
• 23:48 — Ownership structures of Nord Stream 1 and 2 clarified
• 27:37–30:17 — Introduction of the Ukrainian sabotage team (“the Colonel” and “the General”)
• 31:21–34:18 — The “startup” mentality of Ukrainian intelligence operations
• 38:02–40:07 — How the Nord Stream came to be a prime target after the Russian invasion
• 42:32–44:08 — Command approval and the rivalry between General Zaluzhny and President Zelenskyy

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Conclusion

This first part of the Nord Stream investigation skillfully sets the stage for an explosive real-life spy story, uncovering the history, motivations, and double-dealing behind one of the century’s most consequential acts of sabotage. The remarkable inside look at Ukrainian intelligence’s unconventional methods, the shadowy roles of spies-turned-corporate-executives, and the high-stakes political drama gives listeners both context and suspense. The next episode promises to delve into the CIA’s involvement, the German investigation, and the tangled international aftermath.

For more on this fascinating story, including more about the daring operation and its global ripple effects, the hosts encourage listeners to subscribe for early access to the follow-up episode.

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Transcript

[David McClarsky]

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com.

[Gordon Carrera]

Why did an undersea pipeline that sent Russian gas to Germany to explode in 2022? And could a group of Ukrainian operatives really have been behind it? Well, welcome to the Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

[David McClarsky]

And I'm David McClarsky.

[Gordon Carrera]

And David, four years ago, just after Russia invaded Ukraine, scientists detected what looked like an enormous undersea earthquake in the Baltic Sea. But if that's what it was, we wouldn't be talking about it on our show. Because the reality was it was an explosion, an act of unprecedented science sabotage. Someone had blown up the $20 billion Nord Stream pipeline, which carried cheap Russian gas to Europe.

[David McClarsky]

But who could have orchestrated such a wild and dangerous operation? An operation that took place 80 to 100 meters underwater on the floor of the Baltic Sea. And what were the motivations of the group that did this? For many in the immediate aftermath, the prime suspect was Russia. But over time, the finger would gradually point somewhere else. And it's really spawned, I think, a. An information war around this entire event that has. That has become interesting all on its own, causing some very difficult and tense conversations between countries that are supposedly allies. So to get to the bottom of this wild and crazy stories of spies, sea divers, political cover ups, all the kinds of things that we love on the Rest Is Classified. We are very fortunate to be joined by Bojan Panchevsky, who is the chief European political correspondent of the Wall Street Journal and author of the newly released book, the Wonderful Nord Stream Conspiracy. Welcome, Bojan. Thanks for being with us.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Hey guys, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure.

[Gordon Carrera]

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[Gordon Carrera]

Boyan, you've done decades, two decades of reporting across Europe covering lots of different stories, financial crises and of course, the war in Ukraine. And I guess this must be one of the craziest stories you've ever done. Is that fair to say?

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Yeah, it's entirely fair to say. It's an extraordinary story, largely also because of the people involved. And that's how I decided to write a book about it. I had been covering Nord Stream before it exploded, because it was always this kind of large geopolitical sort of topic and generating tension between Germany, America, Germany, Britain, Germany, its Eastern European neighbors, et cetera. But after the explosions, it became that much bigger the story. And when I actually finally met the characters behind the attack, but also the detectives who are hunting them. I realize these are extraordinary people and you can only do justice to their saga by writing a pretty thick book, as I did. In the end, it's really a fascinating subject. Probably one of the, if not the most fascinating story I've ever worked on, but certainly right right up there in the top.

[Gordon Carrera]

More interesting than doing Brexit on some of the other stories you did.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Yeah, no, that's a past life. I can hardly REM remember that.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, I think we've all blocked it out.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Yeah, exactly.

[David McClarsky]

Well, maybe we should start, I guess, with the. With the crime, the explosion, as it were. Maybe could you set the scene for us on what happened on that fateful day in September of 2022? Because, I mean, we're, we're seven months into Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline. We'll talk about how there's, you know, there's a couple pipelines that are, that are on the seafloor there had been completed a year earlier. No gas is flowing through it. It's September of 2022. What happens on that day?

