The Bomb Nobody Wants to Find

On September 26, 2022, three of the four strings of the Nord Stream pipeline network were destroyed by underwater explosions beneath the Baltic Sea — one of the most audacious acts of infrastructure sabotage in modern European history. The attack cost an estimated 1.2 to 1.35 billion euros in direct damage alone, and many times that as Germany scrambled to replace cheap Russian gas with expensive American liquefied natural gas shipped across the Atlantic.

Nearly three years later, we still have no official verdict. No government has been held responsible. And Germany’s political establishment has greeted every attempt at clarity with what can only be described as strategic silence.

Now the AfD parliamentary group has demanded a parliamentary inquiry committee, calling the attack “a serious violation of German sovereignty and most likely state-sponsored.” Whatever one thinks of the AfD, this question deserves an answer.

The Evidence That Accumulated in Plain Sight

Let’s begin with what is on the public record.

On February 7, 2022 — more than seven months before the explosions — President Biden stood alongside German Chancellor Scholz at the White House and delivered a remarkable warning. “If Russia invades, there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” When pressed on how America could possibly do that, Biden’s answer was not a qualification. It was a promise: “I promise you, we will be able to do it.”

That was a sitting U.S. president publicly threatening the destruction of allied energy infrastructure. Months later, the pipeline exploded. Victoria Nuland, then Under Secretary of State, reinforced the pattern with congressional testimony in January 2023, expressing that the administration was “very gratified” that Nord Stream was now “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.” Not troubled. Gratified.

Then came Seymour Hersh. In February 2023, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist published a detailed account alleging that U.S. Navy divers had planted explosive charges during the NATO BALTOPS 22 exercise in June 2022, with Norwegian assistance. The White House dismissed the claims as “utterly false.” But dismissal is not refutation. No official ever methodically rebutted Hersh’s timeline or operational details. A wall of denial is not the same as innocence.

The Ukrainian Trail and What It Doesn’t Explain

German investigators have since identified seven Ukrainian suspects with military and intelligence backgrounds. The alleged ringleader, Serhiy K., a former SBU officer, was arrested in Italy in August 2025. Another suspect, diving instructor Volodymyr Zhuravlev, had an arrest warrant issued in June 2024 — but Polish authorities refused extradition, and he was reportedly helped across the border into Ukraine by a car registered to the Ukrainian military attaché. Poland’s Prime Minister Tusk declared the case “closed.”

A Wall Street Journal investigation cited senior Ukrainian officials claiming Zelensky personally approved the original plan but later ordered its cancellation — and that his commander-in-chief Zaluzhny proceeded anyway. Both men deny it.

Here the analysis must be careful: identifying the operatives who physically placed the explosives does not answer who authorized and funded the operation. Operatives execute orders. Orders come from somewhere. A technically demanding deep-sea demolition in Danish territorial waters, requiring specialist equipment and near-perfect operational security, is not a freelance adventure. Someone with resources and a strategic interest in the outcome was involved. Whether that someone wore Ukrainian insignia, American insignia, or both, remains unanswered.

Germany’s Silence Is Its Own Scandal

When Frohnmaier asked the German government whether it had formally requested extradition of the suspects still sheltering in Ukraine, the government offered no substantive reply. This is the German government declining to pursue accountability for a terrorist attack — classified as such by the Federal Court of Justice — on its own sovereign infrastructure.

Sweden and Denmark closed their investigations in early 2024 without public conclusions. Germany’s is the only remaining active inquiry, and even there, political will appears to have set its own limits. Meanwhile, German households have been absorbing the economic consequences of higher energy prices.

The AfD holds 150 Bundestag seats; 158 are needed to establish an inquiry. Frohnmaier’s appeal to other parties is simple: “This isn’t about party politics. It’s about investigating one of the most serious attacks on German infrastructure in postwar history.”

The established parties will cite ongoing judicial processes and the risk of damaging US relations — all real concerns, and all enormously convenient reasons to avoid scrutiny. But if a powerful state can destroy another country’s energy infrastructure, shift the European energy landscape in its favour, and face no formal accountability, then “rules-based international order” becomes an empty phrase.

Germany’s parliament should vote for this inquiry. Not because every accusation is proven. But because permanent silence about one of the most consequential acts of sabotage in post-Cold War history is itself an answer — and a deeply troubling one.