On September 26, 2022, seismic-monitoring stations in northern Europe picked up signals that resembled small earthquakes—rumblings below the surface of the Baltic Sea detected as far as a thousand miles away. Soon after, operators in charge of the Nord Stream pipelines, two seven-hundred-mile-long underwater conduits meant to bring Russian natural gas to Germany and onward to the rest of Europe, noticed a sudden drop in pressure. The Danish Air Force dispatched an F-16 interceptor, which captured images of what was unmistakably a huge gas leak: escaping methane had turned the water’s surface into a bubbling froth.
In the weeks that followed, underwater drones captured images of wide gashes in the pipelines. Swedish authorities found blast residue at the scene, and called the rupture an act of “gross sabotage.” In Germany, which had imported more than half of its natural gas from Russia, investigators declared that the explosions represented “an attack on the internal security of the state.”
Nord Stream was destroyed less than a year into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It seemed likely that the two events were linked, but it was not immediately apparent how. Speculation initially centered on Russia, which had experience with undersea operations. Weeks earlier, Gazprom, the state-owned Russian energy company, had shut down Nord Stream 1, claiming that Western sanctions had undermined its ability to maintain the pipeline. (Nord Stream 2, which was completed in 2021, had not yet become operational.) Officials in the U.S. and Europe had accused the Kremlin of using energy exports as an economic weapon, and Russian Navy vessels were spotted in nearby waters in the days before the attack. But Western intelligence agencies couldn’t find any other evidence that the Kremlin was responsible. The Kremlin, for its part, blamed the United Kingdom and the United States. “The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons,” President Vladimir Putin said. “They moved on to sabotage.”
In January, 2023, four months after the attack, German police showed up at the offices of a boat-chartering company in Dranske, on the German island of Rügen, in the Baltic Sea. They had a warrant to search the Andromeda, a fifty-foot sailing yacht described by Der Spiegel as “not exactly elegant, but practical, a bit like a floating station wagon.” The boat had been rented the previous fall by six people using forged passports, booked via a Polish travel agency with Ukrainian owners, and paid for by a Ukrainian businessman. Investigators suspected that a photograph in one of the passports, which ostensibly belonged to a Romanian citizen named Ştefan Marcu, was that of an active-duty Ukrainian soldier. On board the Andromeda, they found traces of HMX, a powerful explosive whose blast signature was consistent with the damage at the site.
That March, the Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had reviewed evidence indicating that “a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack,” while allowing for the possibility that “the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government.”
The news came as a surprise. Many experts believed that whoever planted the explosives would have needed access to a mini-submarine or a decompression chamber—neither of which a proxy force, even one backed by Ukraine, was likely to possess. Another reason that Ukraine had been ruled out as a possible perpetrator was the unbelievable political risk: a country defending itself from invasion and desperately reliant on foreign military aid could hardly afford to blow up the energy infrastructure of one of its primary Western backers. Still, even as mounting intelligence pointed to Ukraine, it remained unclear who, exactly, had ordered or carried out the attack. “A real brain-twister,” a high-ranking German official said.
In November, 2023, a suspect emerged. A joint investigation by Der Spiegel and the Washington Post, citing sources in both “Ukrainian and international security circles,” identified Roman Chervinsky, a former Ukrainian intelligence officer, as the operation’s alleged lead organizer. By then, Chervinsky, who had spent two decades directing secret operations for Ukraine’s intelligence services, including assassinations and multiple acts of sabotage, was under house arrest in a suburb of Kyiv. He had been charged in two separate criminal investigations, for extortion and abuse of authority, both of which he denies. Neither case, at least formally, had anything to do with Nord Stream. When I visited him recently, at his apartment, he was unequivocal about his involvement in the Nord Stream attack. “I didn’t do it,” he told me.
Chervinsky, who is fifty, with a slight frame and a head of thinning hair, wore a loose-fitting polo. An electronic monitor was affixed to his ankle. He made a pot of tea, and we sat at his kitchen table. “You look at him and see this absolutely ordinary person you could imagine standing next to on the bus that morning,” one person who has collaborated with him told me. “Then you come to understand who he is and what he’s capable of.”