[Bojan Panchevsky]

It was the 26th of September and somewhere around midday there was a report that the pressure had dropped in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which at the time was not in use, but it was fully functional and filled with gas. For technical reasons, both pipelines were pressurized and full of gas. The reports were public. It didn't really mean much to me at that stage. I realized something was going on and I thought they might have, you know, the Russians had stopped the flow in Nord Stream 1. As you said, there are two pipelines. Nord Stream 1 is a little bit older, Nord Stream 2 is more recent and both of them kind of run almost parallel to each other, connecting Russia and Germany beneath the Baltic Sea. It was the biggest offshore pipeline system in the world. And it was one of these mega infrastructure projects, one of the kind of critical infrastructure projects in Europe. I read about the pressure drop, didn't think much of it. I thought it was kind of brinkmanship from the Russians because they had shut down the flow of gas almost a month earlier through the existing and operating pipeline Nord Stream 1. And then the next day the footage now iconic emerged. The the Danish navy send out jet fighters and helicopters and then the Swedes did the same. And there was this kind of photographs and footage of this gigantic kind of vortexes in the middle of the ocean. And then it became clear that this was a enormous story because from, from the onset it was, it was obvious that someone had sabotaged the pipelines, someone had blown them up. Just to talk about the scale of the thing, of the event itself. It was the largest ever recording man made or human made release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It was absolutely ginormous. And the explosion was so powerful that in the, in the, in the first seconds the kinetic energy released was equal to the thermal output of a large nuclear reactor.

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[Bojan Panchevsky]

These geysers at the top of, at the surface of the Baltic Sea went on for about a week. There was so much gas in the pipeline that it took a week, a whole week for it to kind of empty out into the atmosphere. There were many scientific studies by, in leading journals following the event and they found that around 14% of the Baltic Sea was saturated with gas because the gas Then became kind of fluid as it was spreading. And there was satellite footage from. From space kind of observing this. It was a pretty large and very noticeable event. So it was quite an extraordinary event when. When the first tremor occurred, Europe's early warning system for earthquakes spotted or was triggered all the way up to the polar circles almost a thousand miles to the north in the polar circle of Sweden in the middle of the night. And the initial assessment was that this was an earthquake with an epicenter on the bed on the Baltic Sea. Soon after, seismologists realized this wasn't an earthquake, but it was probably a set of explosions because seismologists have experience in kind of distinguishing between the two. And that's how basically, experts arrived at the conclusion that this was a sabotage very early on. I mean, in the first kind of hours of the event, a sabotage.

[Gordon Carrera]

But who did it? And that, I think, is what's remarkable about your book, because it's a stunning piece of investigative journalism, telling us a lot about how sabotage really works and about also investigations and how they tried to unpick who was behind it. And it involves lots of fascinating characters, spies from different countries, including theories about who might have been behind it. Even the CIA, David, I think, at one point was. I mean, you know, who'd have thought that they could.

[David McClarsky]

We would never. We would never destroy critical infrastructure, Gordon. Right.

[Gordon Carrera]

Completely out of character.

[David McClarsky]

Completely out of character. Stuxnet, Nicaragua in the 80s. I mean, these are Cuba, Operation Mongoose. We have no, no, no press, no

[Gordon Carrera]

