Military ships of the Russian Federation were near the sites of explosions on the “North Stream” before the incident – mass media
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A joint investigation by journalists from Northern Europe claims that Russian ships visited the areas of explosions on branches of the Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline at least three times, and one of them was five days before the incident.
As European Truth reports, this is stated in a study by the Danish broadcaster DR, the Norwegian NRK, the Swedish SVT and the Finnish Yle.
The Russian ships were moving in the area with their identification devices turned off, but thanks to information from radio communications the ships exchanged with their military bases and satellite images analyzed with KSAT, journalists were able to more accurately determine their movements.
In June 2022, Russian vessels potentially capable of conducting underwater operations visited the gas pipelines at least twice, with the latest incident occurring less than a week before the explosions. In one case, the vessel remained near the pipeline for almost a whole day.
The first vessel spotted near the Nord Streams on the morning of June 7 left the naval base in Kaliningrad and arrived in an area southeast of Karlskrona and east of Bornholm. The ship spent several hours in the very place where the branches of the “Nord Streams” pass at a depth of 80 meters. The name of this vessel is not mentioned. Based on information from the Danish authorities, three of the four gas pipeline explosions subsequently occurred here.
The second vessel – the 86-meter “Sibiryakov” – arrived in this area on June 14. The ship was very close to or almost over the pipelines, sometimes moving at a very low speed. Satellite images suggest that the ship was a couple of hundred meters away from the site of one of the explosions. In addition, another vessel can be seen in the pictures, which apparently also moved with the identification device turned off, but it was not possible to establish it precisely.
The pictures show that these two ships were at a distance of several hundred meters to several kilometers from the places of one of the future explosions.
NATO’s BALTOPS 22 exercises were also held in the Baltic Sea at the time, but after reviewing the available movement data, the journalists did not find any units that were close enough to the area to see the “Sibiriakov” and the other “ghost ship”.
The third recorded vessel that visited the pipelines on September 21 is the 49-meter-long tugboat SB-123 of the Baltic Fleet. The German portal T-Online already mentioned this tugboat as potentially involved in the incidents.
SB-123 turned off the transponder halfway from the Kaliningrad base to the Nord Stream area. Based on information from intercepted radio communications, journalists believe that the tugboat was in the area from approximately 20:00 on September 21 to 2:00 on September 22.
Swedish prosecutor Mats Linqvist, who is in charge of investigating the pipeline sabotage, says that the investigation has very detailed data on the movement of ships in the area, even on “ghost ships”, but cannot comment at this stage.
Recently, the Danish media received information from military sources that a Russian SS-750 was also near the Nord Streams four days before the explosions.
With the received data, the journalists turned to the Russian embassy in Copenhagen, but they refused to comment there.
It will be recalled that in March materials appeared in the Western mass media suggesting that non-governmental groups, including Russians and Ukrainians could enter.
The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, said that Ukraine is not involved in the explosions and offered to analyze which players might need such an information dump.
Journalists of the same broadcasters recently published another investigation – that Russian warships and civilian “ghost ships” in the Baltic and North Seas collect data for sabotage against wind power plants, gas pipelines and communication cables.
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