Ukrainian special forces officer allegedly coordinated sabotage of Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, claims Spiegel and the Washington Post in a joint investigation, published Saturday November 11.
His name: Roman Tchervinsky. According to the German weekly and the American daily, this Ukrainian colonel would have supervised the team which exploded the two pipelines on September 26, 2022, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
Contacted by the two newspapers, Mr. Tchervinsky affirms that these accusations are unfounded. “All speculation about my involvement in the Nord Stream attack is spread by Russian propaganda”he said through his lawyer, while he himself is currently in pre-trial detention in kyiv for another case.
Arrested in April, Roman Tchervinsky is accused of having abused his power by pushing a Russian pilot to defect, in July 2022, during an operation which would have turned into a fiasco: instead of surrendering to the Kiev authorities as agreed , the man allegedly transmitted to his superiors information about the Kanatove military airport, located in central Ukraine, where he was to land, which allowed Russian forces to bomb it, killing a Ukrainian soldier and injuring seventeen others. Roman Tchervinsky says the charges against him constitute political retaliation for criticizing President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky would have been “kept away” from this operation
These criticisms are public. They date back to December 3, 2021. In an interview broadcast that day on the Ukraine 24 television channel, Roman Tchervinsky accused the entourage of the head of state of having foiled, in July 2020, an operation aimed at capture mercenaries from the Russian Wagner group in Belarus with the aim of extraditing them to Ukraine. According to him, people close to Volodymyr Zelensky would have derailed this plan at the last minute by “fear of provoking Russia”while kyiv and Moscow had just concluded a ceasefire in Donbass, a region plagued by armed clashes between Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces since 2014.
At the time, Roman Chervinsky was a member of the Ukrainian military intelligence service (GUR), which he joined after working for several years for the country’s security services (SBU). In his statement sent to Spiegel and at Washington Post through his lawyer, he claims to have “planned and implemented” several assassinations of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. He also claims to have “have a witness removed” likely to corroborate Russian involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew.
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