The head of Norway’s foreign intelligence service says Russia has become bolder about sabotaging its oil and gas infrastructure than it was a year ago as it seeks to counter Western support for Ukraine.
“The risk level has changed,” Vice Adm. Nils Andreas Stensoenes, head of the Norwegian Intelligence Service, said.
“We believe sabotage is more likely, and we see acts of sabotage happening in Europe now which indicate that they have moved a bit on that scale,” Stensoenes, who was speaking at an energy conference in Stavanger, said.
His comments come only a few days after a beluga whale—which had been at the center of claims that it was unwittingly spying for Russia—was found dead off the coast of Norway.
Norway is Europe’s largest gas provider and a major exporter of crude oil, from vast hydrocarbon fields in the North Sea.
Earlier this year, Norway’s intelligence agencies said Russia “may find it prudent” to conduct acts of sabotage against oil and gas infrastructure, something they assessed as unlikely last year.
Norway was one of the founding members of NATO in 1949, but since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, its neighbors Finland and Sweden have joined the alliance, worried by Moscow’s belligerence.
Stensoenes, whose agency is responsible for collecting intelligence abroad and supporting Norway’s military, said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nation had become “more or less a pariah state” for the West, and therefore had little to lose when it came to causing diplomatic incidents.
But he said he felt Russia would stop short of actions that might trigger NATO’s collective defense clause.
After the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea were sabotaged in September 2022, Norway deployed naval ships to protect its North Sea oil and gas platforms.
Moscow has denied that it was responsible for sabotaging the two pipelines built to carry Russian gas to Europe under the Baltic Sea, and has accused Germany of not conducting a proper investigation.
Norway has 90 offshore oil and gas fields and undersea gas pipelines stretch 5,590 miles, all of which are difficult to protect from an enemy with significant military and submarine resources.
In 2022, an undersea telecommunications cable off the Shetland Islands in Scotland was damaged twice, leaving residents without phone and internet connections until it could be repaired a few days later.
He said: “If you cut all these cables what purpose does it serve? It might give you instant gratification but your crimes become public. But tapping them and using the information to give yourself a significant advantage is the way they work.
“The Russians have got ships with James Bond-style moon pools. These are hulls in the bottom of a vessel which allow underwater drones to be launched in secret.”
On Aug. 31, a beluga whale—which had been seen with a harness strapped around its neck in Norwegian waters five years ago—was found dead, by a father and son fishing in southern Norway.
The whale, which was dubbed Hvaldimir—a combination of the Norwegian word for whale and Putin’s first name—became the subject of media attention when it was discovered off Norway’s Arctic coast in 2019 wearing a harness with what appeared to be a mount for a small camera.
The Nord Stream sabotage in the Baltic is still being investigated in Poland and Germany.
Last month, a spokeswoman for the Polish National Public Prosecutor’s Office told The Epoch Times by email that in June, German authorities sent a European Arrest Warrant directly to the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw in the case of Ukrainian citizen “Volodymyr Z.” in connection with proceedings conducted against him in Germany.
However, Volodymyr Z. was not detained because he wasn’t included in a database of wanted persons, which meant that the Polish Border Guard had no knowledge of him and no grounds to detain him, according to the spokeswoman.
This meant that at the beginning of July, the man was able to leave Poland and cross the Polish–Ukrainian border.
Ukraine has denied involvement.
Russia has denied any wrongdoing and accuses NATO countries such as Norway of scaremongering.
The Russian Embassy in Oslo was not immediately available for comment on Stensoenes’s comments.
