Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has urged those responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines to “keep quiet,” as intelligence sources in Germany point to a joint Polish-Ukrainian plot to destroy the undersea pipelines.
According to German state media, prosecutors in Berlin issued an arrest warrant in June for a Ukrainian national known as ‘Vladimir Z’ in connection with the destruction of the pipelines. Working with a team of saboteurs, Vladimir Z is believed to have rented a yacht in Poland, sailed to a site in the Baltic Sea off the Danish island of Bornholm, and planted explosives on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines.
German investigators filed a cooperation request with their Polish counterparts in the hope of locating the suspect, who is said to have been tracked to a location west of Warsaw before disappearing, German state broadcaster ARD reported.
In a post on X on Saturday, Tusk appeared keen to quash any attempts to investigate the attack.
To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2,” he wrote. “The only thing you should do today about it is apologise and keep quiet.”
According to ARD, Poland, despite EU inter-state regulations, has failed to respond to Berlin’s request for cooperation. In an interview with Die Welt on Thursday, the former president of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, August Hanning, claimed that Poland was likely involved in facilitating the attack.
“The way it seems is that it was a Ukrainian team that… operated there,” he said, referring to Poland. However, he added, “this was of course only possible with support from the land.”
“When we look at the map… pretty evidently, the Polish agencies were engaged here, and I think not only agencies… I think that this was an arrangement between [people] at the top level in Ukraine and in Poland,” he speculated.
Polish Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski rejected Hanning’s accusations, telling the Polsat broadcaster on Friday that “Poland did not take part in anything.”
Back in January, the Wall Street Journal claimed that Poland’s internal security agency refused to turn over testimony from eyewitnesses who encountered the yacht’s crew, withheld CCTV footage from the Polish port of Kolobrzeg where the vessel was moored, and “failed to answer queries, obfuscated or gave contradictory information,” when pressed by German investigators.
