On September 26, 2022, four breaches appeared on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, on the floor of the Baltic Sea \u2014 the largest destruction of energy infrastructure ever caused by sabotage in Europe. Within a few hours, a culprit was designated by nearly all major Western media and by numerous political officials: Russia. Nearly four years later, the hypothesis is no longer tenable. But how was it constructed \u2014 and why was it able to hold for so long despite its implausibility?<\/p>\n\n
An immediate accusation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n As early as September 27, 2022, Kyiv pointed the finger at Russia: Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak called the incident a terrorist attack planned by the Kremlin. Several heads of government took the same line. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki suggested Russian involvement and presented the incident as a new stage in the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict; taking advantage of the very day marking the inauguration of the Baltic Pipe gas pipeline linking Norway to Poland, he declared that the era of “Russian domination” over gas, made up of “blackmail” and “threats,” was coming to an end. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said for her part that everything must now be done to ensure that energy ceases to be an instrument of Russian power \u2014 a formula which, without naming Moscow, left little room for doubt as to its target. Other Western heads of state were more cautious in form \u2014 but the calculated ambiguity of their statements systematically pointed in the same direction. A source close to the German government, cited by Der Tagesspiegel<\/em>, then summed up very explicitly the reasoning circulating in Western chancelleries: such a maneuver would allow Moscow to revive concern and drive gas prices back up, at a moment when the energy crisis was showing signs of easing. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for her part, spoke of an act of sabotage calling for the “strongest possible response,” without ever naming Russia \u2014 but in a context where any other reading seemed excluded from public debate. US President Joe Biden went further on September 30, explicitly accusing Moscow of disinformation regarding the incident, thereby de facto validating the thesis designating the Russians as the culprits.<\/p>\n\n The press followed, and often got ahead of, this line \u2014 particularly in France. On September 28, 2022, just two days after the explosions, General Michel Yakovleff, former deputy chief of staff of SHAPE (NATO) and a regular commentator on LCI’s Les Matins<\/em> , hosted by Adrien Gindre, stated: “The most logical hypothesis is that the Russians did it as a demonstration.” This intervention, like that of several other military commentators on French news channels, illustrates well the speed with which the Russian hypothesis established itself as a near-consensus among experts, from the very first days, even before judicial investigations had begun. CNN, for its part, ran headlines by the end of September stating that suspicions were intensifying against Russia. The Washington Post<\/em> editorial emphasized that the perpetrators of the attack possessed capabilities generally reserved for a state actor \u2014 a formula which, in the context of the time, implicitly designated only one state. The so-called “cui bono” reasoning (who benefits from the crime) became the central argument of dozens of articles: Russia, listed as one of the few plausible beneficiaries of a sustained rise in European gas prices and of increased pressure on Western unity, found itself designated by deduction, for lack of proof.<\/p>\n\n This “cui bono” reasoning does not, however, withstand elementary scrutiny of the technical facts of the time, which most of the articles cited conveniently passed over in silence. Nord Stream 1 had already been shut down since early September 2022, officially for maintenance; Nord Stream 2, for its part, had never been put into service, Berlin having suspended its certification on the very eve of the invasion. In other words, Russia already held, even before the sabotage, total control of the tap: it could cut, reduce, or use its gas supplies to Europe as blackmail leverage without needing to physically destroy an infrastructure that it half-owned, that had cost it billions to build, and that it might one day have wanted to reactivate, once Western sanctions were eased or a peace agreement reached with Kyiv. Destroying the pipelines meant, for Moscow, definitively giving up a bargaining chip and a major economic asset \u2014 whereas closing the tap, a strictly equivalent solution in terms of the pressure exerted on Europe, cost it nothing and remained reversible.<\/p>\n\n A failure that information science research has already described<\/strong><\/p>\n\n This kind of collective rush to judgment is nothing like an isolated accident peculiar to the Nord Stream affair: it is a phenomenon that several generations of communication scholars have documented with precision, including in democracies equipped with a supposedly free and pluralistic press.