Like an earthquake with a magnitude of 2.3 on the Richter scale. How to register monitoring stations in Sweden Monday evening explosions at the bottom of the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. That they were explosions, there is no doubt anymore: They punched holes in the two Nord Stream gas pipelines that play a key role in the energy chess game between Russia and Europe surrounding the war in Ukraine.
No gas flows through the pipes. Russia has shut down Nord Stream-1, on the pretext that Western sanctions are blocking a major repair. And Germany refused to give Nord Stream 2 the green light just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet in both pipelines are hundreds of millions of cubic meters of natural gas, that is released. Gas prices skyrocketed.
“Our imagination no longer allows for a scenario where this is not a targeted attack,” a German government official said on Tuesday against the Tagesspiegel. Poland and Denmark also assumed sabotage; it underlines the vulnerability of energy infrastructure. Denmark and Norway have tightened security measures around energy nodes.
Such an attack, which goes beyond the use of gas as a political weapon, carries with it all the elements of the ‘hybrid warfare’ in which Russia seemed to specialize until the invasion of Ukraine: violence that creates fait accomplis – as in the Crimea in 2014 – but that is just below the threshold that makes a military response immediately evident.
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There is wild speculation about the perpetrator and motive. But the timing was salient: one day before the opening of Baltic Pipe, the new gas connection from Norway via Denmark to Poland. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was in Poland for the opening ceremony on Tuesday.
Norwegian gas must compensate for missing Russian gas. „The leak in Nordstream-2 [ten zuidoosten van Bornholm] is close to the Baltic Pipe,” said Tom Marzec-Manser, an energy consultant, against the Financial Times. “Norwegian gas means a new dawn for European imports, but twilight for Russia.”
Negotiation room
Aslak Berg, a Norwegian economist, said on Twitter that he saw only two possibilities: a – “very unlikely” – scenario where “a friendly nation carried out the attack” to prevent Germany from having “negotiable room with Russia” over gas at all. And two: Russia did it “to show what it is capable of.” “If the gas supply from Norway is interrupted, everything will be in jeopardy,” Berg said.
The latter also seems plausible to Julian Pawlak, a German defense analyst. The goal is: “send a message,” he tweeted. “Anyone who can paralyze a pipeline through which no gas flows can also hit active infrastructure.” Such as oil and gas pipelines that lie all over the North and Baltic Seas, or power cables to offshore wind farms and data cables, which form the backbone of the interconnected economies.
There is no doubt that Russia is capable of such operations. It features submarines, as well as manned and unmanned ‘underwater vehicles’ and so-called combat divers. Russian ships have also been repeatedly found performing suspicious maneuvers at submarine cables. It cutting a data connection between Norway and a satellite station on Spitsbergen, early this year, was almost certainly Russia’s work. With the Belgorod, a ‘submarine mothership’, Russia has a vessel specially equipped for this purpose.
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But it is precisely the shallow Baltic Sea that is closely observed by “adjacent countries and their navies”, said HI Sutton, a leading maritime analyst. It is virtually impossible that the Belgorod (with a length of more than 150 meters) “could operate unnoticed there,” said Sutton.
Dutch tanker plane
Especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, surveillance has been sharpened enormously. On ADS-B Exchange, a open source tracker of aircraft movements, western military aircraft were seen patrolling the Baltic Sea on Tuesday. Even what you did not see was significant: above the area of the explosions, a military tank plane registered in the Netherlands circled for hours. But the plane that was supposed to refuel the A330 in the air — almost certainly a military aircraft capable of detecting underwater activity — was not visible because it had its electronic beacon turned off.