track record on that destroying. But it was, I think, described as the greatest act of sabotage on civilian infrastructure in history. So, you know, you'd think some of these intelligence agencies might be competing to see who could carry that out rather than denying it. But maybe we should go back and explain what it was, because that is the crucial part of this story to understand it, isn't it? Is. Is where did it come from? Why was Nord Stream being built? And to some extent, it was very controversial, wasn't it? And this is a lot to do with Germany, isn't it, and Germany's relationship with Russia.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Absolutely. Germany and Western Europe, though. So Nord Stream was conceived in 2004, 2005, during the reign of the then Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who was very close friends with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, who at the time was seen in Germany, certainly elsewhere in Western Europe, as well, as a reformist leader, a man with whom you can do deals, you can cooperate. In the energy sector in particular, Russia is the second biggest exporter of oil. One of the biggest exporters of natural gas. And Germany was extremely hungry for cheap energy. It is the industrial locomotive of Europe. So Nord Stream 1 was conceived in the months before Schroder was forced to call an early election and got booted out of office. So it was his brainchild, but he didn't actually get to build it at all. Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2 were built entirely during the time of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who ruled Germany for around 16 years. So the idea behind Nord Stream was pretty simple. It was to circumvent Eastern Europe, the pesky little nations between Russia and Germany, because Russia always had a beef with these countries. Ukraine is a point in question, but also obviously Poland, etc. These were the former satellites of the Soviet Union, the former satellites of the Kremlin. A lot of them had a pretty tense relationship with Moscow. And there were old pipelines, and there still are, running through that region who always needed fixing because they were going back to Soviet times. And then obviously there were these geopolitical tensions between Russia and the transit countries. So the Germans decided to build a pipeline that would circumvent all that trouble and channel the gas straight from Russia, from the Siberian gas fields, through continental Russia, right into Germany. Now, it's important to Note, Nord Stream 1 was a pan European project. It wasn't just. It's often now forgotten that, you know, the Germans get blamed for everything eventually in Europe, you know, including at the World Cup. But it was a. It was.

[David McClarsky]

We should say, we are recording this. We're recording this.

[Gordon Carrera]

The day is Germany have got knocked

[Bojan Panchevsky]

out in the world, knocked out by Paraguay.

[David McClarsky]

It was the worst day for the axis powers since 1945. Both Germany and Japan go down on the same day in the world.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

It was a day of mourning in Germany and day of national shame. First they lost to Ecuador and then they lost to Paraguay. I mean, it was, it was too much to handle, but nonetheless, Northern One was a pan European project. And if you look at the footage from the festive opening of the pipeline, you will see the French Prime Minister of the time, Francois Fillon. You will see Marc Rute, who is a familiar face. He was then the Prime Minister of the nation of the Netherlands and he was quite eager to expand the economic relationship with Vladimir Putin. Nowadays he is the head of NATO and he has reinvented himself as, as a Russia hawk and hardliner and a

[Gordon Carrera]

Trump whisperer, but that's another story.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

And a Trump whisperer indeed. Yeah, he's. He, he shows up in The Oval Office calls Trump daddy and shows him very simple, very straightforward kind of flip charts to convince him of. Of his loyalty and the loyalty and of Europe. So it was all smiles at that festive opening. I think it was 2011, if I'm not mistaken. And the pipeline was constructed as means of providing cheap energy to the industrial heartland of the old continent. In return, Putin got cash. And right from the beginning, even before construction started, Nord Stream became extremely controversial. Every single American administration, starting from George W. Bush's all the way to the present administration, basically opposed Nord Stream. Consecutive British governments were also quite negative. They were not as outspoken as some American presidents were. But the British politicians were always very, very cautious about what was going on, because the sense was this is no simple commercial relationship that is being built, but rather it's a geopolitical bond in the making that will eventually make Western Europe reliant on Russian energy exports. On the other side, Chancellor Angela Merkel and pretty much everyone else in Germany and a lot of people in the Netherlands, France, etcetera, Were actually quite keen. They rejected these arguments. They saw Vladimir Putin as a normal leader of a country that needs money, of a country that actually based its budget at the time. I think a third of the revenues of the state budget of Russia came from the sale of hydrocarbons. So in their mind, it was a simple equation. We get the gas, he gets the money. We both need each other. Why would there be a problem? And for Germany, this philosophy ran much deeper. There is a concept that became at some point, known as change through trade. Bundle. Dua Handel.

[David McClarsky]

I was gonna ask Gordon to pronounce it boy.

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[David McClarsky]

because I understand that you. Do you speak German and Russian, I believe, but we frequently have attempted to speak German on this program.

[Gordon Carrera]

Could you just say that again? What's the phrase? And I'll try. Okay, got it. Okay.

[David McClarsky]

That's pretty good. It's pretty good, Gordon.

[Gordon Carrera]

It's pretty good.

[David McClarsky]

You've been working on your Germans.

[Gordon Carrera]

I've been working on it. But that basically means change Russia through trade, doesn't it? That that's kind of.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Or bind it in at the time. It means change the Eastern Bloc, because Germany in any war game, Western war game. And then later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, we found out at the Soviet war games were exactly the same. In any scenario, Germany becomes the stage of a nuclear confrontation in the Cold War, when. When, you know, the two. When NATO and the Warsaw Pact were aiming missiles at each other.

