What should surprise us is rather that they didn’t succeed to cut it off earlier

Ola Tunander interviewed by Moritz Enders

This article was first published in German, in the German magazine Hintergrund, in July after the documentary film “Nordstream – Die Sprengung” was aired in Berlin in early July 2026. The film was made by Moritz Enders and Gunther Merz, and Moritz Enders interviewed me for the magazine Hintergrund to make me articulate some of my arguments in the film. The interview was originally made in English, but in this version below I have added a few lines and a section on U.S. covert operations to make some arguments clearer. (Photo is from the film). For an advertisement for the film, see: “Nordstream - Die Sprengung (Dokumentation, 2026) | Exklusive 35-Minuten Vorschau”

HINTERGRUND: Mr. Tunander, you argue that the events surrounding Nord Stream cannot be viewed in isolation. Why do you believe that looking back at the history—particularly the 1980s—is essential to understanding the present?

OLA TUNANDER: U.S. Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson, said in 1998 that “it’s very important that both the pipeline map and politics come out right”. He spoke about Central-Asia, but it could have been a U.S. statement about pipelines in general. Pipelines tie one state to the other. They are bridges that creates a mutual dependency, which can open-up for close cooperation and peaceful coexistence. Like the Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s (and later the EU) that had created trust and mutual dependency between the former World War enemies, France and Germany, the Soviet-West German pipeline in the 1970s and 1980s, opened-up for a German–Soviet interdependency. It created trust between the Cold War enemies. It contributed to ending of the Cold War around 1990. From 1985, President Mikhail Gorbachev opened for talks with the Germans, and then with the British and the U.S. But there was a significant power elite, particularly in the United States that wanted to keep Russia as an enemy.

The new Reagan Administration realized already in 1981 that the Soviet-West German pipeline would create dependencies between the Europeans and the Russians that would weaken U.S. influence in Europe, and according to the national security advisor Dick Allen and then deputy security advisor Tom Reed, the U.S. actually had been able to bomb the pipeline already in 1982. While President George H.W. Bush and his State Secretary James Baker promised Gorbachev not to extend NATO, Bush’s national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney were pushing for NATO enlargement towards Moscow and for stopping the pipelines. In 2006, as Vice President Cheney tried to undermine the building of the Nord Stream pipeline, and in 2014 his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Scowcroft’s protégé, said on German TV that Germany had to change its energy dependency. Germany had to replace its Russian gas with U.S. gas. And you have to “act as quickly as possible”, she said. The German reliance on cheap Russian gas was unacceptable to the Americans. From 2016-17, the U.S. started with massive LNG production to make Germany able to replace its Russian gas with U.S. gas. Rice’ Ambassador to the UN and President Trump’s national security advisor in 2018-19, John Bolton, said that Trump was to decide about the Nord Stream pipeline, but he didn’t do anything: “We should have cut it off in the Trump Administration” [2018-19], Bolton claimed. The top people in the Congress and in the Administration said that the pipeline had to be taken out. President Biden said in February 2022 that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it” and “I promise you. We will be able to do it.” However, Trump said both in 2024 and in 2025: “I am the one that stopped the pipeline”. “When Biden came in, almost the first week, he approved [my decision]”, Trump said.

President Reagan with his CIA Director Bill Casey, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and national security advisor Dick Allen and President H.W Bush with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, and President W. Bush with Vice President Cheney and Scowcroft’s protégé, State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, were all against the pipeline. And now, in recent years, President Biden with Cheney’s protégé Victoria Nuland and Rice protégé John Bolton and with President Trump himself, they have all tried stop the pipeline to prevent mutual dependencies between Europe and Russia. What should surprise us is rather that they didn’t succeed to cut it off earlier.

HINTERGRUND: Can the current conflict over energy in Europe only be understood by looking back at the final phase of the Cold War?

