Baltic Sea In Danger: Nord Stream 2 Begins Plowing Through WWII Minefields- OpEd

The fact that there are chemical antitoxins delivered to the ships in the Baltic Sea that are currently tenaciously constructing the Kremlin’s geopolitical project Nord Stream 2, i.e. the gas pipeline that no one asked for, known in the friendly neighboring nation as Северный поток 2, is proof that the leaders of Russia, as well as Gazprom and Latvijas Gāze, have admitted that this “energy” project is about to turn into a large-scale ecological disaster in the Baltic Sea.

I have a long overdue rhetorical question to former Latvian prime minster Aigars Kalvītis, also known by his nickname hit-the-gas, who represents the interests of Russian oligarchs in Latvia because he was the only “Latvian” who shook hands with Putin and was willing to give up Abrene (Pytalovo) to Russia without a fight. Why didn’t you just stage a referendum in Latgale according to the Crimea scenario? In this case the documents would have at least been clean, unlike the chests of Dzintars and Iesalnieks on which a faint painted “Abrene” can still be seen. Now, let’s get to the point.

Unfortunately, our Lithuanian neighbors are once again one step ahead of us naïve Latvians – after all, there’s a reason why Lithuanian anecdotes depict Latvians as being somewhat slow. You see, Lithuanian political experts and analysts have raised the alarm in Lithuania regarding how and where the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is being built.

“The entire world tried to talk to the Russians using the language of facts in order to prove that the Nord Stream 2 project is a serious threat to the ecological safety of Europe, since the Russian pipeline goes through an area where the victors of WWII buried chemical weapons [they weren’t really buried, more that they were dumped in the sea near the shores of Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, proving how “far-sighted” the winners of the war were, resulting in their “grandchildren” now being forced to go through “serious crap” to construct a pipeline to Germany]. Of course, the presence of chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea has been completely ignored on all political levels. The fact that, according to Ukrainian intelligence services, the ships that are engaged in the construction of Nord Stream 2 have recently received antitoxins required when a person has suffered from a chemical attack, proves that the Kremlin is well aware that an ecological disaster may break out in the Baltic Sea at any moment,” senior analyst at the Vilnius Institute of Policy Analysis Marijus Laurinavičjus concluded.

At present, it is believed that the deliveries of these antitoxins to the ships are a signal that the construction of the pipeline has reached the danger zone where the WWII chemical weapons dump is located. The most interesting in all this is that the politicians of Old Europe continue to ignore this fact. This is understandable because money doesn’t stink, and if something was to stink it would probably be the shores of Sweden and Denmark (Bornholm). We aren’t discussing whether the pipeline is the Kremlin’s geopolitical tool, but instead that this is a potentially dangerous chemical weapon that poses a threat to the entire Baltic Sea Region.

What has Europe done so far in response to the facts uncovered by Ukrainian intelligence services? Nothing much, i.e. the European Parliament has “demanded” Moscow to comment on the facts provided by the Ukrainians regarding the deliveries of antitoxins to ships in the Baltic Sea. Moscow will most likely comment but knowing the Kremlin’s attitude it won’t explain much.

Everyone living in the Baltic Sea Region should know that:

From 1947 to 1948, the Soviet Union plunged its chemical weapons arsenal in the Baltic Sea east of Bornholm island. It is known that from there part of the arsenal has been spread in every direction due to erosion and waves. There have been cases when Bornholm residents have found boxes containing chemical weapons washed up on the shore. This is a signal that it’s impossible to locate all of the chemical weapons dumped in the Baltic Sea. Coastal fishermen too have on numerous occasions found the remains of chemical weapons outside the area they were buried. Most of such remain have been found in the Gulf of Gdansk some 190 kilometers from Liepāja.

Archives contain documents that confirm that in 1946 four Soviet ships carrying 60 tons of chemical weapons were sunk southeast from Bornholm. According to other documents, the USSR has dumped 8,000 tons of chemical weapons east from Bornholm.

Some archives also contain evidence that in 1945 Nazi Germans dumped 69,000 artillery shells containing nerve agents and phosgene near Bornholm.

In 1959, after some time passed, USSR sailors decided to supplement the Baltic sea with more modern chemical weapons – again near Bornholm island. After the Soviet Army commissioned chemical weapons containing sarin, it decided to get rid of its yperite containing weapons by dumping them in the Baltic, Kara, Okhotsk and Barents seas. The exact locations of these dumps are still classified.

P.S. The Baltic Sea is not only the sweetest, but sadly also the most polluted sea in the world!

*Augusts Augustiņš, Reserve Sergeant of the Latvian National Guard.