[Gordon Carrera]

So basically, you want to avoid war by binding them Close.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Well, you want to avoid any kind of confrontation because within up to two weeks, Germany, up to Bonn, which was then the capital of Germany, becomes kind of scorched earth, radioactive pile of ash. And so it's a little known that the first post war Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, who took charge of the democratic rebirth of Germany from the ruins of Nazism, he joined NATO, I think it was 1955. And in the same year, within a very short space of time, he traveled to Moscow, to the Kremlin, to sign a trade pact of swords, because it was a balancing act. On one hand, they wanted to be embedded in the Western alliance. On the other hand, they wanted to balance the kind of potential of conflict because they were the stage of that conflict. So as much as Germany was faithful to the Western alliance and it was always harboring Western British troops, American troops, to this very day, There are almost 50,000American troops. Troops, not only troops, personnel around the troops, logistics, et cetera, but it's almost 50,000 people that are tied to the American armed forces in Germany to this very day, including bases like Ramstein and so on. So Germany always had to kind of tiptoe that line because they were terrified of war with the Eastern bloc. So the concept of change to trade was meant to change that situation of tension and being kind of tiptoeing on the brink of nuclear holocaust and change your potential opponent into becoming slightly more flexible, slightly more amicable, slightly more democratic, even.

[Gordon Carrera]

So that's the need for the pipeline. But it's interesting, isn't it, in terms of who was involved in it? I mean, it should have raised some suspicions, you'd have thought, because on the one hand, you've got Putin, an ex KGB guy who's running it from Moscow, but also the person involved in running Nord Stream was an ex spy and ex Stasi agent, weren't they? I mean, so spies were all over this from the start. It was about more than just trade. Maybe you want to explain a little bit who was involved on the German side.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Absolutely. I mean, you know, Putin is an operative in the Kremlin. He was KGB and then fsb. And every single person that wields any kind of power in Russia, pretty much every single person, is someone he knows from back in the days in the kgb, right? Or their children, for that matter. I mean, his spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, is the son of a KGB agent who served as a station chief in Turkey, and therefore he speaks fluent Turkish because he went to school there. So that's the kind of personnel that Putin has at the core of the Kremlin power apparatus. And it was, interestingly enough, not different with Nord Stream. He deployed his best friend, possibly his best friend in the West, a man called Matthias Vanig. Matthias Vanik is a banker turned energy executive. This is his kind of post Cold War career. His pre Cold War career was that of a senior operative with the Stasi and also with the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Eastern German Republic. He was a kind of a senior officer with both agencies. And as soon as the Wall came down, he used the old connections, his kind of linguistic skills, to set up a business relationship with Russia that emerged from the Soviet Union. And that's how he met Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin was a deputy mayor at the time in St Petersburg, and the two men met. This is the official story, that there is a theory that they had met even before, when they were both spooks. We don't know if that's true or not, but what is documented is that they met when Putin was a senior official in St Petersburg. And Putin's wife needed medical aid because of a car crash. And Matthias Vani kind of pulled some strings and had her flown over to Germany, where she was treated very successfully. And that kind of sealed the bond between the two men and they became the best of friends. And it must have been an awkward moment for Chancellor Angela Merkel at the opening of the Nord Stream one festive opening of the pipeline, because Matthias Varninch showed up there as the chief executive. And it's interesting to, you know, she hails from eastern Germany and she has often spoken about how the Stasi, how she hated the Stasi and how the Stasi was omnipresent and so on. And so to have this former officer of the Stasi directly kind of working with her administration must have been quite interesting. You know, Varnig also is a very capable individual, it must be said. He's highly regarded in the energy sector as a very clever executive, as a very inventive kind of businessman. He was rubbing shoulders with the good and the great for decades. He maintains a winter residence on a Spanish island in the Mediterranean. And he there owns a yacht called Catherine the Great, which I find quite, quite amusing to know, boy.

