The Adventures of a Ukrainian Intelligence Officer
Letter from UkraineRoman Chervinsky’s spycraft has been a decisive factor in Ukraine’s national defense. Why is he under house arrest in Kyiv?By Joshua YaffaFebruary 24, 2025“You look at him and see this absolutely ordinary person,” a former colleague said. “Then you come to understand who he is and what he’s capable of.”Photograph by Julia Kochetova for The New YorkerOn 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, h
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.
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.
In early 2015, the C.I.A. agreed to help fund a new spy outfit within the S.B.U. called the Fifth Directorate. “The idea was to blend counterintelligence with special operations,” a U.S. official said. The C.I.A. provided tactical gear and communications equipment, and ran training courses for the department’s officers, most of whom had come of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The head of the Fifth Directorate reported to the deputy director of S.B.U., bypassing the usual layers of bureaucracy. “If, before, the service was hostage to statistics and plans set from above,” one Fifth Directorate officer said, “now we were freed of all that, with full creative license.”
Chervinsky joined the department shortly after its founding, and helped its officers build a network of informants and conduct surveillance of militia forces. A microphone hidden inside an extension cord in the office of the prosecutor for the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic allowed the department to listen to interrogations of Ukrainian P.O.W.s. A female officer in a pro-Russian militia was duped into placing a bugged table lamp in the headquarters of a tank battalion. Another agent whom Chervinsky had recruited from that battalion hid improvised explosives, provided by the S.B.U., under the tracks of eight tanks parked on a training ground. After the tanks were destroyed, Chervinsky listened to the stunned reactions of commanders inside the headquarters.
The Fifth Directorate was also involved in assassinations of pro-Russian field commanders. There was no legal framework for targeted killings on internationally recognized Ukrainian territory. S.B.U. officers concluded that, because Ukraine was at war with terrorists backed by Russia, the usual rules didn’t apply. “When a state is at peace, it has one way of dealing with its enemies,” Chervinsky said. “But during wartime, when your territory is occupied, you have to be more forceful.”
U.S. policy prohibited C.I.A. officers from having any involvement in such operations. “Officially, the Americans were opposed,” Kondratiuk said. But behind the scenes, he went on, C.I.A. officers often expressed their appreciation: “They would shake our hands and say, ‘Good work.’ ”
On December 12, 2015, Pavel Dremov, a thirty-nine-year-old bricklayer who became the commander of a self-proclaimed Cossack battalion in occupied Ukrainian territory, set off for the town of Pervomaisk in a Range Rover. He had got married a week earlier, and was still celebrating in his home town of Stakhanov, less than ten miles away, when he got a call to attend to some urgent business. On an empty stretch of road, Dremov’s car exploded, killing him and his driver. Dremov had promoted the establishment of a Cossack-run republic within the Russian-occupied territories. It was widely assumed that he was offed by rivals within his own ranks, perhaps on the orders of Moscow, which had little tolerance for outspoken rebel leaders.
In reality, the blast had been orchestrated by the S.B.U. Some months earlier, a source on the ground, a local businessman in the Donbas, had told the Fifth Directorate about Dremov’s interest in cars, especially Range Rovers. The department imported one from Europe, and, once it was in the separatist territories, agents placed hidden explosives inside the doorframe. The businessman brought it to the headquarters of Dremov’s battalion in Stakhanov, where, as Chervinsky and his fellow-operatives had hoped, he asked to take it for a drive. The businessman handed him the keys. The next day, the S.B.U., which was remotely following the Range Rover’s movements, triggered the explosion. A Fifth Directorate officer, who in the wake of such killings was responsible for writing false statements that blamed the pro-Russian factions, told me that, in this case, “we didn’t need any P.R.”
Chervinsky’s next target was Arsen Pavlov, a former car-wash employee who went by the nom de guerre Motorola. At the start of the war, Pavlov led a group of pro-Russian militants, whom he called the Sparta Battalion, in a siege of the Donetsk airport. He was later implicated in the torture and execution of Ukrainian P.O.W.s, including a captured machine gunner he shot twice in the head. “I don’t give a fuck,” he told a reporter from the Kyiv Post. “I kill if I want to. I don’t if I don’t.”
Chervinsky oversaw a handful of failed attempts to assassinate Pavlov. The Fifth Directorate prepared a crate of poisoned vodka, which a middleman was supposed to give to Pavlov and his soldiers. But when the middleman couldn’t find money that the S.B.U. had buried for him at a drop point, he called the soldiers and told them not to drink it. (“That was stupid,” Chervinsky said. “They detained him and threw him in prison.”) Another time, a local agent hid an antipersonnel mine near the exit of a hospital where Pavlov regularly received treatment for an eye injury. The mine detonated, but the shrapnel missed Pavlov’s car—a good thing, in the end, Chervinsky said, because Pavlov’s wife was in the passenger seat. They were both unscathed.
