• Optional
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        81 month ago

        Except for the German federal prosecutors, Dutch officials, former Ukranian commander in chief, and the sabotage team themselves, I suppose you’re right.

        Days after the attack, in October 2022, Germany’s foreign secret service received a second tipoff about the Ukrainian plot from the CIA, which again passed on a report by the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD. It offered a detailed account of the attack, including the type of boat used and the possible route taken by the crew, according to German and Dutch officials.

        Inasumuch as you can have a source for a covert operation after the fact.

        • BlackLaZoR
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          61 month ago

          Can you link the direct source - like, statement of german police or official press conference?

          I’ve spent some time looking into this and found no direct sources.

          BTW, these articles are copypaste - There were bunch of much older (2023?) ones which I also failed to find any credible source for.

          EDIT: Correction, the first articles about this came out 3 months ago

          The part about Zelenski ordering sabotage while drunk has both no source and is utterly ridiculous.

          • Optional
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            11 month ago

            The part about Zelenski ordering sabotage while drunk has both no source and is utterly ridiculous.

            I agree. I also didn’t see it in the article -?

            If you want to find German federal prosecutor records, or Dutch itelligence reports - I’m not sure where to go for those.

            It pains me to say this but the WSJ, while being a Murdoch rag and certainly guilty of ridiculous bias in the way it reports things, isn’t really known for making up things whole cloth like the Daily Mail or something.

        • @barsoap@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          Prosecutors have a lead against someone holding Ukrainian citizenship. That doesn’t say anything more than that someone with Ukrainian citizenship was involved, in particular it doesn’t say that he’s not a Russian operative. Or Polish, for that matter, the Poles were uncharacteristically uncooperative.

          In any case it’s not like Germany would be mad it’s the wheels of justice churning as usual. Heck at this point I haven’t ruled out that it was a German operation. The whole yacht theory is in general on shaky ground because one does not just lower some sea mines with a yacht. Or smuggle them to a Polish port. etc., etc.

    • oce 🐆
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      21 month ago

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the plan, according to one officer who participated and three people familiar with it. But later, when the CIA learned of it and asked the Ukrainian president to pull the plug, he ordered a halt, those people said. Zelensky’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was leading the effort, nonetheless forged ahead.

      Not exactly on their own initially according to this article.

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        41 month ago

        Zelensky took Zaluzhniy to task, but the general shrugged off his criticism, according to three people familiar with the exchange. Zaluzhniy told Zelensky that the sabotage team, once dispatched, went incommunicado and couldn’t be called off because any contact with them could compromise the operation.

        “Oops” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