<\/p>\n\n American political scientist W. Lance Bennett formalized, as early as 1990 in the Journal of Communication<\/em>, what he calls “indexing theory”: news media tend to calibrate the range of viewpoints they relay on foreign affairs according to the range of positions already expressed within dominant governmental debate, rather than according to the actual range of defensible positions on a given subject. In concrete terms, as long as no prominent Western official voice seriously challenges the Russian hypothesis, the press has statistically almost no structural reason to do so itself \u2014 not through deliberate submission, but because the field of sources deemed legitimate closes in on itself. Bennett later extended this analysis, with Regina Lawrence and Steven Livingston, in a book significantly titled When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina<\/em> (2007) \u2014 in which the episode of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction serves precisely as a textbook case: a largely unfounded conviction, carried by anonymous government sources, endlessly repeated by nearly all major American outlets, to the point that the New York Times<\/em> would publish, in 2004, a rare internal note acknowledging the shortcomings of its own coverage. A study by the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, conducted by researcher Susan Moeller, had moreover statistically established, over that same period, the overrepresentation of government talking points at the expense of dissenting voices in the American and British press \u2014 an imbalance that only came to light once the war had begun and the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were… never found.<\/p>\n\n In media sociology, the concept popularized in France by Pierre Bourdieu in On Television<\/em> (1996) provides a complementary perspective, less centered on political power than on the internal dynamics of the journalistic field itself: “circular circulation of information” designates the mechanism by which each newsroom, constrained by competition, feels obliged to cover a subject as soon as its competitors are covering it \u2014 producing a homogenization of the hierarchy of news. English-language researchers designate a related mechanism under the name “pack journalism”<\/em>: works such as those of Matusitz and Breen have analyzed its symptoms through the lens of “groupthink,” theorized by psychologist Irving Janis \u2014 excessive cohesion within the group of accredited journalists, alignment with the most experienced or best-connected figures, a quest for unanimity that discourages internal dissent. A journalist covering a geopolitical subject does not write alone facing the facts: he writes facing his peers, in a sociologically homogeneous professional milieu (the same training pathways, the same diplomatic circles, the same habitual sources), where departing from the collectively accepted narrative carries a real professional cost \u2014 even when that narrative later turns out, once the facts are clarified, to have been entirely false.<\/p>\n\n Let us recall the indignant \u2014 but above all undignified \u2014 reactions to the investigation by American journalist Seymour Hersh exonerating Russia of the Nord Stream sabotage. Although a Pulitzer Prize winner, he suddenly became nothing more than a washed-up has-been, a confused old man. Take, for example, journalist Nicolas Carvalho, on September 26, 2023, on Franceinfo, responding to a question about Hersh’s investigation by immediately emphasizing his age. The investigation itself was never discussed on its merits: the angle chosen consisted of discrediting Hersh and his source rather than examining his article, which was simply dismissed as “shaky.” <\/p>\n\n A narrative immediately undermined by its own supporters<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Perhaps the most revealing episode of this period came from a camp that had no interest in exonerating Moscow: on September 27, 2022, MEP and former Polish foreign minister Rados\u0142aw Sikorski posted on Twitter a photo of the gas leaks accompanied by the words “Thank you, USA” \u2014 a message he would delete two days later. This simple tweet, coming from a fiercely anti-Russian official close to the Atlanticist establishment, should have been enough, on its own, to introduce a healthy dose of doubt into media coverage that admitted none at the time.<\/p>\n\n The reasons for this retraction shed considerable light on the diplomatic pressure surrounding the subject at the time. The tweet had immediately provoked a reaction from the Kremlin, with Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova asking whether Sikorski’s remarks amounted to official acknowledgment that this had been a terrorist act carried out by the United States. It was better for everyone to quickly close this door, left ajar onto what appeared to be an inconvenient truth.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n What the investigations actually established<\/p>\n\n From March 2023 onward, however, the majority of Western intelligence sources cited in the press began to point, no longer to Russia, but to a Ukrainian commando team. On February 8, 2023, Seymour Hersh published on Substack a detailed investigation (cited above) claiming that US Navy divers had planted the charges, on orders from the White House \u2014 a version distinct from the Ukrainian trail, but sharing one point in common with it: the exclusion of Russia as the perpetrator of the attack on its own pipeline.