There are presently two mysteries (at least) relating to the war in Ukraine. The first is who sabotaged the NordStream pipelines? As you may recall nearly a month ago both NordStream pipes in the Baltic were sabotaged. Fingers were immediately pointed at the Russians; the Russians point at the British. Although tantalizing details have been released we still don’t know who the culprit was or, more precisely, NATO and the Swedish may know but if so they haven’t revealed the culprit’s identity. For the life of me I can’t see what Russia’s motive would have been for the sabotage.
Yesterday a new mystery emerged. Missiles were fired across Ukraine’s border with Poland killing two Polish citizens. Some in Poland called for Article 4 NATO action (consultation). Today the preponderance of the evidence suggests that the missiles were fired by the Ukrainians and it was accidental.
So, here are my questions. Who was responsible for the sabotage to the NordStream pipelines and who was responsible for missiles fired into Poland? Those are non-trivial questions; we are dealing with brinksmanship of the highest order in this.
It seems most likely that the missiles that landed in Ukraine were SA-10 (S-300) air defense missiles fired by Ukraine. That makes the most logical sense given the location, plus that’s what NATO has concluded, and experts have looked at the debris on the ground and found they match that system best.
It’s extremely unfortunate and unlucky that they happened to land in a field and killed two people.
As for Nordstream, the silence is…interesting, and there is no new additional information available – at least that I’m aware of – to confirm any attribution.
I would have thought that, if Russia had been responsible for the NordStream sabotage, we’d know it by now.
On Nordstream, the latest in public intelligence is they have identified two “dark ships” with ship identifiers turned off in roughly the waters where the bombing occurred in the weeks prior to the bombing.
Just ask yourself, what’s the odds the American government doesn’t already who those two ships are. The implications are interesting.
“Just ask yourself, what’s the odds the American government doesn’t already who those two ships are. The implications are interesting.”
This was one of my jobs in my early days in the Navy – tracking merchant and other non-warships of interest. It was challenging because of the huge numbers of ships, the fact that many of them look the same, and the intelligence resources devoted to it were less than more important problems. This was also before AIS was common or required.
I would think things are easier now with AIS and much larger imagery databases, including commercial imagery, and other stuff I can’t really mention.
Curious mentions the two “dark” ships which were detected on radar imagery that do not correspond with an AIS track. While radar imagery is great (it can “see” through clouds), it doesn’t have great resolution, and interpreting radar imagery is something we used to call “blob-ology.” The reporting on this suggests the resolution was of low quality, even for radar imagery.
Still, that is pretty suspicious, and there are definitely ways one might be able to determine which ships they were and track their historical movements, though nothing is certain. And those ships may have nothing to do with the sabotage, as other methods are available to conduct that kind of sabotage.
Sweden has confirmed explosives were used to sabotage the pipelines:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/traces-explosives-found-nord-stream-pipelines-sweden-says-2022-11-18/