Chervinsky had another idea. He had enlisted an agent to wear a pizza-delivery uniform and to sneak into Pavlov’s building. The agent reported that Pavlov was usually accompanied by a security guard who stood watch outside Pavlov’s apartment, which was on the seventh floor. But there was one place where the pair were confined and usually alone: the elevator. Chervinsky sent two other agents—a Donetsk local and a former special-forces soldier—to Chernobyl, where, in an abandoned apartment building, they practiced the basics of the operation: prying open the doors to the elevator shaft, jumping down to the compartment’s roof, placing an explosive packet on top and a surveillance microphone in the ventilation slats, and making a quick exit. The whole sequence took about a minute. “They were motivated,” Chervinsky said. “They knew what they were doing and why.”
Back in Donetsk, the pair took up a position down the street from Pavlov’s entryway. When one of Pavlov’s guards came outside for a smoke break, the local agent—“He looked like the most peaceful guy, you’d never suspect him of anything,” Chervinsky said—caught the door before it closed. He and his partner got into the elevator shaft and out of the building without being noticed. A week later, Pavlov arrived at his building and walked inside. The agent from Donetsk called Pavlov’s cell phone and heard, via the hidden microphone, that it was ringing inside the elevator. Pavlov picked up. “Is this Arsen Pavlov?” the agent asked.
“Yes,” Pavlov replied.
“This is the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper—we’d like to interview you.” The agent pressed a button, detonating the explosives. S.B.U. officers in Kyiv had tapped Pavlov’s wife’s phone, and listened in as she frantically called her husband, who didn’t pick up.
Afterward, some C.I.A. officers received a commemorative patch that read, simply, “Elevator.” But, even in private, Chervinsky never acknowledged his role in Pavlov’s killing. “Oftentimes, inside secret services, people are eager to claim credit,” a former U.S. intelligence officer said. “They want influence, attention, promotions—it’s politics, basically.” But Chervinsky, the former officer went on, “didn’t seem to care about any of that. If we heard about any of these operations, it certainly wasn’t from him.”
Chervinsky had learned that every target has a vice that lowers their defenses, even for a moment. For Mikhail Tolstykh, the commander of the pro-Russian Somali Battalion—so named for the ragtag appearance of its fighters—that vulnerability was women. Tolstykh regularly invited prostitutes to his headquarters in Donetsk, where he also kept a bedroom.
The S.B.U. maintained contact with several sex workers whom it used in its operations. Chervinsky dispatched one of them from Kyiv—I’ll call her Katerina—to occupied Donetsk in early 2017. A local taxi-driver typically brought women to Tolstykh’s place. The S.B.U. learned that the driver frequently used amphetamines; not coincidentally, so did Katerina. In Donetsk, she caught a series of rides with the taxi-driver, during which she unspooled her cover story: she was a university student whose parents had recently died, and she needed money, both for her studies and for a persistent drug habit. The driver made a proposal: he had a client who would pay well—was she interested? He brought her to Tolstykh’s headquarters, where she spent the night. A week later, Tolstykh called Katerina and asked her to return.
Before their third meeting, S.B.U. agents passed her a package, which contained a cell phone and eight hundred grams of explosives wrapped in plastic. Early the next morning, when Tolstykh got out of bed, Katerina taped the case under the bed frame. Chervinsky was waiting for her at a makeshift operational base in Ukrainian-held territory. The next day, they drove to a spot near the front line, in range of Russian cell-phone towers, to conceal their location. The S.B.U. had tapped Tolstykh’s bedroom; Chervinsky and Katerina listened for the sound of him turning over in bed. Chervinsky pressed a button. “That’s it?” Katerina asked. “So quiet.”
That spring, Chervinsky was named the head of the Fifth Directorate. He had earned a reputation as an ambitious, even aggressive, operational chief. The S.B.U., meanwhile, was suffering its own losses. In the first half of 2017, a series of car bombs killed several Ukrainian intelligence officers, including one of Chervinsky’s friends in the service. He assumed that the assassinations were the work of the F.S.B., in Moscow, which enlisted agents in the Donbas. “Inside the occupied territories, we felt like we had a good sense of who they are and where to find them,” Chervinsky said of Russian intelligence officers. “But, as we should have known, they were watching us, too.”
In the summer of 2018, Chervinsky received a list of people wanted in connection with the attack on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which had been shot out of the sky over the Donbas four years earlier, as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all two hundred and ninety-eight people on board. A Dutch-led investigation determined that Russian-supplied rebel forces fired on the plane, with a Buk anti-aircraft missile system. Ukrainian investigators had been collaborating with the Dutch on a multiyear effort to locate and detain those responsible. To Chervinsky, one name looked especially promising: Vladimir Tsemakh, a Donbas native in his mid-fifties who had served as the head of air defense for Snizhne, a town near where the plane was shot down.
Around that time, a man in a pro-Russian battalion in the Donbas, whom I’ll call Stepan, got in touch with the S.B.U. Stepan had initially fled Ukrainian-held territory after getting into a hit-and-run accident. He then fought as a foot soldier in a pro-Russian militia but had begun to suspect that he was being prepared for a kamikaze mission. He decided to defect again, this time to the Ukrainian side. Chervinsky told him, “We can guarantee your safety, but we have a job for you.”
