Good morning. The story goes like this: last September, five men and one woman – a captain, two divers, two assistants, and a doctor – used professionally forged passports to rent a yacht from a Polish-registered company owned by two Ukrainians. The saboteurs set sail from the German city of Rostock, and made their way to two sites in international waters in the Baltic Sea.
The divers planted explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines connecting Russian natural gas supplies to western Europe. The bombs rendered three of the four conduits essential to Russia’s future supply of gas inoperable. And the operation set off an international diplomatic incident – and mystery – with potentially profound consequences for the war in Ukraine that persist to this day.
