DISINFO: Danish outlet reveals evidence of US fingerprints in Nord Stream sabotage
SUMMARY
Media published new evidence revealing US fingerprints in the Nord Stream attacks. Danish outlet Politiken indicated in an article that four or five days before the Nord Stream explosions, there were some ships in the area with their radios turned off, and it turned out that they were American warships. In addition, the article also refutes the theories put forward by the European justice department, pointing out that the Andromeda yacht, which was allegedly used to carry out the attack, is not suitable for such operations because the waters of the Baltic Sea are turbulent and it requires a lot of technology, money and explosives to dive to a depth of 80 meters, which is very dangerous.
RESPONSE
This is a deliberate distortion of the original article in the Danish outlet Politiken. While the sentences included in this disinformation story appear in the original piece, they are taken out of context and presented in a manipulative way in order to promote a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative blaming the US for the Nord Stream sabotage, of which there is no actual evidence.
The original article exposes several theories about who may be responsible for the sabotage, including Russia, Ukraine and the US. Information about US warships crossing the area with radios off is provided by a witness, but it can’t be considered hard proof of US involvement in the sabotage and Politiken does not claim this at all. The other arguments -that the yacht ‘Andromeda’ may be too small for such an operation, and that such a deep dive is problematic- are expressed by some people interviewed in the article, but are also refuted in different paragraphs, which are disingenuously omitted in the disinformation story. For example, Politiken states that “according to expert information leaked from the Germany’s prosecutor office, it can be done even from an ordinary yacht, and it requires less than 50 kilos of explosives”.
While the question of who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines remains a mystery, investigations from German and US media, Germany’s prosecutor office and other European police investigators point to the involvement of a recreational yacht called ‘Andromeda’ manned by a Ukrainian commando. German officials have issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man identified as Volodymyr Z. as a main suspect. Nothing of what has been publicly released in these investigations points to any possible US participation.
Quoting Western legitimate sources while distorting its content to introduce a pro-Kremlin message as if it was part of the original story is a frequent pro-Kremlin manipulative technique.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that everyone in the West knows about the US involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage but the terrorist attack is hushed up, that NATO may have destroyed undersea cables in the Red Sea, as with Nord Stream, that the Kursk incursion was conceived by the same people who blew up Nord Stream, or that the objective of Nord Stream media reports is to scapegoat Ukraine.