Belgium (Brussels Morning Newspaper) EU High Representative Josep Borrell warned that the Union would offer a “robust and united response” to any intentional disruption to the bloc’s energy infrastructure.
His remarks followed reports that the gas leaks detected in the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines were acts of deliberate sabotage, with The Times reporting that the damage was most likely inflicted by undersea drones.
The likely attack took place east of the Danish island of Bornholm, in international waters, close to territorial waters of both Denmark and Sweden. According to a British defence source, the sabotage was “probably premeditated and planned for” in advance, with an explosive device set near the concrete and steel pipelines weeks before the detonations took place.
The investigation efforts will be hampered for weeks as the ruptured pipelines are being emptied of pressurised gas, but both Sweden and Denmark, which have begun investigating the blasts, are already certain that the damage to the pipelines was inflicted deliberately.
Act of sabotage
“We take this very seriously, as it is likely that this is a deliberate act, a sabotage,” said Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson at a press conference on Tuesday. Her Danish counterpart Mette Frederiksen echoed her in a separate press conference in Copenhagen. “It is now the clear assessment by authorities that these are deliberate actions. It was not an accident,” said Frederiksen.
While all EU leaders stopped short of assigning blame for the attack, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki indirectly implicated Russia, stating that the Polish government sees the incident as a clear act of sabotage, “related to the next step of escalation of the situation in Ukraine”.
At the time of the incident, neither pipeline was delivering gas to Germany. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was never used for gas delivery, having been completed just prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while it was awaiting regulatory approval. One of the first political decisions against Russia made by the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was to finally cancel the project, which his predecessor Angela Merkel was pushing through despite Moscow’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula and Russian material support to armed insurgents in Ukraine.
The older Nord Stream was shut down for maintenance in late August after its operator, the state-owned Gazprom energy company, was throttling down deliveries for months following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Despite initially claiming the maintenance was temporary, Gazprom announced in early September that it would not resume gas deliveries, citing a technical issue with the gas turbine as the reason.
Sabotage of the both Nord Stream pipelines significantly increased concerns about the safety and security of European energy infrastructure, especially the gas pipelines delivering Norwegian and Algerian gas to Europe.
Norwegian concerns
Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre on Wednesday joined in with his Swedish and Danish counterparts, stating that his government received information “strengthening the assumption that it was an intentional act”.
Støre stressed that his government is conscious of ensuring safety on the Norwegian continental shelf. “The military will be more visible at Norwegian oil and gas installations,” he said in a press conference.
NATO member Norway, with its more than 90 offshore oil and gas fields, is currently the largest supplier of gas to Europe, and one of the global leaders in the oil market. Its platforms are connected to Norway, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany and Poland through a nearly 9,000 kilometre-long network of gas pipelines running through the Norwegian Sea, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.
According to Støre, Norway’s navy will patrol the country’s offshore platforms and pipelines, while Norwegian police will increase their presence at all land-based facilities. Støre stressed that any attack would be “handled jointly with our allies”.
While Swedish outgoing PM Andersson was quick to emphasise that the attack took place in international waters – thus it is not directly an attack on Sweden – the incident raised the issue of whether further such incidents, targeting key energy infrastructure, could trigger NATO’s Article 5, the mutual defence clause.
Strategic target
Legally and theoretically, any significant material damage to a country’s infrastructure – whether performed through a conventional attack, an act of covert sabotage or through a cyber attack – could pass the threshold for triggering Article 5. In practice, though, hacking and sabotage can be difficult to prove and attribute, leaving a significant grey area which could be exploited by a well-motivated adversary.
“You can never fully hinder sabotage against 8,800 kilometres of pipelines, that’s impossible,” said Tor Ivar Strømmen, a senior lecturer at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy. Speaking with Reuters, Strømmen stressed that the network is currently the most important strategic object in all of Europe, and expressed concern that the current security could be too lax. “If those deliveries should be cut or stopped or reduced by a large amount, this would cause a complete energy crisis in Europe,” he said.
For its part, Russia denied any culpability for the Nord Stream explosions, with its embassy in Denmark stating that any sabotage on the pipelines was an attack “on both Russia’s and Europe’s energy security”.