[David McClarsky]

And I do want to ask just to kind of set up a few of the facts around the pipeline. So Nord Stream 1 becomes, or kind of becomes functional in 2012, I believe, what is the ownership structure of the pipeline? Because I think it's just important when we talk about, as we will soon, the actual sabotage, who actually owns the thing. What is the, what's the, what's the construct for the ownership of the pipeline?

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Well, it's a little bit different for both pipelines. So the earlier, which was slightly less controversial pipeline, Nord Stream 1 is a joint venture between Gazprom, the energy giant, the state controlled energy giant, the Russia, and a string of big European companies, including Gas Unier from the Netherlands, Angie from France, which is also state controlled, and some German companies. So That's Nord Stream 1. Nord Stream 2 is a little bit different because that project was extremely controversial and it was conceived and built after Putin originally attacked Ukraine in 2014, after he annexed the Crimean Peninsula. So despite all these transgressions, Merkel sort of went ahead and built a whole new pipeline. The ownership structure was similar in the beginning, but then President Trump then in his first term, imposed very serious sanctions on the pipeline during the final stage of his construction. And the Western companies were forced to kind of pull back from the management and reduce their exposure. So it then became fully controlled by Gazprom.

[Gordon Carrera]

So what's so significant About Nord Stream 2 is, as you said, it's being built even after 2014, when Putin made his first invasion of Ukraine annex Crimea. The Germans are still going ahead with it, as we've heard, allies including the US are against it and fear that it's going to create a dependency. And then we get to this point, the construction of Nord Stream 2, the actual construction is completed by September 2021, just before Angela Merkel is going to leave office actually. But before it actually starts pumping any gas, something's going to happen which is going to change everything. And that is Russia is going to invade Ukraine in February 2022 and that is going to lead to the dramatic events that we'll come to in terms of the sabotage. So let's maybe take a break there and then when we come back, we'll start looking at who actually carried out this act of unprecedented sabotage and why.

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[Bojan Panchevsky]

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[Bojan Panchevsky]

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[David McClarsky]

Well, welcome back. You left off with the completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline ready to carry Russian gas. And it is September of 2022. That pipeline, as we talked about earlier, is about to explode. And Boyad here, I think, I mean, we come to the part of this story that I mean, really does truthfully read very much like a spy thriller, and you bring us into the world of this very interesting Ukrainian team that is going to wind up leading the sabotage effort. I'm wondering if you could in particular give us a sketch of, I think, two of the key people behind this, and you call them the Colonel and the General in the book. Don't use their real names. We should say none of the operatives are given their real names in the book. But who are the Colonel and the General and what role do they play in the sabotage operation?

[Bojan Panchevsky]

So the Colonel was the absolute mastermind of the operation. He's a veteran of the special services of Ukraine. He was born during the time of the Soviet Union. He was trained by Soviet Russian exposure experts in espionage, counter espionage, sabotage, special operations, et cetera. And then as years went by, he essentially turned against Russia after 2014 and became one of the fiercest defenders of Ukrainian independence in the war against Russia. That's the Colonel. The General is a friend of his and an ally. The General similarly was born in the Soviet Union. He was trained in the Soviet spirit of Intelligence gathering, counterintelligence, special operations, etc. And then he equally was in very senior roles across the several intelligence services in Ukraine. So in an interesting twist, these people are now probably the world's most dangerous opponents of Russia and they were, in a way, created by Vladimir Putin. You know, they, they were once perhaps even pro Russian. When not pro Russian, they were certainly ambivalent. They are fluent Russian speakers. They had no beef with Russia, they had lived with Russia, they had lived in the Russian information space. They were trained by Russian or Soviet experts. And then it was the Russian aggression that turned them into what they are now, you know, the most dangerous enemies.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, I always find that fascinating that, because I've met quite a few Ukrainian spies and they understand the Russians, I think, in the way the West, a lot of Western spies and, you know, Western journalists and others might not, because, you know, they've, they've fought alongside them, they trained with them, they understood them. But also that makes it feel particularly brutal because they, the antagonism is quite deep on both sides. You know, especially as we see what happens. What I find fascinating is, is the culture of what we're going to see of how this operation to target Nord Stream develops, because it's kind of, it's not necessarily top down, is it? You have groups of people and groups of Ukrainian officers and spies who have, I mean, you put it as almost like a startup mentality and they, you know, you call them the startup because they're coming up with ideas, particularly as we get closer to the invasion in 2022, about what they could do to take the fight to the Russians. It's a different model, isn't it, of intelligence operations to some extent?