The following June, Stepan pulled up to Tsemakh’s apartment building in Snizhne. By then, Tsemakh had left the ranks of rebel fighters and was, in the words of Chervinsky, “an ordinary-looking older retiree.” The S.B.U. had placed a transponder under his car and knew his schedule: every morning, he drove his wife to work at a local technical college, then returned home. Stepan was waiting for him, and forced his way into Tsemakh’s apartment. “Some people in Donetsk want to speak with you,” he told him. When Tsemakh refused to leave, Stepan pistol-whipped him and stuck a syringe filled with a tranquillizer into Tsemakh’s leg. “Let’s go,” Stepan said, holding up Tsemakh, who fell into a groggy, weak-kneed trance.
The S.B.U. had procured a getaway car for Stepan, a clunky old Lada, with a folding wheelchair stored in the trunk. Fake medical records showed that Stepan’s passenger suffered from a terminal illness. When they reached the rebel-controlled checkpoint, Stepan told the guards that Tsemakh had grown up in Marinka, a town on the front line, and wanted to see his childhood home one last time. The soldiers waved them through.
Four Ukrainian special-forces operatives were waiting for them on the other side of a pedestrian bridge on the outskirts of Marinka. The bridge was crumbling and pockmarked by explosions, too difficult for a wheelchair to navigate. Stepan decided to walk Tsemakh down to a dry riverbank below. The lead Ukrainian operative on the other side, a recon officer, began to approach them, triggering a mine. The explosion blew dirt and smoke into the air and flipped him on his back. Lying on the ground, he triggered another. The second blast sent shrapnel up through a gap in his helmet, into his brain. Another special-forces soldier ran to his partner, detonating a third mine. Stepan turned back and dragged Tsemakh several hundred feet across the bridge. Within days, the lead officer was dead; doctors amputated the leg of the other soldier.
The remaining operatives took Tsemakh to Kyiv. That afternoon, Chervinsky was at the grave site of his friend who was killed in one of the car bombings two years earlier. He got a call from a subordinate at the Fifth Directorate. “We have him,” the voice on the line said.
Ukrainian prosecutors charged Tsemakh with terrorism for his role as a field commander in the pro-Russian militia. Dutch investigators were eager to question him about the Malaysia Airlines attack. “A risky, bold action,” a member of the Dutch-led investigative team told me of Tsemakh’s arrest. “The sort of thing we could never have done ourselves.”
At the time, the Ukrainian and Russian governments were discussing a large-scale prisoner swap. Zelensky had been inaugurated as the President of Ukraine a month earlier, and one of his central campaign promises had been to find an end to the conflict. On September 7th, Tsemakh was among the prisoners included in the trade, a condition that Ivan Bakanov, S.B.U.’s director at the time, said had been set by Putin himself. Zelensky called the exchange “the first step to end the war.” The Dutch were disappointed. “People were irritated, even astonished,” the team member said. (Tsemakh has denied any involvement in the Malaysia Airlines attack.) Chervinsky thought that the Zelensky administration was overly credulous in its dealings with Russia. “All this effort to locate and apprehend this one person,” he said. “And just like that we let him go.”
By then, Chervinsky was watching from the sidelines: shortly after Tsemakh’s detention, he was dismissed as the head of the Fifth Directorate and relieved of his duties by the S.B.U. Chervinsky said that he never received an official explanation for his dismissal, but Kondratiuk, the former spy chief, told me, “His competencies suddenly felt out of vogue.” The war in the Donbas had shifted to a less active phase; for better or for worse, the time of blowing people up in elevators seemed to have passed. “These people are adventurists by nature,” Kostenko, the special-forces officer in parliament, said. “They get bored and frustrated by routine. They want more lively work.”
Vasyl Burba, a former director of HUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, is a barrel-chested career officer who, like Chervinsky, started out in the S.B.U. and ran operations in the Donbas. In late 2019, he offered Chervinsky a job overseeing a unit that blended human intelligence with covert operations. “They say that, for an assassin, his weapon should be an extension of his hand,” a former HUR officer said. “For Roman, that meant something else—his mind, and how he used it to recruit people, to bring them over to his side. These agents became an extension of him.”
Chervinsky’s new unit had launched an operation to gather intelligence on Russian mercenaries who had taken part in the Donbas war. A source in the Russian security services—“He loved money,” the former HUR officer said—had helped the team repurpose a defunct Russian private military company to recruit fighters. Applications poured in, including one from a militia commander named Artyom Milyaev, whose nom de guerre was Shaman.
Milyaev soon got a call from a Syrian phone number. The man on the other end introduced himself as Sergei Petrovich, a “curator” from the Russian security services. He asked Milyaev if he could recruit fighters for a deployment to Syria, where, since 2015, Russia had been deploying mercenaries, mostly from Wagner, the private military company, in support of President Bashar al-Assad. “We have a lot of tasks,” Sergei Petrovich said. “We need people who are ready to go.” Milyaev soon gathered a group of nearly two hundred Russian mercenaries willing to join the mission.
Sergei Petrovich told Milyaev to send detailed résumés of his team members, with documentation showing their deployments to war zones, including Ukraine. Some mentioned Russian medals that they’d received for participating in the annexation of Crimea or the Battle of Debaltseve, a bloody fight in the winter of 2015. A handful boasted of guarding a Buk anti-aircraft missile system in the Donbas around the time that Flight 17 was shot down. “We asked them, ‘Do you have combat experience?’ And they replied, ‘You bet I do!’ ” Chervinsky said. “They were building the case file against themselves.”