OLA TUNANDER: Since the 1980s, a significant U.S. power elite has tried to undermine, stop or even destroy the German–Russian pipelines, because of the dependencies they would create in Europe. The pipelines created mutual trust and possibilities for a European–Russian peace. For the U.S. neoconservative power elite, however, this was unacceptable. The U.S. influence in Europe depended primarily on Europe’s perception of Russia as an enemy. The United States entered Europe as a “protecting power”, and this was the only way that U.S. military superiority could be translated into political influence. The mutual trust between Europeans and Russians – after building the pipeline – would reduce U.S. influence. The United States would become a “normal country”. The U.S. would be reduced to an economic power like any other large state. There have been different administrations in the U.S., but since the 1980s, important U.S. power elites have all pushed for the same general strategy: to decouple Europe from Russia. But in the final analysis, this attempt of decoupling goes back to early 20^th century, to the British-American geopolitics with Halford Mackinder (1919) and with Nicholas Spykman (1942), who claimed that it was necessary for the Sea Power (the U.S. and the British) to control the “Rimland” (the European countries) to contain the “Heartland” (Russia, later the Soviet Union). Russia was believed to be expansionist and an alliance between Germany and Russia should be prevented at all costs. The U.S. geopolitical analyst and STRATFOR Chairman George Friedman argued in 2017 that “Russia is historically a most dangerous option for Germany” and a Russian–German alliance had to be prevented at all costs. This was actually what Brent Scowcroft argued already in 1989. The U.S. should place itself in-between Germany and the then Soviet Union, he argued, and accordingly, the U.S. had to expand NATO. A similar idea was also brought up by U.S. former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (1998). He argued that the Western control of Central Europe and not least of Ukraine was vital to prevent a Russian Empire. Historically, the ambition of the U.S. and Britain have always been to decouple Europe from Russia and particularly decouple Germany from Russia. With the German–Russian pipelines from the beginning in the 1970s, then from the 1980s and particularly with the Nord Stream pipelines from after 2000, this appeared no longer to be possible.

HINTERGRUND: In the 1980s, large-scale gas cooperation between Western Europe and the Soviet Union emerged. Political leaders such as Helmut Schmidt supported this approach as part of a broader strategy of stability. What made this energy relationship strategically significant at the time?

OLA TUNANDER: For Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the pipeline was important to create stability and trust in Europe, while the Reagan Administration wanted to strangle the Soviet Union economically and technologically. Peter Schweizer wrote in his book Victory (1994) that already from early 1981, Reagan’s CIA Director Casey and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, wanted to stop the pipeline, while State Secretary Alexander Haig argued that the U.S. could not confront all of Europe. Schweizer describes President Reagan’s visit to Chancellor Schmidt in June 1982: “While [Reagan] was making an impassioned plea [for curtailing the pipeline], Schmidt was looking out of the window at the garden – purposely ignoring him”. Schmidt had not treated Reagan as a U.S. president. “That was a mistake”, Schweizer wrote. The UPI intelligence correspondent Richard Sale told later in an Arte interview with Dirk Pohlmann (and also in e-mails to me) that, shortly afterwards, Weinberger’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle turned to the small and divided German Free Democratic Party (FDP) and offered them financial support, if they replaced their alliance with Schmidt with an alliance with the conservative Christian Democrats and Helmut Kohl. FDP accepted the offer, and Kohl took over as a Chancellor 1 October 1982. The problem for the U.S., however, was that Kohl would not cancel the pipeline. The Pipeline created trust between the German and Soviet leadership, which became the material foundation for ending the Cold War and for a united Germany.

HINTERGRUND: To what extent did this policy reflect a specifically European—perhaps even German—approach to balancing security and economic cooperation during the Cold War? And can economic interdependence through energy infrastructure actually contribute to peace and stability?

OLA TUNANDER: For Germany, Russia will always be a close neighbor. We cannot change the geography. Russia and Belarus are located next door, only with Poland in between. A good relationship with Russia has always been German “Realpolitik”. The Russian–German pipelines created mutual dependencies during the Cold War, and it strengthened common European–Russian interests and stability on the continent. Germany, after the Second World War, has developed in close cooperation with other European countries and within the EU, but Germany has also in many respects common interests with Russia. To trade cheap Russian gas for German advanced industrial products gave both countries an advantage. In recent decades, Russia has also, like Germany, avoided military adventures. The invasion into Ukraine in 2022 was a direct response to the U.S. ambition to include Ukraine in NATO. Leading Americans, the founder of NATO’s containment policy [from 1949], George Kennan, and then Secretary of Defense Bill Perry [1994-97] were warning for the serious consequences of NATO enlargement. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel understood that Russia would interpret Ukraine’s NATO membership as “a declaration of war”. Russia wanted a “neutral Ukraine” as a buffer to deny forward deployment of U.S. weapons systems. To have a neutral Ukraine was Russia’s only real demand. “Everything else was cosmetic”, said the Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia, in Spring 2022. There has, up to now, not been any Russian aggressive ambitions. To keep a peaceful relationship with Russia should be a highest German priority and the pipeline was the bridge that would make us able to keep that peace.

HINTERGRUND: From a U.S. strategic perspective, why might closer energy ties between Europe and Russia have been perceived as problematic?

