{"id":8627,"date":"2026-06-23T09:31:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T09:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/8627\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T09:31:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T09:31:05","slug":"the-nord-stream-conspiracy-by-bojan-pancevski-5-star-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/8627\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nord Stream Conspiracy by Bojan Pancevski: 5-star review"},"content":{"rendered":"

All these questions and more are answered in The Nord Stream Conspiracy, a new book by investigative journalist Bojan Pancevski, which tells the remarkable inside story of the bomb plot, and the dogged German police investigation that ensued. Rather than merely relying on official sources, Pancevski gets plenty of his intelligence from the Ukrainian conspirators themselves \u2013 who tell him their story even as German prosecutors continue to hunt for them.<\/p>\n

The strike, which left 350,000 tons of methane bubbling to the Baltic\u2019s surface, sparked a vast geopolitical whodunnit. At the time, many in the West presumed that it was the work of the Kremlin, angry at EU energy sanctions and keen to show the bloc how vulnerable its power infrastructure was to sabotage<\/a>. Meanwhile, plenty of others pointed a finger at the CIA. Successive Washington administrations had warned Germany that its reliance on cheap Russian gas left it beholden to Vladimir Putin\u2019s regime<\/a>, and a fortnight before Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden, then the US president, had cryptically promised to \u201cbring an end\u201d to Nord Stream 2 if Russia crossed that border.<\/p>\n

Putin himself<\/a>, though never slow to blame Kyiv, seemed to suggest that Ukraine wasn\u2019t capable of this one, blaming instead an \u201cAnglo-Saxon\u201d alliance. Whoever the culprit was, it was assumed that they must have had a level of technical expertise only available to the world\u2019s great powers.<\/p>\n

Yet as Pancevski reveals, the world was once again underestimating Ukraine. The Nord Stream Conspiracy expands on reporting conducted in his capacity as Berlin correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, where he broke much of the original ground on this story. It\u2019s also the fruit, however, of years of earlier reporting in Ukraine, where he appears to have met, and diligently cultivated as sources, two of the military commanders behind the Nord Stream attack, codename: \u201cOperation Diameter\u201d.<\/p>\n

These two men are identified here only as \u201cthe General\u201d and \u201cthe Colonel\u201d. They were not, it seems, taking direct orders from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, they formed, as the General puts it, \u201ca tiny little deep-state\u201d, operating largely on their own initiative. They brought a wealth of experience at the dirtier end of espionage: the Colonel, for instance, specialised in assassinating pro-Kremlin warlords in Ukraine\u2019s separatist-held east, one of whom had had a bomb planted in his apartment\u2019s lift.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All these questions and more are answered in The Nord Stream Conspiracy, a new book by investigative journalist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4212,1985,429,4209,4211,4210,11,26,33,35],"class_list":["post-8627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-book-review","tag-books","tag-culture","tag-culture-editors-choice","tag-non-fiction","tag-nord-stream-2","tag-standard","tag-ukraine","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-volodymyr-zelensky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}