What began as an intelligence-gathering operation grew into a plan, code-named Project Avenue, to interdict and arrest the fighters and charge them in Ukraine. Chervinsky brought the list of mercenaries to his contacts at the S.B.U. “You can’t just arrest someone and put them in jail for being a Wagner fighter,” he said. “There has to be particular criminal conduct, and some evidence proving it.” Eventually, the list was whittled down to twenty-eight persons of interest—fighters who had taken part in pivotal episodes, such as an attack on a Ukrainian military helicopter, which killed a general, and the downing of a Ukrainian plane carrying forty paratroopers. But there was a problem: Russian mercenaries were flown directly to Syria on Russian military aircraft. The fictitious Syria mission would have to be, as Chervinsky put it, “zeroed out.”
In June, 2020, Milyaev received an e-mail with some tragic news: Sergei Petrovich had been killed in Syria. Soon after, a man who introduced himself as Artur Pavlovich called from a Venezuelan number to say that he had taken over the project. “Don’t worry,” he told Milyaev. “You and your men won’t be left without work.”
Artur Pavlovich proposed a new mission. Milyaev and his men were needed to guard drilling sites in Venezuela for Rosneft, the Russian state oil company. It was a believable cover story. As Oleksandr Zholobetskyi, a former HUR officer who was among the leaders of the operation, told me, “Is Rosneft a genuine, well-known company? Do they have documented interests abroad, and in Venezuela, in particular? And do they have the budget to pay for security contractors? Yes, yes, and yes.”
The plan was to put the group of mercenaries on a commercial flight to Caracas, with a connection in Istanbul, and to force the plane to land as it crossed over Ukrainian airspace. Flights from Moscow to Istanbul passed over Ukraine for nearly an hour, but Russia, owing to the COVID pandemic, had cancelled flights to Turkey. Instead, the mercenaries would have to travel by bus to Minsk, in Belarus, where they could catch a direct flight to Istanbul. It would be a tighter window: the flight from Minsk passed over Ukrainian airspace for only twenty-eight minutes.
Chervinsky enlisted the help of a military official in Ukraine’s air-traffic center to learn the rules laid out by the Convention on International Civil Aviation. For Chervinsky’s purposes, there were two scenarios in which a commercial flight could be forced to land before reaching its destination: a medical emergency or a bomb threat. HUR officers found an agent willing to board the plane and take a substance that induced seizure-like symptoms, and ran a test under the supervision of doctors. “He didn’t know why he was supposed to do this or who else would be on the plane,” Zholobetskyi said. “We only told him it was for an important operation.”
But, in cases of onboard medical emergencies, the pilot was in control of whether, and where, to land the plane. That left a bomb threat. Just after takeoff, an agent recruited by HUR would place a call from inside the Minsk airport to Ukraine’s antiterrorism center, reporting that he had overheard two people discussing plans to carry out a terrorist attack on board the flight. In such cases, security agents would contact air-traffic control. Ukrainian dispatchers would then be in charge: if they ordered the pilot to land in Kyiv, the pilot was required to comply. Once the plane was on the ground, the passengers would be led off, and the mercenaries would be arrested.
HUR officers used black-market payment networks to wire a tranche of funds to Milyaev—fifteen thousand rubles per person—and told him that he and his men would be meeting a Rosneft employee named Larisa in Istanbul. “From then on, they were relaxed,” Chervinsky said. “They were certain their contracts had started.”
Burba, HUR’s director, has repeatedly told the story of what he claims happened next. He went to Bankova, the Presidential-administration building in Kyiv, to brief Zelensky on Project Avenue’s next phase. Zelensky was unable to attend, but his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, told Burba that the operation would have to be delayed. Zelensky and Putin had agreed to a ceasefire in the Donbas that would take effect that Monday, two days after HUR planned to conduct the operation. Yermak didn’t want anything to undermine one of Zelensky’s key political initiatives. Burba agreed to delay the plan by five days, enough time for the ceasefire to take hold. The HUR team was nervous. “These guys had prepared themselves to get to work and earn money,” Zholobetskyi said. “Telling them at the last minute to wait even longer risked losing them forever.”
The officers used pandemic travel restrictions as an excuse for the delay. A Ukrainian travel agent working with HUR booked rooms for the group at a hotel in Minsk. Milyaev laid out the rules to his men: no drinking, no leaving the hotel without approval, and everyone had to eat meals at predesignated times. “Over many months, we led him to think of himself as their commander,” Chervinsky said. “So it was him, not us, who was in charge of keeping them disciplined.” Two days later, HUR relocated the men to a sanatorium in the woods outside Minsk. “We needed to find a quiet, hidden place that could house a large number of people on short notice,” Zholobetskyi explained.
Then there was another hiccup. On July 29th, a day before the mercenaries were supposed to fly to Istanbul, Milyaev sent an urgent message to Larisa, his Rosneft contact: he and his men had been arrested in Belarus. That morning, a Ukrainian intelligence officer got a call from a contact in the Belarusian security services: “Why the hell did we receive an order to arrest thirty-three mercenaries?”
