Three Russian ships were sailing near the Nord Stream before the sabotage, according to the documentary

Three Russian navy ships with the capacity to conduct underwater operations were in the area near where the sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines took place last September, according to a joint investigation by Nordic public television. The vessels remained in that area for several hours, and in one case for almost a whole day: the first two, in June, and the last, five days before the explosions in the Baltic Sea, says the documentary war in the shadows.

The investigation uses radio links, satellite images and signals from ship transmitters which they were, however, excluded in some parts, to reconstruct the route of the ships, which departed from the Russian bases of St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad. The radio communication between the ships and their bases was intercepted by a former British naval officer, who until many years ago worked monitoring the Russian fleet in the Baltic, according to the documentary.

The first vessel, whose identity has not been established, set sail from Kaliningrad on June 6, arrived northeast of the Danish island of Bornholm the next day and sailed four kilometers south of where three of the four pipelines leaked. A week later, another ship, identified as Sibiryakov, arrived in the area.which remained for a day and, according to intercepted radio communications, was in the same position near North Stream 1 as the previous ship.

The presence of both ships in the area coincides with NATO’s BALTOPS maneuvers in the Baltic. The last Russian ship SB-123, sailed in that area for almost a day between September 21 and 22, and was already mentioned by the German media before. The SB-123 is used as an auxiliary vessel in operations with submarines, experts from the University of Copenhagen point out in the documentary.

war in the shadows is a documentary series that began airing two weeks ago and has highlighted in previous installments that dozens of Russian ships have been patrolling the North Sea in recent months to allegedly gather information on critical infrastructure for possible sabotage. In total, two leaks were found in each pipeline (both out of service and located in the Baltic), two in the Danish area and two in the Swedish area.all in international waters, which the affected governments soon described as “sabotage”, in addition to pointing to a state actor as the culprit.

German, Swedish and Danish authorities, along with Russia, are keeping several investigations open, but have provided little detail about their status. The Swedish prosecutor’s office reported in early April that it was a “complicated” case and that it would be “difficult” to confirm who the perpetrator was..

Both the affected countries and the rest of the European Union (EU), the US and Russia speak of sabotage, although they differ on possible authorship. Moscow accused “Anglo-Saxon” countries of being behind it, alluding to opposition to the project that Washington has maintained for years and its threats to arrest him by any means if Russia intervenes militarily in Ukraine, while some western countries pointed in the opposite direction. An investigation by the American journalist Seymour Hersh a few months ago pointed to the American intelligence services, with the cooperation of Norway and other Western countries. Media from the United States and Germany later pointed to a pro-Ukrainian group as a possible perpetrator of the sabotage.