A Ukrainian special forces officer is alleged to have coordinated the sabotage of Russia's Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, according to a joint investigation by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post published on Saturday, November 11.

His name is Roman Chervinsky. According to the German weekly and American daily publications, the Ukrainian colonel supervised the team that blew up the two Baltic seabed pipelines, on September 26, 2022.

Contacted by the two newspapers, Chervinsky asserted that these accusations are unfounded. "All speculations about my involvement in the attack on Nord Stream are being spread by Russian propaganda without any basis," he said in a written statement. He is currently detained in Kyiv awaiting trial for another charge.

Chervinsky was arrested in April, accused of having abused his power stemming from a plot to lure a Russian pilot to defect in July 2022, during an operation that allegedly turned into a fiasco: Instead of surrendering to the Kyiv authorities as agreed, the pilot allegedly passed information about the Kanatove military airport in central Ukraine – where he was due to land – on to his Russian superiors. This allowed their forces to bomb it, killing one Ukrainian soldier and wounding 17 others. Chervinsky has claimed that the charges against him are political reprisals for having criticized President Volodymyr Zelensky.

These criticisms were public, and date back to December 3, 2021. In an interview broadcast that day on Ukrainian television Channel 24, Chervinsky accused Zelensky's inner circle of having mishandled a July 2020 operation to capture mercenaries from the Russian Wagner group in Belarus, with the aim of extraditing them to Ukraine. According to him, people close to Zelensky had scuppered this plan at the last minute out of "fear of provoking Russia," just as Kyiv and Moscow had reached a ceasefire in Donbas, a region plagued by armed clashes between Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces since 2014.

At the time, Chervinsky was a member of the Ukrainian military intelligence services (HUR), which he had joined after working for several years for the country's security service (SBU). In a statement sent to Der Spiegel and the Washington Post by his lawyer, he claimed to have "planned and implemented" several assassinations of pro-Russian separatist leaders in Ukraine, as well as to "abduct a witness" who could corroborate Russia's involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine in July 2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew.

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