Kyiv and Moscow jockeyed over where the men would be sent. Ukrainian prosecutors, noting that the mercenaries had committed crimes in Ukraine, filed extradition requests. Zelensky called Aleksandr Lukashenko, the President of Belarus, to press the case. Russian authorities, meanwhile, were piecing together what had happened. A report in Komsomolskaya Pravda, citing the Russian secret services, noted that the phone numbers from Syria and Venezuela were fakes, and that the airline tickets purchased for the group had been booked by a travel agency in Kyiv. Ten days after the arrests, Lukashenko was reëlected to a sixth term as President. His victory, which much of the West condemned as illegitimate, led to wide-scale protests. Lukashenko turned to Putin for a guarantee of security. Belarus handed the men over to Russia.
Burba was consumed by his suspicion that, before the arrests, an official in Zelensky’s office had tipped off Lukashenko, perhaps thinking that Belarus could be persuaded to hand over the mercenaries to Ukraine—no complicated sting operation required. Burba wanted to launch an internal investigation, with polygraphs conducted on high-ranking officials, including Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff. But he never got a chance: on August 5th, he was fired as HUR’s director.
Reports of the failed operation began to appear in the Ukrainian press, where it took on the moniker Wagnergate. At first, Yermak denied that such an operation had been attempted. “A fictional detective story from beginning to end,” he said. Zelensky eventually acknowledged its existence, but he said, “It was the idea of other countries, not Ukraine.” Opposition members of parliament, from the party of the former President Petro Poroshenko, accused Zelensky of treason. “If the President was involved in falsifications and lies,” one declared, “this means impeachment.”
A special commission was formed in parliament to investigate the incident—the first in Ukrainian history to deal with such highly classified material. Its members worked inside a specially prepared room, where cell-phone reception was blocked. “I hoped this commission could grow into a proper intelligence-oversight committee,” Mariana Bezuhla, a thirty-six-year-old parliamentarian, who chaired the effort, told me. “I now realize there was little hope of getting accurate or reliable information on what really happened.” According to the commission’s report, released in November, 2021, its members were “unable to clearly establish by whom and at what level in Ukraine the decision to postpone was adopted.”
In June, 2021, Chervinsky, who was then forty-six, left HUR. He was entitled to his state pension as a retired officer and considered joining an acquaintance’s private law practice in Kyiv. Like Burba, he believed that Project Avenue had been undermined from within. That December, he appeared on a political talk show in Kyiv. It was the first time that Chervinsky had shown his face to the public; a man who spent his career in the shadows was now in the klieg lights of a television studio. He said that Project Avenue’s failure was the result of a “betrayal” and alleged the President’s office had a mole: “I am ninety-nine per cent certain that this was an act of treason.”
A former U.S. intelligence officer said of Chervinsky and his allies, “When these guys felt like they were being thrown under the bus, they decided to throw back.” But a senior official in Ukraine’s intelligence apparatus said that the fallout from Wagnergate amounted to “total silliness.” “In this trade, you have to be able to admit your mistakes,” the senior official said. “If they did that, the operation would have ended in a normal, ordinary failure—the kind of thing that happens all the time. Instead, they kept pushing and pumped the story into a huge political scandal.”
Whatever the case, the battle lines surrounding Wagnergate were clear: those who favored a more hawkish policy toward Russia, including powerful figures in Poroshenko’s camp, had used the incident as a cudgel against Zelensky and his team. Kondratiuk, the former spy chief, called Chervinsky “an extremely talented operative and tactical thinker,” but added, “The tragedy is that he didn’t figure out the moment when others began to use him.” The officials he had upset were vindictive, Kondratiuk said. “They are always sure to get their revenge.”
The scandal, however, proved short-lived. Two months after Chervinsky’s TV appearance, Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Bezuhla and I spoke about the legacy of Wagnergate in the context of the current war, during which the Ukrainian military and the secret services have undertaken far more ambitious operations. In October, 2022, for example, the S.B.U. hid explosives in rolls of cellophane and shipped the cargo from Russia to Crimea; a truck, packed with the explosives, detonated as it was driving over the Crimean Bridge, destroying a key overland route that Russia used to resupply its troops. Earlier this year, a HUR source told me, operatives rigged explosives in a batch of goggles used in drone operations, which middlemen passed to pro-Russian volunteers, who donated them to Russian military units. The goggles subsequently exploded in the faces of Russian drone pilots. Wagnergate, Bezuhla said, “removed the taboo for carrying out crazy operations. Now we are very crazy.”
On the morning of Russia’s invasion, as armored columns bore down on Kyiv, Chervinsky’s wife, Olha, and their three children fled to Kamyanets-Podilskyi, where Chervinsky’s mother lived. That evening, Chervinsky met up with former colleagues from HUR, some of whom, like him, had been pushed out after Project Avenue. Their former colleagues in the service helped procure automatic rifles and antitank mines. “At the lower levels,” Chervinsky said, “we never had any misunderstandings.”