<\/p>\n\n In August 2024, the Wall Street Journal<\/em> published its own investigation, citing four anonymous Ukrainian military sources according to which Kyiv had devised the sabotage plan as early as May 2022. The following month, German judicial authorities issued an arrest warrant against a Ukrainian national. Two suspects were ultimately apprehended \u2014 one, Volodymyr Zhuravlov, in Poland (released in October 2025 after a Polish court refused his extradition to Germany), the other in Italy, extradited to Germany in 2025. On July 1, 2026, the German federal prosecutor’s office took a decisive step: it formally charged this second suspect with a war crime, and directly accused Ukrainian authorities of having commissioned the operation, specifying that the man in question and other servicemen had, at Kyiv’s request, devised the plan to destroy the two pipelines. According to the prosecution, the commando team had rented a sailboat in Germany before making their way to the Danish island of Bornholm to attach the explosive charges.<\/p>\n\n On August 19, 2026, Croatian police apprehended the fugitive Volodymyr Zhuravlov in Pula, Istria, in execution of the same German European arrest warrant. His arrest, however, took place on the set of the film Snake Island, a Hollywood production devoted precisely to a fictionalized reconstruction of the Nord Stream sabotage! The suspect had been working there as a technical consultant on the diving scenes. The German federal prosecutor’s office confirmed that this was indeed the same man wanted since 2024. His lawyers now intend to oppose his extradition to Germany once again.<\/p>\n\n This episode, however far-fetched it may seem, adds a further dimension to the narrative reconstruction of the affair: four years after the events, the Ukrainian hypothesis has become sufficiently consensual \u2014 even within American popular culture \u2014 for a Hollywood studio to base a feature film on it before German justice has even reached a final verdict \u2014 a complete reversal from 2022, when the same Ukrainian hypothesis, even as it was already circulating in certain intelligence circles, found virtually no traction in Western public debate.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n An imbalance worth highlighting<\/p>\n\n What strikes one, in hindsight, is not merely that the Russian trail proved unfounded. It is the disparity in treatment between the two sequences. In 2022, the attribution to Russia spread within a few hours, on the basis of simple reasoning about opportunity, relayed without any critical reservation by a large part of the general press and fueled by carefully ambiguous political statements that were nonetheless unequivocal in their implications. In 2023, by contrast, Hersh’s investigation was almost entirely passed over in silence. In the United States, neither the New York Times<\/em> nor the Washington Post<\/em> \u2014 the two newspapers where Hersh nonetheless built his entire career \u2014 mentioned it, even to refute it. In France, neither France 2 nor France 3 covered the subject, despite the fact that Engie had invested 950 million euros in Nord Stream 2. In 2024 and 2026, the formal accusation by the German federal prosecutor’s office against Ukrainian authorities themselves \u2014 though very well substantiated, resting as it does on a judicial investigation spanning several years, actual arrests, and effective criminal prosecutions \u2014 received only comparatively modest coverage in major Western media, and prompted no public reconsideration on the part of the political officials who had, four years earlier, pointed to Russia with such confidence.<\/p>\n\n This episode deserves reflection beyond the Nord Stream case alone: it illustrates the speed with which a geopolitically convenient narrative can establish itself as collective certainty, and, conversely, the slowness with which its refutation circulates once the facts have ceased to be convenient for anyone. George Orwell had foreseen this mechanism well before the era of social media and rolling news channels. His essay Politics and the English Language<\/em> sheds light on what played out here: Orwell shows how vague, passive, carefully ambiguous language \u2014 “act of sabotage,” without ever naming its author, but in a context leaving no room for doubt \u2014 makes it possible to suggest an accusation without ever formulating it, and thus without ever having to answer for it once it proves unfounded. The real danger documented by the Nord Stream affair is thus not so much that of an outright state lie \u2014 in the sense of a knowingly asserted false statement of fact \u2014 but the more insidious one of doubt collectively organized into certainty, without any political official ever having had to lie explicitly, strictly speaking, in order to achieve it. This is precisely what makes this type of state lie so difficult to combat in a democracy: it rests on no censorship law to repeal, no Ministry of Truth to dismantle, but on the simple accumulation of individually defensible, yet collectively misleading, rhetorical caution. Orwell reminded us that the corruption of language always precedes that of political thought itself; the Nord Stream affair, four years after the fact, offers an almost mathematical demonstration of it.<\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On September 26, 2022, four breaches appeared on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, on the floor…","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":6740,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-opinion","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"yoast_head":"\n