Nord Stream AG said Wednesday that a roughly 250-metre (820-feet) section of pipeline was “destroyed”, after the operator carried out an investigation on the pipeline after explosions at the end of September.
“Craters with a depth of three to five metres were found on the seabed at a distance of about 248 metres from each other” along a Nord Stream 1 pipeline, the operator said in a statement.
“The section of the pipe between the craters is destroyed,” it said.
Four leaks emerged on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm at the end of September, with seismic institutes reporting that they had recorded two underwater explosions prior to the leaks appearing.
While the leaks were in international waters, two of them were in the Danish exclusive economic zone and two of them in the Swedish.
Swedish authorities announced in early October that they had conducted an underwater inspection of the site and that the inspection backed up suspicions of sabotage.
The Nord Stream group, which operates the twin Nord Stream 1 pipelines, has launched its own investigation and said Wednesday it would “continue to analyse” data gathered from the site.
The pipelines, which connect Russia to Germany, have been at the centre of geopolitical tensions as Russia cut gas supplies to Europe in suspected retaliation to Western sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Although they were not in operation when the leaks occurred, they both still contained gas which spewed up through the water and into the atmosphere.