Recently, the Trump Administration has begun negotiating with the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine. Those talks have excluded Ukraine itself, prompting President Volodymyr Zelensky to warn against dealmaking “behind the backs of the key subjects.” The conditions that the Trump Administration envisions, which have been spelled out by top U.S. officials, have caused alarm in Ukraine and Europe: no relinquishment of all territory taken by Russia since 2014; no NATO membership for Ukraine; no U.S. peacekeepers to enforce a ceasefire. Instead, the emphasis has been on big-ticket deals, such as a proposal to grant the U.S. a fifty-per-cent stake in Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals. (Zelensky turned down the deal.) After Zelensky suggested that President Trump was repeating Russian misinformation, Trump lashed out, calling Zelensky a “dictator” who wants the war to continue to keep the “ ‘gravy train’ going.”
Chervinsky represents a less visible but no less decisive aspect of the conflict, in which a nation facing a superior enemy fought back from the shadows. “If there is a ceasefire, this part of the war will only intensify,” Roman Kostenko, a special-forces colonel who now serves in the Ukrainian parliament, told me. Chervinsky, for his part, wanted to correct the record, both about his past exploits and about what they’ve achieved for his country. “I’m ready to speak about these things, even if it goes against the usual rules of intelligence work,” he said. “Ukraine is a full-fledged state—not some province of Russia—with the right to defend itself and to set its own course.”
Chervinsky grew up in Kamyanets-Podilskyi, a medieval city in western Ukraine, where his father was a construction foreman and his mother worked at a grocery store. As a teen-ager, he competed in soccer and target shooting. He briefly considered enrolling in an I.T. program at a local technical college, but everyone there seemed to just sit around and smoke cigarettes. He was sixteen when Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union, in 1991. Not long after, recruiters from the S.B.U., the Ukrainian offshoot of the K.G.B., visited his school, and spoke of a new academy in Kyiv—the first in the country to train its own intelligence officers. Chervinsky’s father, who had dark memories of the K.G.B., urged him not to apply. “You should know this system will, sooner or later, make you fire on your own,” he said. Chervinsky was accepted as a cadet on his second attempt.
As a junior officer, he was sent to Kamyanets-Podilskyi, his home town, where he unravelled a kickback scheme between the agriculture ministry and the chair of the village council. He spent the next decade in Kyiv and the surrounding region, launching stings to catch drug traffickers, criminal gangs, and corrupt politicians. In the northeastern city of Poltava, he planted listening devices in a banya and recorded a gang of police officers discussing under-the-table agreements with local mafiosi. “People didn’t always love Roman,” a law-enforcement officer who regularly collaborated with Chervinsky told me. “Not just because he had no tolerance for corruption but because he could be so set in his principles.”
At the time, the S.B.U. resembled many other bloated Soviet-legacy bureaucracies. Corrupt dealings with local officials and organized crime were common. The agency was also thoroughly compromised by Russian intelligence. An assessment from the C.I.A. at the time concluded that in some regional bureaus, such as Kharkiv, in the northeast, as many as sixty per cent of the officers were either working directly for Moscow or otherwise carrying out its interests. Valerii Kondratiuk, who held top positions in several Ukrainian intelligence agencies, told me that many of the S.B.U.’s leadership appointments were made in consultation with the F.S.B., Russia’s security service.
“You get in there, you give it a hundred and ten per cent, and a leftover slice of lasagna and two episodes of your favorite TV show are waiting for you at home.”
Cartoon by Sarah Kempa
In December, 2014, Chervinsky was sent to the Donbas, where Ukraine was fighting Russian-backed militias in what the country then called an “antiterrorist operation.” Since the incursion, many of the S.B.U. officers who had been stationed in occupied territories had switched sides. Officers who had evacuated to areas controlled by Kyiv often didn’t want to take part in operations against their former colleagues. But the front line was porous, with locals travelling back and forth to visit relatives, obtain medical care, and collect pensions. Chervinsky and his colleagues exploited the flow of people to recruit agents. “Everyone has a certain hierarchy of values,” he told me. “For some, it might be as simple as money. Others want drugs and nothing else. And there are those who think in terms of justice and honesty. You can make your approach from any of those angles.”
That year’s Maidan Revolution, in Kyiv, followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its proxy war in the Donbas, had reoriented Ukraine’s politics. The country was turning to the West for support—and, for the intelligence services, that meant the C.I.A. “We provided information on Russia,” Kondratiuk told me. “When they realized it was often of better quality than what they were getting from their own officers and agents in Moscow, their interest in helping us spiked.” A former U.S. intelligence officer estimated that the new partnership effectively doubled the amount of information that the U.S. was able to collect on Russia. In one case, the S.B.U. passed along the source code used in a Russian hacking attack, allowing U.S. agencies to build their own defenses. “That’s tens of millions of dollars in value right there,” the former U.S. intelligence officer said.