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Oh, absolutely. It would be entirely alien to a British or American civil servant or intelligence official or army officer. It's very fragmented, it's very atomized, it's very self driven, self motivated to this very day. I mean, in the early days of the full scale invasion, there was kind of a period of chaos where it was basically every man for himself or every unit for themselves for a short while, for at least a month or two. But even now, you know, you got these now famous drone units and the best drone units in Ukraine, and consequently, I think the best in the world perhaps were all set up by private entrepreneurs who brought in private funding. So it wasn't even part. I mean, officially they are part of the armed forces, but a lot of the tech was developed by kind of kids who got a bunch of money from oligarchs or Business people or crowdfunding, and then came up with these technologies that are now like at the forefront of innovation in warfare. And overarchingly the army is sort of commanding them. But you know, when you look at the day to day activity, quite often they decide what to do so that, you know, beyond the financial, I mean that is partly because Ukraine is very poor and relies on external funding for, for running the war. Partly because of the corruption which is quite endemic and rampant, and partly because the political fragmentation. There are a lot of tiny little fragments of a deep state like structure and they are loyal to different politicians or different oligarchs, et cetera. And it's not necessarily, you know, the state doesn't really work like the United States or Great Britain, let me put it that way. But I have to say while researching for my book and while reporting From Ukraine since 2014, I've noticed that that has served to their advantage. It makes them incredibly nimble, it makes them incredibly innovative, it makes them incredibly resilient. Like there is a, you know, you have an elite military unit. They don't expect the armed forces to take care of them. They're very angry with it. Don't get their weapons or ammunition or even like, you know, flak jackets or whatever. But then they kind of find a way to get them anyway. You know, they crowdfund or they get the tap and oligarch or you know, they organize a campaign or they kind of reach out funds from somewhere. So that's how it works. Incredible resilience and adaptivity, you know.

[David McClarsky]

And Bojan, you call this particular, I guess, I don't know if we could call it a clan, but this particular clan that is going to, to plot the destruction of Nordstream, the startup, Is that your code name for them or do they actually call themselves the startup?

[Bojan Panchevsky]

That is what I came up with because when they started explaining who they are, how many, there's around 20 men involved. There are mainly officers above the rank of colonel, some of them are slightly more junior, but it's mainly colonels. There are a couple of generals and there are also kind of state officials, businessmen, they're very prominent businessmen inside there. There are kind of people who own various other businesses, lawyers, et cetera. So it's not just army or intelligence people, it's a whole ecosystem. So it's over two, dozens of people. And they call themselves, or they describe themselves as a little deep state because they have been watching the news from the United States and all this kind of cultural wars around the deep state and they said, well, we are kind of a little deep state, you know. And then after I got acquainted with a lot of them and with the way they operate, they were initially loyal to the previous president. They were attached to some people from the business community who were providing funding and they shifted from the special services to the armed forces. After this full scale invasion, they became embedded in, in an elite unit of the armed forces of Ukraine. And some of them are still there now. So they said, you know, we're this little deep state. And I told them, look what you're telling me, that sounds more like a startup.

[David McClarsky]

You're like, maybe you don't want to brand yourself that way. It's not going to resonate. It's not going to resonate as well.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's also much more orderly, the deep state, than what you're doing. Like, it's a. This is a very much of a different spirit, you know, a different mentality. So. And they are not unusual. There are groups like that, you know, there are groups like that across the spectrum in politics, in, in the economy. You know, it cuts across all walks of life. You know, they have a couple of senior lawyers who take care of their legal challenges. They have a couple of senior minigar or even oligarchs who finance their endeavors when, when it's necessary or at least partly financing their endeavors. So it's a kind of a nexus between the private sector and the military sort of industrial security complex.

