The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022 was approved by senior officials in Kyiv, a report said Thursday, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially giving his support.
Speculation has long swirled about who was behind the operation, with both Ukraine and Russia denying any involvement.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Ukraine’s top military commander at the time, Valery Zaluzhny, oversaw the plan to blow up the pipelines used by Russia to deliver gas to Europe.
The idea emerged during a meeting of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen in May 2022, just months after Moscow invaded Ukraine.
Six people were directly involved in carrying out the operation, which cost around $300,000 and was privately financed, the report said.
Using a rented yacht, they sailed out to the area of the pipelines and dived down to lay explosives on them.
Zelensky also initially approved the operation. But when the CIA learned of the plan, they asked him to stop it going ahead and he ordered a halt.
But Zaluzhny, who was removed from his post earlier this year in a shake-up, pushed ahead anyway, the WSJ said, citing Ukrainian officials.
Zelensky took the military commander to task for going ahead with the operation despite the order to pull the plug, according to the paper.
But the commander replied that once the sabotage team had been dispatched, they could not be called off.
“He was told it’s like a torpedo — once you fire it at the enemy, you can’t pull it back again, it just keeps going until it goes ‘boom,'” a senior officer familiar with the conversation was cited as saying.
Contacted by the Journal, Zaluzhny — now Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain — said he did not know anything about such an operation and any suggestion to the contrary was a “mere provocation”.
The Journal report comes a day after German media outlets had reported that German investigators probing the sabotage were now focusing on Ukraine, and had issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man.
Most however did not report approval at the highest levels in Ukraine, apart from Der Spiegel, which mentioned the possible involvement of Zaluzhny.
Nord Stream’s two pipelines had been at the centre of geopolitical tensions as Russia cut gas supplies to Europe in suspected retaliation for Western sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Four large gas leaks were discovered in September 2022 in the pipelines off the Danish island of Bornholm, with seismic institutes recording two underwater explosions just before.