The group headed toward Makariv, a settlement thirty miles west of Kyiv, where a Russian armored column was trying to press toward the capital. The men went on scouting missions to plant mines on roads and highways where Russian tanks and other vehicles were passing. When a Russian convoy triggered the mines, the group opened fire. “I had been at war,” Chervinsky told me. “But not like this.”
In the Donbas, he had fought the enemy at a distance; now he and the others were operating in Russian-held territory, moving at night, sleeping in the woods or, when sympathetic locals allowed, in an empty storage shed or an abandoned house. They regularly came under fire. The former HUR officer, who was a member of the group, told me, “Overnight, a bunch of guys who not long before had been commanders, running large-scale operations, became ordinary soldiers, not showering for weeks, eating canned meat out of metal tins.”
After a month, Chervinsky and a few of the others were invited to join the S.S.O., the special-operations branch of the Ukrainian military. They were put in charge of an effort to prepare populations in areas at risk of Russian occupation for partisan warfare. “Let’s say Ukrainian forces retreat from a certain territory,” an officer in the S.S.O. said. “Everything should be set up in advance—sources and agents on the ground, hidden weapons and explosives, a system for coördinating operations.”
In early April, the group was assigned to the Zaporizhzhia front, in Ukraine’s southeast. They searched for people in occupied zones who could help their cause, from pro-Ukrainian patriots to small-time criminals. “It may sound pompous,” the former HUR officer told me, “but, after two decades of doing this work, we have a pretty good sense of who the strong-willed people are in any community and how to find them.” They divided jobs among the residents. “One person performs a rather meagre task, such as counting the order in which military supply trains pass through a certain crossing,” the S.S.O. officer said. “And another, who never met or saw the first, goes at night to lay an explosive on the tracks.”
Chervinsky was in touch with colleagues throughout the secret services, sharing ideas for new operations. “Roman can’t sit still for long,” the former HUR officer said. In the spring of 2022, one of Chervinsky’s contacts at the S.B.U. told him about a civilian who, on his own initiative, had begun communicating with Russian fighter pilots, trying to persuade them to defect to Ukraine along with their aircraft. What they needed, the S.B.U. operative said, was money—did Chervinsky know where to find some?
That April, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law declaring that any Russian serviceman who provided Ukraine with one of Russia’s more advanced military planes would receive a million dollars. An amateur pilot in Kyiv with a background in I.T. and cybersecurity, who asked to be called Bohdan, began thinking about how he might lure Russian airmen to take up the offer. “One plane more or less wouldn’t change the military picture for Ukraine,” Bohdan told me. “But if even one pilot, a member of Russia’s military élite, defected in such a public way it would be a blow to morale, and a sign for others to consider the same. Not all of them want to bomb cities, after all—maybe they’d prefer a million bucks.”
Bohdan found a publicly available list of Russian pilots who had received medals for flying combat missions in Syria. He ran the names through a dark-Web database, which generated about a hundred phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Most pilots didn’t answer; others told Bohdan to get lost. But several seemed interested. He asked them to take photos of their aircraft while holding up a piece of paper with a number that he dictated to them—proof that they were really pilots and still flying combat missions.
Bohdan brought the idea to HUR. “It’s impossible,” the senior Ukrainian intelligence source said, citing the difficulty of flying a plane low enough to evade Russian radar detection. “You’d have to either be an idiot or incompetent to propose such a thing.” An officer in the S.B.U. was more receptive. He helped Bohdan communicate with the pilots, who often demanded money for the photos and the videos they sent. The S.B.U. officer had previously worked with Chervinsky in the Donbas, and he asked his former colleague to join the effort. “It seemed like a classic PsyOp,” Chervinsky told me. (The S.B.U. has since said that it did not approve the operation.)
Chervinsky approached a Ukrainian businessman, who agreed to chip in a few thousand dollars to pay the Russian pilots. “Roman is a brilliant saboteur, an assassin of the state,” the businessman, who had worked with Chervinsky on some previous operations, told me. “I felt obligated to help him do what he is capable of—no questions asked.” Chervinsky also got assurances from his contacts in the military that Ukrainian air-defense units would not fire on the target aircraft as it made its approach.
Bohdan had identified three possible candidates. One of the pilots, who flew a long-range bomber on missions to Mariupol, said that he was worried about getting his wife and their three children out of the secure military town where they lived. “I don’t want to have the same story as Skripal,” he told Bohdan, referring to the former Russian intelligence officer who, in 2018, was poisoned in the U.K. Another pilot wanted to defect not with his wife—“It’s a complicated relationship,” he said—but with his mistress, a fitness trainer in her twenties. Chervinsky asked Christo Grozev, then a researcher at the open-source-intelligence outfit Bellingcat, to share a trove of Russian cell-phone billing records. Geolocation data showed that the pilot’s mistress had visited F.S.B. facilities in Moscow. Soon, both candidates disappeared.
That left Roman Nosenko, a thirty-six-year-old who flew fighter jets from a Russian base in Morozovsk, near the southern city of Rostov. Over Signal, Bohdan told him that his wife should leave Russia through Belarus. Once she arrived in Minsk, Ukrainian agents would provide her with a European passport issued to a false identity. Nosenko, meanwhile, would slip a sedative into his co-pilot’s coffee before takeoff, knocking him unconscious, and then report to his superiors that his jet was struck by Ukrainian anti-aircraft fire. At one point during the planning phase, according to Yahoo News, Nosenko told Bohdan, “This is like a movie.”
