Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream

For the first time, Russia has fired on a civilian cargo ship. The latest escalation has renewed the threat to the world’s food security and heightened the risk of a more direct confrontation.



Sky's military analyst Sean Bell explains why Russia is targeting grain and what it is hoping to achieve.



The CIA warned Ukraine not to destroy Nord Stream months before an attack on the gas pipelines, after receiving a tip from Dutch military intelligence, according to media reports.

The Netherlands’ military intelligence agency, MIVD, received information about an “imminent attack” on Nord Stream from an unnamed source in Ukraine in June, three months before a series of underwater explosions hit the pipes last September, a joint investigation by Dutch and German news outlets published Tuesday shows.

According to the plan received by MIVD, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, was in charge of the operation against Nord Stream, which involved a small team of divers traveling on a sailing boat and was supposed to take place mid-June 2022.

The Dutch intelligence services then informed the U.S., who made contact with Ukraine via the CIA to warn them off, the reports say.

The Dutch government and MIVD declined to comment to NOS, Die Zeit and ARD on their joint reporting.

Last September, the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, linking Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea, were targeted by two blasts in what has been called an act of deliberate sabotage by Swedish and Danish authorities.

Although fingers were quickly pointed at Russia for the bombing, the culprit has not yet been identified.

In a recent interview with Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denied any involvement in the attack.

“I am president and I give orders accordingly,” Zelenskyy said. “Nothing of the sort has been done by Ukraine. I would never act that way.”

A drone struck and set on fire a Russian factory that churns out microchips used in the production of missiles on the outskirts of Moscow on Friday, Ukraine’s military intelligence claimed.

Videos shared on social media showed a column of thick smoke rising over the suburb of Lyubertsy where the factory is located.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin claimed in a post on his Telegram channel that the Russian capital’s air defense systems shot down the drone.



“Based on initial reports, there were no casualties or damage. Emergency services are working at the scene of the incident,” he wrote.

But Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, dismissed the mayor’s version of events as a lie.

“Sobyanin lied to everyone, [Russia’s] air defense took nothing down. The Tomilino Electronic Factory in Lyubertsy is on fire. This is the facility Russians use to produce electronics for their missiles,” Yusov was quoted by the news outlet RBC Ukraine as saying.

There has been a flurry of drone strikes across Russian this week, including in the regions of Kursk and Belgorod and in the city of Pskov located more than 430 miles from Ukraine’s border with Russia.

Ukraine typically does not claim responsibility for drone attacks within Russia, although Kyiv officials have been known to publicly express satisfaction with them.

On Wednesday, another microchip factory in the Bryansk region was targeted in a nighttime drone strike.