Mystery over Nord Stream raid raises awkward questions for Zelensky

Since the Russian invasion began over a year ago, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has shown remarkable political and diplomatic skill in winning and maintaining the trust of his western allies. So the claim that a Ukrainian team may have destroyed the Nord Stream Two gas pipelines – the biggest attack outside of Russia and Ukraine since the war began – raises potentially damaging questions.

If he knew about and authorised the operation, what does it say about his judgment?

Why jeopardise the enormous efforts he and his colleagues put into winning German support with a demonstrative attack on a pipeline that was already out of action? If he did not know about it – reports in the German and US press suggest it was an off-the-books op by a small group of mavericks unconnected to the government – then how did private individuals access that much explosive?

Mr Zelensky may be diplomatically savvy. But there are people in the Ukrainian intelligence and military apparatus with a blunter appetite for action and fewer inhibitions about allies’ opinions.

Last week, a fringe group of Russian volunteer fighters on Ukraine’s side led by a prominent neo-nazi mounted a brief but massively self-publicised raid across the border into Russia’s Bryansk region – to no obvious military advantage.

The raid was embarrassing to the Kremlin – but also a gift to Russian propaganda claiming the war is a crusade against Fascism and a violation of the unwritten rule that Ukraine will not cross the 1991 Russian border, covert operations and missile or drone strikes notwithstanding. That rule is one of the main guardrails designed by the West to prevent an escalation of the war.

The Ukrainians denied any involvement, but Denis Kapustin, the leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, told the Financial Times that it would have been impossible to cross the heavily defended frontier without some assistance. He is probably telling the truth.

In August, an apparent Ukrainian covert operation blew up Daria Dugina, the daughter of nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, outside Moscow. Again, the Ukrainian government denied involvement.

But in October, the American intelligence community – again via a briefing to the New York Times – publicly pinned the blame on the Ukrainians and said US officials admonished them when they found out about it.

In that context, the American decision to leak details of intelligence about the Nord Stream attacks looks like another public rebuke.