OLA TUNANDER: The U.S. as well as the British have always claimed that there was a “Russian threat” to Europa, and after Second World War this appeared in certain respect to be true. The Soviet Union had occupied East Germany and the Central Europe, but that was after a U.S. elite as well as the British, from Spring 1945, had planned for a massive attack on the Soviet Union (“Operation Unthinkable”). The Russians did not want to have another war on Russian territory and kept Central Europe as a buffer zone. This was not consistent with International Law, but neither did it reflect Soviet aggression. The U.S. military superiority during the Cold War and the British advantage could not have been translated into political influence if the Europeans did not believe in a direct military threat to Europe. The U.S. and the British and their people on the European continent always claimed that there was a “Soviet threat” that they had to protect us from. A top-secret NATO Military Committee document (in the 1980s) had concluded that the Soviets were not aggressive and that the Soviets would avoid a war with the West, if possible, but this document was classified as Cosmic Top-Secret. This tells us everything. After the Cold War, the overwhelming U.S. military superiority became suddenly impotent in a peaceful world. The only way to translate this overwhelming military superiority to political influence was to describe the Other, Russia, as a direct military threat. The problem was that the pipelines between Russia and Europe seemed to have made the Anglo-American threat perception irrelevant. For this U.S. elite it became necessary to “cut it off”, to quote John Bolton.

HINTERGRUND: To what extent did NATO expansion and shifting security arrangements affect trust between Russia and the West?

OLA TUNANDER: There was the same group of U.S. political leaders that wanted to expand NATO and wanted to cut the Russian–German pipelines. Secretary of Defense and later Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to enlarge NATO. He did not just want to break up the Soviet Union and let former Soviet republics be part of NATO, he wanted to break up Russia into pieces, then CIA Director, later Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, said. Cheney wanted to eliminate Russia as a major competitor, and at a meeting in the Baltic in 2006, he spoke out against the Russian gas pipelines as a warning against the new Nord Stream pipeline being prepared for at the time. His protégé and national security advisor Victoria Nuland played a major role, from 2014, in pushing Ukraine closer to NATO, and she had a major role for the elimination of the Nord Stream pipeline in 2022. Afterwards, she celebrated the destruction of the pipeline. We can now say that the plans to expand NATO up to the Russian border and to deploy U.S. weapons systems close to Moscow in Ukraine would definitely provoke a Russian war in Ukraine. It would lead to a total lack of trust between the West and Russia, which almost certainly was a precondition for the German political elite accepting the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline and the replacement of the relatively cheap Russian gas with the much more expensive U.S. LNG. The Ukraine war was a precondition for cutting off the pipeline and for decoupling Russia from Europe. When President Biden in February 2022 said that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it […] I promise you. We will be able to do it”, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was standing close to him saying that we will act together with our American friends. The German elite apparently accepted the U.S. destruction of the pipeline and the destruction of the German economy.

HINTERGRUND: How important has the control of energy routes and infrastructure been as a long-term factor in global power politics? Pipelines are often described as more than just economic projects. What makes them such powerful geopolitical instruments?

OLA TUNANDER: In my answer to your first question, I quoted the U.S. former Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson, who said: “it’s very important that both the pipeline map and politics come out right”. The U.S. has intervened and pushed for regime change in one country after the other to make “politics come out right”, to use his words, but the U.S. also wanted to control the pipelines and nowadays even the shipping of oil, because the U.S. wants to be able to strangle competitors to force them to give in. President Trump’s idea of controlling the oil of Venezuela and Iran and to control the shipping of oil was primarily to strangle China, to force China to submit. For the U.S., to cut the Nord Stream pipeline became necessary to decouple Europe from Russia. Only by cutting off the Nord Stream was it possible to regain full U.S. control of Europe.

HINTERGRUND: In this broader historical framework, how should Nord Stream be understood: as a continuation of an earlier cooperation, or as a source of geopolitical conflict from the beginning? And why did Nord Stream become such a politically sensitive and contested project?

OLA TUNANDER: For the people around Dick Cheney and Brent Scowcroft with Victoria Nuland, Condoleezza Rice and John Bolton, the Nord Stream was unacceptable already from the very beginning. One had to cut it off to avoid Russian influence. Or rather, one had to replace Russian–German collaboration with U.S. control by tying Germany to the U.S. gas deliveries, and “it’s time to do it now”, as Condoleezza Rice’ told the Germans already in 2014. While it is very clear that the Nord Stream pipeline was to the advantage of both Germany and Russia and was a continuation of German Ostpolitik from Chancellor Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, it also limited U.S. influence and control of Europe. The Nord Stream pipeline together with the Norwegian–German gas pipelines gave Europe sovereignty, while the bombing of Nord Stream in praxis made Germany into a U.S. vassal. It is remarkable that Russia didn’t retaliate. The Russians could easily have taken out the Baltic Pipe – the new pipeline from the Norwegian gas fields to Poland that largely replaced the Nord Stream and was inaugurated the day after Nord Stream was blown up. The Russians has been extremely cautious. We should rather quote U.S. former State Secretary Alexander Haig about the Russians: “I was mind-boggled with their patience”.

