The suspicion is now official.
Sweden claims to have confirmed what happened last September, when the pressure in the Nord Stream pipelines suddenly dropped and gas began to gush out at various points near the Danish island of Bornholm.
It was "a flagrant sabotage", the country's authorities reported this Friday.
Its investigators have found traces of the explosive used to detonate the pipelines in "several of the foreign objects found" on the Baltic Sea floor.
What remains a mystery, and it is not clear that one day it can be definitively clarified, is the authorship of the attack, although the investigations, which are "complex and extensive", continue, the Swedish prosecutor in charge of the case, Mats Ljungqvist, has said.
"The investigation will show if someone can be suspected of a crime," he said in a statement in which he asked for patience and announced that he will not attend to journalists in order to work quietly.
The main suspect for the governments involved and the analysts who have studied the sabotage is Russia, but so far no one has dared to formally accuse Moscow of ordering the blowing up of the pipelines that transported gas to Germany through the Baltic seabed.
The Kremlin denies this and points to the West.
The United Kingdom has come out to deny Moscow's accusations that the British Navy carried out the explosions.
The theory of the participation of Washington, and of Ukraine, based on the fact that both would benefit from the attack, also runs through social networks encouraged by Moscow, but analysts do not validate it.
The sabotage, which occurred on September 26, has put the countries bordering the Baltic and NATO as a whole on alert, which have rushed to improve the protection of their critical infrastructures.
The Nord Stream pipelines have been at the center of intense geopolitical tensions since long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow's decision to use hydrocarbons as a weapon against Europe and in retaliation for Western sanctions resulted in the interruption of gas supplies to countries that are highly dependent on it, such as Germany.
The Nord Stream 1 had not transported gas since the end of August, after Moscow alleged an oil leak in the only Russian compressor station that was still operating.
The Nord Stream 2 never came into operation.
Germany suspended its certification in February, three days before Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, in response to Putin's recognition of the independence of pro-Russian breakaway regions.
Both Sweden and Denmark, countries in whose economic zone the explosions occurred, as well as Germany, the recipient of Russian gas, carry out their own investigations.
There is collaboration between countries, but the German proposal to create a joint team was rejected by Sweden due to the implications it would have for national security,
Der Spiegel
magazine reported .
At a time of maximum tension in the region, no one wants to risk sharing confidential information with third countries.
Experts believe that an attack of this complexity could only have been carried out by a "state actor", that is, with the means and analysis of an army or an intelligence agency.
Only Ukraine and Poland have directly targeted Russia.
The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, said it is "very obvious" who is behind the leaks, but stopped short of mentioning Moscow.
Specialized analysts and European and Alliance sources agree that sabotage is a clear example of hybrid warfare, with attacks on physical infrastructure that are intended to destabilize and cause chaos and that will never be recognized, precisely in order to generate confusion and alternative theories. endless.
These "hybrid threats" worry the G-7 interior ministers, who met this Friday in Eltville (western Germany) to discuss security issues arising from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"Hybrid threats to our critical infrastructures, in addition to information manipulation, have increased significantly since the start of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine," the final statement said.
The German Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, assured that a striking increase in Russian disinformation and propaganda has been detected, which has the clear objective of undermining confidence in institutions and sowing division within countries and between international allies.
The Kremlin has assured this Friday that the discovery of Sweden "confirms again the Russian information" and has insisted, through its spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, that it is necessary to locate "those who were behind this explosion."
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly described the incident as a terrorist attack, suggesting that the United States, Poland and Ukraine are behind it.
He has spoken other times about the responsibility of “Anglo-Saxon countries”.
Moscow is still talking about the possibility of recovering the gas pipeline.
Shortly after the sabotage, the Russian state-owned Gazprom suggested to Germany that it could send gas again through the only branch of Nord Stream 2 that was not damaged in the sabotage.
Berlin, which has reduced its dependence on Russian gas from 55% to 9% and intends to cut it to zero, rules it out entirely.
The investigation by the Swedish Prosecutor's Office does not provide information on the type of explosive used, something that could give clues to the authorship.
The statement added that "the work continues to be able to reach more decisive conclusions about the incident."
The investigations in Denmark have not disclosed this type of data either.
The Danish authorities confirmed that there were "strong explosions" and the Swedish newspaper
Expressen
has published images recorded with an underwater drone in which it can be seen that up to 50 meters of the pipeline are missing.
Nothing has come out of the German investigation yet.
The Danish and Swedish governments reported on September 27 that the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, infrastructure intended to transport gas from northwest Russia to Germany, had suffered damage and were leaking in their territorial waters.
Hours earlier, seismographs on the Danish island of Bornholm had detected two explosions in the area.
The two infrastructures were already out of service then, but full of gas.
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The operating company of the Nord Stream, Nord Stream AG, indicated after the events in September that the damage suffered by three of the pipelines "is unprecedented."
The authorities of Germany, Denmark and Sweden have excluded Russia from the investigations into what happened, which has led to a formal protest from Moscow, which has warned that it will not recognize the result of any report in which it has not participated.
The Nord Stream has been involved in a delicate geostrategic conflict for years that has divided the European Union and angered the United States.
Poland and the Baltics always warned Germany—first Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and then Angela Merkel—that the pipeline was one more tentacle of Moscow's influence and that it was not a good idea to increase energy dependence on Russian hydrocarbons.
Washington imposed sanctions but even that did not stop the construction of the second gas pipeline.
The facility was finished and ready to start pumping gas when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz shut it down days before the invasion of Ukraine.
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