[Gordon Carrera]

I mean, it is fascinating because it is basically a deep step. I mean, David, I can't imagine, could you imagine in the UK if you suddenly had a kind of bunch of colonels and generals who are going like, let's just start up our own little club and you know, backed maybe by some businessmen, and we're going to do our own sabotage operations, you know, I mean, without any real or. Well, we'll come to it. The issue of political oversight, I mean, it's, it's kind of wild and very, very different.

[David McClarsky]

That's why it's so hard, I think, for a lot of Western observers, I mean, including myself, I'm coming out of a, a very, you know, structured, bureaucratized organization. And I'm thinking about how covert action, for example, is authorized and planned and, you know, sort of thought through. And it's just, you know, this is not how it's done. There's not a few random people, you know, who were connected to different parts of the agency bureaucracy who decide because they get funding from, you know, a tech billionaire to go out and blow something up, you know, it just don't

[Gordon Carrera]

give anyone any ideas.

[David McClarsky]

David, despite, despite the, despite the, I guess, conspiracy theories around the agency, that just doesn't, that just doesn't happen, but obviously it does in the, in the Ukrainian services. I mean and Boya, how do they, how do they focus, how do they come to focus on Nord Stream? I mean we've obviously set it up in the first half of this episode as a relatively juicy target for the Ukrainians because it's a Russian cash cow. But like how do they, how do they think about the target set and get focused on Nord Stream?

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Well, this is the chronology. So at the onset of the, of the full scale invasion, 2014 of February 2022, they immediately formed their own unit in the defense of Kiev. The early days of the defense of Kiev were quite chaotic because President Volodymyr Zelensky was reluctant to believe the warnings that were coming out of Washington and London about the imminent invasion. And I think days or weeks, a couple of weeks before the full scale invasion started, he received a visit by William Burns, the head of the, then head of the CIA in a last ditch attempt to convince him to start preparing for this invasion. You know, he didn't believe what Burns had told him. All the Burns kind of laid out the details of what is going to happen and how it is going to happen. And I think it really actually happened that way. And on the other side the military leadership was receiving the same warnings, partially from the CIA, but also from the armed forces forces of Britain and the United States. General Milley was then counterpart of General Valeris Iluzhny who was the head of the armed forces of Ukraine. And he was telling him look, you need to dig trenches around Kiev, you need to do this and do that, you need to secure that small airport where the Russians are planning to send paratroopers and set up a command base, etc. And that wasn't done. And largely I think the Luzhny did believe the war now warnings but Zelenskyy kind of refused. And so when the invasion started, Kiev was basically defended in a very chaotic manner. And these people just went to the armory of the military intelligence service with their private cars, they put on their uniforms, their official uniforms, they took out weapons, official weapons on the back of them being officers. And then they just self organized, which is very interesting of course. Course they were operating under the auspices of their service, but commands were not coming from above, they were just self motivated.

[Gordon Carrera]

And this includes the Colonel and the General Yeah, this is you talk about.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Yes, absolutely. The four star general was kind of firing rounds into Russian tanks, which is also unheard of. I've never heard of that happening in any kind of Western system. And it's hard to imagine that an American general will go to Afghanistan and kind of shoot at insurgents or whatever. So. But that happened. And after the war, after the Battle of Kyiv was won partly due to their efforts, they regrouped in a private office because they stopped using their official headquarters for fears that the Russians had the blueprints of all the facilities and they thought they might kind of drone them or send missiles or whatever. So they felt it was safer to meet in covert headquarters. And they set up a list of high value targets in what they called hybrid warfare against Russia. And the priority was to hit, as they told them to hit, the Russians where it hurts to hit their revenues from the hydrocarbons. And this is something they were specialized in, you know, isometric warfare, hybrid warfare, economic warfare, assassinations behind enemy lines. So they drafted a list of almost a dozen targets, very high value targets. One of them was the Kerch Bridge that connects mainland Russia with occupied Crimea, which at the time was extremely strategic. And two other targets were North Stream, the pipeline and we discussed, and Turkstream, which is the kind of Nord Stream equivalent in the south. It connects Turkey with Russia and then pumps gas up through the Balkans into the European Union. So they devised this plan to strike both pipelines, Nord Stream and Turk Stream, simultaneously. And they decided to. Well, maybe I don't know how you want to handle the role of Western agencies and advice they received or not received.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, I think we'll come to that. Maybe. One question just at this point is they're coming up with this plan, pretty ambitious plans, striking these pipelines, including Nordstream, who's signing off on it. And maybe this is a difficult question to know all the answers to, but how far is it just the startup and how far is this someone else who's involved?

