Who Really Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline? With Bojan Pancevski

**Ed Conway** (0:00)
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**Mia Sorrenti** (0:30)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. In September 2022, a series of underwater explosions tore through the Nord Stream pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea.
The destruction of this $20 billion pipeline severed a major artery of Russian gas supplies to Europe, disrupted economies and triggered a manhunt that strained relations within the NATO alliance. Despite capturing the imagination of millions, the mystery of who blew up the pipeline has so far gone unsolved. Could it have been the CIA or part of the shadow war between Russia and the West? Could Putin himself have been behind it? On today's episode, Bojan Pancevski, chief European political correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, joins Hannah Lucinda Smith to discuss his new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, the inside story of the explosions that shook the world and his investigation into a mystery that continues to reverberate through international politics.
Let's join our host, Hannah Lucinda Smith, now with more.

**Hannah Lucinda Smith** (1:34)
Bojan Pancevski, welcome to Intelligence Squared. And congratulations on the Nord Stream Conspiracy. It's really both a great work of journalism and research, but also a really, really cracking read. This is a book that reads like a thriller. In fact, it is. It's a real life thriller.
Can you just first of all explain to us what the Nord Stream was and what happened to it?

**Bojan Pancevski** (1:59)
Well, first, thank you so much for the kind words. It was meant to read like a thriller because I've done some kind of field study with the publishers and it turns out not many people read nowadays, because of the algorithms, because of other ways of absorbing information. So I was hoping that I'll be able to write a narrative that people will actually try and read. So thank you ever so much for that and for the invitation. Nord Stream was or is, to a point, the world's largest offshore pipeline system.
It was built to channel Russian natural gas, which goes all the way from the permafrost of Siberia, through European Russia, and then underneath, beneath the Baltic Sea, and kind of lands in Germany, in a place called Lubmin. And the pipeline system had two pipelines, Nord Stream 1, which is the older pipeline, and Nord Stream 2, which was built a bit later. And both of them had two sort of strings each, two lines each. So in total, there are four actual pipes going beneath the sea and landing in Germany, connecting Russia and Germany.

**Hannah Lucinda Smith** (3:16)
So this was a pipeline that was going to basically supply Germany's gas. What then happened to it?

**Bojan Pancevski** (3:23)
Yeah, it's important to note that, like I said, there were two pipelines, I mean, two parallel pipelines, part of the same system. And the first, the older one, Nord Stream 1, was actually a pan-European consortium. And the majority share or the largest share was held by the Russians, where the gas originates. But the rest of it was ownership of European companies from Germany, but also from France, the Netherlands, et cetera. So that was a time, I think the first line of Nord Stream 1 became operational in 2011
So that was a time when people still wanted to trade with Russia. And if you look at the pictures from the testive opening, the prime minister of France at the time, François Fillon, is there sort of smiling, a broad smile. There are representatives of the European Commission.
The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, who has now reinvented himself as the head of NATO and is a big hawk on Russia, was there and was quite happy to open this Russian slash European pipeline. So it was basically serving the Western European market, not just Germany. It's quite often forgotten that Germany wasn't alone in this, at least not from the onset. Then came Nord Stream 2, and that was a much more controversial pipeline because by then, Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014
It had kind of done a lot of transgressions on the international stage, that the tensions between Europe and the West in general and Russia were escalating. And so Nord Stream 2 was built later and it was pushed by Germany mainly, or to be more specific, by Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor. So it was highly controversial because a lot of countries in Europe, including the United Kingdom, were very much opposed to it. The United Kingdom, I think, was opposed together with the United States to both pipelines because they felt we shouldn't make ourselves reliant on Russian gas because Russia can use that reliance, which later became addiction in fact, as a geopolitical method of coercion, even as a weapon. Eastern Europeans hated the pipeline.