But, while Nosenko’s wife was in transit, Chervinsky and the other operatives learned an unsettling fact. Phone records showed that she had made calls to an F.S.B. counterintelligence officer. “Are you sure this is legit?” Grozev asked Chervinsky. “It looks like a setup.” When Chervinsky asked Nosenko about his wife’s calls to the F.S.B., Nosenko had a ready answer: she worked as a military psychologist at the same airbase where he was stationed—a fact that checked out—and she was in contact with F.S.B. counterintelligence as part of her normal duties. “You could see that being true,” Chervinsky said. But, he added, “it was even more likely a double cross.”
The operatives on the Ukrainian side instructed Nosenko’s wife to return to Moscow and debated what to do next. “Maybe he actually shows up,” Chervinsky said. “Even if he doesn’t, we don’t lose anything.” Chervinsky relayed a new plan: Nosenko’s wife would leave Russia for Kazakhstan, where a team of agents would be waiting for her. When they confirmed her arrival, the operation would commence. “That would show he’s for real,” Chervinsky said. Nosenko was told a password—a string of numbers that he should say over a prearranged military frequency as he was approaching the front line—which would signal to Ukrainian anti-aircraft units to hold their fire. A pair of Ukrainian fighter jets would then escort Nosenko to the Kanatove airfield, in southeastern Ukraine. Nosenko’s wife was supposed to get to Almaty at two in the morning; by six, Nosenko would take off in a Su-34 fighter toward Ukraine.
On July 22, 2022, Chervinsky and three other operatives set up a temporary command center at the Kanatove airfield. The soldiers at the base were told that the new arrivals were conducting a training mission to prepare for Russian sabotage. At midnight, Chervinsky spoke with Nosenko, who said that his wife had boarded a flight to Almaty. But a couple of hours later Chervinsky’s contact there said that the wife had not landed. “We knew it was over,” Chervinsky said. At four-thirty, an air-raid siren went off. Chervinsky rushed to a nearby bomb shelter, where he could hear explosions ripple across the earth—six missile strikes in all. After half an hour, he resurfaced to see blown-out windows, a collapsed roof, and several burning aircraft. The base’s commanding officer, a lieutenant colonel, was dead. Seventeen other soldiers were injured. “Was Nosenko a double agent from the beginning?” Chervinsky told me. “Or did he turn at some point?” (Nosenko, who remains in Russia, could not be reached for comment.)
Within days, the F.S.B. boasted of disrupting a Ukrainian operation to lure Russian Air Force pilots to defect. A video report released by the Russian agency featured images of the Ukrainian chats with the pilots and, in one instance, Chervinsky’s own voice. “Our goal is the plane,” he says. “We’re ready to pay.”
The following April, Chervinsky was arrested by investigators from the S.B.U. and charged with abuse of authority. According to a statement I received from the S.B.U., “Chervinsky’s unauthorized actions led to the enemy’s missile attack on the Kanatove airfield.” To many of Chervinsky’s former colleagues, the criminal charges seemed flimsy. His superior in the S.S.O., a major general named Viktor Hanuschak, testified that the operation was carried out with the knowledge and approval of military leaders, the Air Force, and the S.B.U. When a prosecutor asked Hanuschak whether someone could gain access to the Kanatove airfield without an order from on high, he answered, “Are you joking?”
Kostenko, the former special-forces colonel in parliament, told me, “Lots of operations don’t work. To prosecute Chervinsky because he wanted to harm the enemy is like fining a Formula 1 driver for breaking the speed limit.” But the case took on political overtones from the outset. Poroshenko, the former President, who still has political ambitions, paid Chervinsky’s two-hundred-thousand-dollar bail. Chervinsky, for his part, believes that his arrest was less a legal matter than one of personal animosity, perhaps even payback for how he publicly broke ranks in the wake of Wagnergate. “I’m a convenient target,” he told me. “The goal is to discredit me, to make me look uncontrollable, to find a reason to go after me.”
That spring, when evidence began to emerge tying Ukraine to the Nord Stream attack, Zelensky issued blanket denials. “I am President, and I give orders accordingly,” he said in an interview with the media company Axel Springer. “Nothing of the sort has been done by Ukraine. I would never act that way.” Even in private, Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told German officials that the Ukrainian government was not involved. “It was so blurred,” the German official said. “It felt like no one knew the whole story start to finish.”
The murkiness had its advantages. Last February, Denmark and Sweden closed their investigations into the explosions. A diplomat from one of those countries told me that there hadn’t been enough evidence to mount a prosecution that would hold up in court, calling the outcome a “matter of investigative luck.” After all, the diplomat said, “it could have put us in a position of having to point fingers at one of our allies for blowing up undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.”