HINTERGRUND: When looking at the destruction of the pipelines, what key questions should be asked beyond simply “who did it”?

OLA TUNANDER: One should ask: Who benefits? And who has been pushing for taking out the Russian–German pipelines for 40 years? One should ask: Who has tried to bomb the pipeline on earlier occasions? Who was totally preoccupied by taking out the pipeline the years that preceded the bombing? And which people celebrated the bombing of the pipeline afterwards? And they are all from the same country or the same countries and from the very same power elite.

HINTERGRUND: And who did it? Who destroyed the pipeline?

OLA TUNANDER: We know that the American journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that U.S. Navy deep divers from Panama City, Florida, had planted the explosives (with timers to be triggered by a coded signal) during the BALTOPS-22 mine countermeasure exercise east of the Danish island of Bornholm 5-17 June 2022. While the exercise itself just demanded dives on the surface, we know that there were US Navy divers operating from a Norwegian ship Magnus Lagabøte, which was equipped with decompression chamber for deep water diving, witnesses speak about divers with equipment for deep diving developed at Panama City Florida, and we know that the divers were diving over the pipelines, which would imply that they went down to the pipelines. We also know that aircraft leaving the BALTOPS-22 exercise, flew not just to allies in Europe and to U.S. Naval Station Norfolk at Washington, but also to Panama City Florida. As Hersh source told, these divers would have been from Panama City Florida. According to Hersh, the timers to the explosives had been triggered by a coded signal sent from sonar buoys dropped by a P-8 Poseidon aircraft, and we also know that shortly before the explosions, an American Poseidon aircraft had been brought up from the Mediterranean to fly back and forth over Bornholm and southern Baltic Sea.

However, we know as well that a small sailing boat, Andromeda flying a Ukrainian flag and with a crew with Ukrainian divers had supposedly planted the explosives on the pipelines in September, just weeks before the explosions, but it is not clear why they choose to do it in the deep water basin of 80 meters east of Bornholm, when they didn’t have equipment for deep water diving and when the pipelines in southern Baltic Sea largely run through more shallow waters of 30-50 meters? To plant the bombs in the Bornholm deep-water basin could not have been their decision. And it is very unlikely that this was a decision made by their Ukrainian superiors. We also know that a couple of large U.S. naval ship, including the 257 meters’ “aircraft carrier” Kearsarge, with deep-water diving capability and with its AIS turned off, turned up at the place of the explosions on 20-21 September less than a week before the explosions. When the Danish rescue vessel went out to check what kind of ship it was that didn’t respond on radio, the Danes were told to keep out from the area. We know that the day after, a Russian ship SS-750 with a capability for carrying a small minisub approached the same area, but it was apparently chased away by Danish and Swedish naval vessels after they had been pre-notified by the supposed “organizer of the Ukrainian diving trip”, “the Colonel” [Roman Chervinsky], Wall Street Journal journalist Bojan Pancevski writes. This argument has been presented by the Swedish engineer Erik Andersson. Furthermore, we know that the Danish and Swedish investigations were closed down without conclusions, and they did not hand over evidence to the German investigation. Furthermore, we know that both Chervinsky, and his superior, the former Chief of Ukrainian Intelligence, “the General” [Vasyl Burba], had been working hand in glove with the American CIA and that they collaborated closely with several top leaders of the CIA (with the Directors of the CIA Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel). That is what Pancevski writes. Burba and Chervinsky were the CIA in Ukraine. One cannot credibly argue that Burba’s and Chervinsky’s operation was not a CIA operation. A Ukrainian politician, Andrei Derkach claimed in 2024 that the Ukrainian contribution with divers on a sailing boat had actually been initiated by CIA’s top man in Kyiv, Christopher W. Smith, later Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for eastern Europe. According to Pancevski, “the General” [Burba] was his close drinking friend. Derkach argued that “the Ukrainian operation” was organized as a cover to make it possible for the Americans to blame Ukraine.