[Bojan Panchevsky]

So like I said, the startup is at all time embedded in official service. Initially, it was first they started off as members of the sbu, which is the largest intelligence service of Ukraine. It's perhaps comparable to the CIA, but not quite because it's an enormous machine. It has now, I think, around 55,000 employees. They are a kind of intelligence service, counterintelligence service. They have their own kind of anti corruption unit. They have their own prisons, they have their own sort of prosecution in a way. They tap the phones and telecommunications of pretty much everyone in Ukraine at all times. And then they segued into the military intelligence service, which is much smaller but also quite ferocious. It's called the hur. It's again equivalent of the Russian and previously Soviet military intelligence agency called GUR in Russia. And then they became embedded in the armed forces. So when they were planning the attacks behind enemy lines on critical infrastructure that served Russian interests, they were doing that as part of this elite military unit which was commanded by a very senior general who then answered directly to Valeri Zaluzhny, the chief commander at the time of the armed forces of Ukraine and

[Gordon Carrera]

currently Ambassador to London, we should say.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Exactly, Ambassador at the Court of St. James. He was effectively fired by Zelenskyy because there was great tension between the two men.

[Gordon Carrera]

Rivalry, Yeah. A lot of people think Zaluzhny could end up president.

[Bojan Panchevsky]

Exactly. Zaluzhny said to have presidential ambitions. He was extremely, extremely popular figure in Ukraine during the time he was in command. Ukraine was winning pretty much. And then when he got shafted, they, you know, the luck, their luck turned. So he remains quite popular. I think he's not been necessarily tainted by some of the more challenging things that had happened to the armed forces in the last almost five years now. And Zaluzhny also, interestingly, was very, I think, upset with Zelenskyy, who refused to allow him to prepare for the invasion. This is something that is felt, this is a very strong emotional subject within the secret services or parts of the secret services and part of the armed forces, where people who are not that keen on Zelenskyy and his clique are very upset that he did not prepare for the full scale invasion. Right. So Zaluzhny, I think, belongs to that camp. And he was literally not allowed in secret. He performed some preparations, but he wasn't allowed to dig trenches and throw divisions around and do all the. All that sort of stuff. And that's the kind of origin of that animosity. But anyways, Illusiony greenlighted the operation at the time. And he even asked them whether they had told the President's advisors about it and they informed him that they hadn't. So he was quite happy because he did not believe that the presidential administration is reliable. He felt that if you tell them about something like this, they might leak it and the Russians might even find out about it. Such was the animosity between the two camps that they, you know, they didn't trust each other even with basic stuff like that.

[David McClarsky]

Well, Boyan, I think maybe there with the operation greenlit and the Startup beginning its its plans to target Nordstream. Let's. Let's end this episode. We come back next time. We're going to dig deeper into how our good friends at the CIA become involved in this dramatic plan to conduct the greatest act of sabotage on civilian infrastructure in history. And how dogged German investigators get at the truth behind who planted the bombs. Which is a team of professional not just professional spies I guess, but also civilians. And it incorporates includes a glamour model among the diving team. But of course, Gordon, there's no need to wait for that episode. You can get it right now. Early access by joining the declassified club. Go to the restisclassified.com and sign up. We'll see you next time.

[Gordon Carrera]

See you next time.

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[Mary Beard and Josephine Quinn]

I'm Mary Beard. And I'm Josephine Quinn. At the Rest is Fest this September, we're putting on a show that can only be described as an iconoclastic romp through the ancient world. We're talking about leaders behaving badly, emperors putting their horses in charge, cities built by asylum seekers and empires getting their comeuppance. There will be some proper myth busting, but we lost also be asking why these myths matter even when we know they're wrong. So if you love your ancient history and you're free on September 6th, get your ticket now and join us at London South Bank Centre. Tickets are on sale now. Just visit southbankcentre.co.uk that's southbankcentre.co.uk.com.