In June, German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for a suspect they identified as Volodymyr Z., a diving instructor in his mid-forties who, before the Nord Stream attack, lived in a small town outside Warsaw. Soon after, he crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border in a car reportedly used by the Ukrainian Embassy. As it became clear that the Zelensky administration could not simply disavow any Ukrainian connection, officials in Kyiv began to shift their behind-the-scenes messaging: Zelensky himself wasn’t involved, but, if rogue elements inside the Ukrainian state were to blame, Ukrainian authorities would help track them down. At least one journalist told me of an S.B.U. briefing where Chervinsky was named as the organizer of the attack. (The S.B.U. said that this was “completely untrue.”)
Last August, the Wall Street Journal reported that Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then the chief military officer in Ukraine, had authorized and overseen the plot. Zaluzhnyi had “enlisted some of Ukraine’s top special-operations officers with experience in orchestrating high-risk clandestine missions against Russia to help coordinate the attack,” the Journal said. Chervinsky was the only operative named in the story. One participant told the Journal that the operation, which was said to have cost three hundred thousand dollars, resembled a “public-private partnership,” in that it brought together wealthy businessmen, active military officers, former spies, and private citizens with useful skills.
Some participants worked on preparations and logistics from Kyiv. According to a well-placed Ukrainian security source, this was likely Chervinsky’s role—coördinating efforts among various stakeholders in the military and intelligence services. The crew, dispatched on the Andromeda, was composed of civilian divers and active-duty Ukrainian soldiers on leave from the front. They set off from Rostock, a German port city on the Baltic Sea, and made a stop in Sandhamn, in Sweden, before arriving at their target coördinates, a stretch of open water near the Danish island of Bornholm. A little more than two weeks later, they returned to shore, having finished their supposed pleasure-cruise holiday. The source involved in the initial planning told me that Zelensky might not have been informed of the operation. Nevertheless, the source insisted, it was carried out within the military’s chain of command: “We are not the types to act out of order.”
The closest to an official comment on Nord Stream that I managed to secure came from Kostenko, who sits on the security committee in the Ukrainian parliament. “Everyone who needs to know the answer to this question knows the answer, and this answer is enough for them,” he said. “Our Western partners understand everything perfectly well.”
A rough outline of a plan to blow up Nord Stream had been circulating in Ukrainian security circles for some time. “Russia lives off of selling raw materials—oil and gas,” the Ukrainian source familiar with the planning for the Nord Stream operation said. “It’s what finances Putin’s aggression and helps him manipulate Europe.” The source added that Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, is linked to two private military companies that have deployed fighters to Ukraine.
In the course of my reporting, I learned that, in early 2022, Chervinsky was part of a group of people who approached their C.I.A. contacts with the idea of blowing up Nord Stream. The C.I.A. officers strongly opposed the proposal, and urged the Ukrainians to abandon it. “There was a constant flow of novel, creative ideas,” a U.S. official who worked with Ukraine told me. “Some were good, others not so much.”
An officer in Ukraine’s military told me that a group of operatives—the source wouldn’t name any of them—had proposed the same plan to Zaluzhnyi: “It was in the spirit of ‘There’s this idea, this possibility. Are we doing it or not?’ ” The source said that Zaluzhnyi signed off. (Zaluzhnyi has denied any knowledge of the sabotage.)
According to this source, Zaluzhnyi informed Zelensky of the operation. For a while, everything proceeded as planned until, at a certain point, the source said, Zelensky gave an order to cancel the mission. But it was too late. “When you enter the zone of operations, you activate a regime of total silence,” the source said. A single connection, a ping from a phone to a cell tower, can be enough to give away not only your location but whom you’re talking to. As a result, the source said, “going dark is textbook procedure for any special operation.”
Despite the initial speculation that the attack required highly specialized equipment, it was a rather simple affair. “For a normal, professionally trained diver, placing an object on an underwater pipeline is no problem,” the source said. Narrowly speaking, the mission was a success. The target was destroyed, and, “most importantly, everyone involved left the field safe and whole.” In private, a handful of participants, those who were active-duty soldiers, received awards from the military’s general staff. “On paper, it was for something vague, like ‘For the defense of Ukraine,’ ” the source familiar with the plans told me. “We wanted to show them they are valued.”
The problem, the military officer told me, is that “if you judge them strictly according to the law, they’re not heroes but criminals.” Of course, that is the nature of espionage—every country, including the United States, technically breaks the laws of foreign nations to execute missions in its own interest. Zelensky, the source offered, could simply say, “We will carry out whatever operations we have to, in any theatre in the world, in order to defend the country.” Instead, the officer went on, “it’s as if the country has turned its back” on its own operatives.
In Kyiv, when I asked Chervinsky again about Nord Stream, he said, “Someone did a good thing. It must have been a difficult decision, but I’m convinced it benefitted Ukraine, and the West, too.” I mentioned that I had learned he was among the Ukrainian intelligence operatives who first proposed to the C.I.A. the idea of blowing up the pipelines. He seemed surprised. “I’m not going to talk about that,” he said, before adding that he couldn’t confirm that such a meeting had taken place. He insisted that his name had been falsely linked to the operation. “Let them point fingers at me,” he said. “I’m no better or worse off from all the attention.” He declined to comment further. “I get why people are interested,” he told me. “The story of Nord Stream is a compelling mystery. Let people speculate. One day we’ll find out what really happened.” ♦