In covert operations, the U.S. Defense Department and the CIA would always prepare a cover. This cover or cover story has to be “true”. It has to be real, but it still will cover up for the real purpose of the operation, as stated by the former Chief Scientist of the U.S. Navy Special Project Office, John Pina Craven. He developed the U.S. DSRVs that were described as “Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles”, two midget submarines that were carried on the back of their mother submarines. They would supposedly be used to rescue sailors from sunken submarines on the sea floor, and they were used for this purpose during exercises with allied navies. But the DSRVs were never used during an actual emergency. Their real purpose was intelligence. The “R” in the DSRV did not only stand for “Rescue” but also for “Recovery” and “Research” (Tripple “R”). The DSRVs deep diving capability was used for recovering Soviet missile parts on the sea floor and for tapping Soviet communication cables on the sea floor. “Research” was in this case a cover for intelligence, for espionage. The rescue function of the DSRV was a cover, and most senior allied naval officers believed that the DSRVs were nothing but rescue vehicles, they told me. The real purpose of the DSRVs was extremely secret, and the same would have been the case with the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines. One has to have several layers covering up for the real operation to give the U.S. “plausible deniability”, as they call it. However, to use a handful Ukraine divers in a small sailing boat as a cover still means that this has to be a real operation. These divers may even have believed that they were the ones responsible for the operation, similar to how allied navies believed that the DSRVs were built for the purpose of rescuing sunken submarines.

To understand the real instigator behind the bombing of Nord Stream, we have to look at what happened in late September 2022. We know that the U.S. Navy, for the three nights before the explosions, were running a special operation (not a training mission) over Bornholm area and the southern Baltic Sea with a P-8 Poseidon aircraft that was brought up from Sigonella Sicily, where it was responsible for covering underwater activity in the Mediterranean. However, for these three days and nights, this U.S. “Mediterranean aircraft” was brought up and was based at Nordholz Naval Air Base (Cuxhaven, Hamburg), Germany, while flying back and forth over the Bornholm area. One task for the P-8 was to drop sonar buoys, and this P-8 could have been used to drop a sonar buoy to send a coded signal to trigger the timers for the explosives on the pipelines. The bombs must have been triggered in one way or another, and a coded signal was a safe way to do it. To bring up a U.S. “Mediterranean P-8” to the Baltic Sea is exceptional, but it happened also during the BALTAP-22 exercise in June the same year. In addition, the Americans were running an operation with a second P-8 Poseidon from Keflavik (Iceland). This P-8 was responsible for covering underwater activity in the North Atlantic and in the Norwegian Sea (not for the Baltic Sea), but now, on this very occasion, it was brought down to cover the area of the first explosion for five hours in the night and early morning on 26 September. The aircraft arrived east of Bornholm one hour after the explosion at 02.03 and it started its trip to the target area two hours before this explosion. It was air refueled over Poland for almost an hour by a U.S. tanker aircraft that left its U.S. Spangdahlem Air Base (Germany) close to Luxemburg at the very minute of the explosion, and the refueling was necessary for an extended patrol by the P-8 Poseidon. At 09.00, it passed over the site of the explosion at low altitude for the last time. Then immediately, it climbed to 10,000 meters and returned to Keflavik. The U.S. decision to patrol the area of the explosion for five hours had been taken long before the first explosion happened. Already from the time before the explosions, a U.S. Seahawk helicopter was hovering over the waters close to the Russian Baltic Fleet base Baltiysk to cover all Russian naval activity before and after the explosions, and a U.S. signal intelligence aircraft RC-135 was circling around the Russian naval base several times. After the explosions, U.S. ships were involved in investigating the crime scene, while the Nord Stream company was denied to even come close to its own pipeline in international waters. The bombing of the pipelines was a huge U.S. operation. The evidence show that the U.S. was not just directly involved, the U.S. would have had the overall responsibility.

Based on the 40-years’ history of U.S. attempts to disrupt the Russian-German pipelines and based on the U.S. activity days before the explosions, on the night of the first explosion, and after the explosions, the U.S. would have had the main responsibility for cutting off the Nord Stream pipelines: Or to quote now Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski on Twitter, on the day of the explosion, over a photo of the Nord Stream gas release: “Thank you, USA”. However, the British would have been aware of it as well, because of their traditional role for intelligence in the Baltic Sea area, while both the Poles and the Ukrainians would have been directly contributing to the operation. Intelligence operatives from Norway, Denmark and Sweden may also have been directly involved and perhaps even from Germany. All of them seems to have had their fingers in the pie, although they are not yet caught with their hands in the cookie jar.