AIUI (from other src, not read these yet), it all boils down to "Could have been a tiny 'private'...
...operation, so lots of lovely deniability and opportunity for false-flagging for whichever larger (state-level) interests -- if any -- lay behind it".
Oh sure, they "looked and sounded Ukrainian"? How hard is it for Russia to fake that? Or vice versa? (And did they even; that's only hearsay. Could have been Nigerians, Maori, or Japanese for all I know.) It's not as if you can't find people who look and sound Ukrainian -- mainly because they are Ukrainian -- pretty much anywhere: The second-largest city in the world, by number of Ukrainians living in it, right after Kyiv, is AFAIK: Toronto, Canada. And there's been an exodus of refugees from the war Ukraine for a year now; lots of time for intelligence services (or private actors) all over the world -- certainly all over Europe -- to recruit and train agents for all kinds of ops, including this.
Could still have been absolutely anyone. Sure, a bunch of private Ukrainians -- scuba diving hobbyists from the Black Sea coastal regions, financed by some Odessa oligarch pal of theirs? -- feels like quite a plausible option. Almost as likely, though, that they raced off to somewhere in Europe back in March-April '22 and got recruited by private Western rich folks with interesting political views... Or the domestic intelligence services of weherever they ended up, or of the country two over to the left. Quite possible one posing as the other, to them, so they didn't even know who they were working for.
Sure, that all sounds like tinfoil-hattery... That's because it is. I'm not saying that's what happened. Only that at this stage, it's not much more unlikely than anything else -- and fun to speculate about. As for who this possible actor hiring this gang (be they Ukrainians or not) could be... Anything from Statoil (Hi, Gryge!) to Mossad, via Japan's security services and a cartel of Argentinian and Brazilian cattle ranchers. The least unlikely perhaps some British M-whatever agency; motive: The Germans need stiffening their backbone. The most funny(-Macchiavellian): The Germans themselves. Either private(-slash-political) actors, presumably on the right; motive: Scholz and the SPD need stiffening their backbone. Or, perhaps most fun of all: Private(-slash-political) actors on the left, or even the BND / GSG9(*) / Kampftaucher unit of the Bundeswehr Marine; motive: Scholz himself felt "the Germans need stiffening their public backbone", in the sense that he felt politically trapped into maintaining his foot-dragging and pandering to the "pacifist" Putin-Versteher and the large proportion of the populace they've turned into cowardly useful idiots, but didn't actually want to run too far in that direction, and therefore wanted to make sure he physically couldn't (and therefore couldn't be made to) re-open it. Yeah, that last one is really twisted... Must be why I like it the most. :-)
___
(*): Successor unit called something else nowadays, can't recall what.
Oh sure, they "looked and sounded Ukrainian"? How hard is it for Russia to fake that? Or vice versa? (And did they even; that's only hearsay. Could have been Nigerians, Maori, or Japanese for all I know.) It's not as if you can't find people who look and sound Ukrainian -- mainly because they are Ukrainian -- pretty much anywhere: The second-largest city in the world, by number of Ukrainians living in it, right after Kyiv, is AFAIK: Toronto, Canada. And there's been an exodus of refugees from the war Ukraine for a year now; lots of time for intelligence services (or private actors) all over the world -- certainly all over Europe -- to recruit and train agents for all kinds of ops, including this.
Could still have been absolutely anyone. Sure, a bunch of private Ukrainians -- scuba diving hobbyists from the Black Sea coastal regions, financed by some Odessa oligarch pal of theirs? -- feels like quite a plausible option. Almost as likely, though, that they raced off to somewhere in Europe back in March-April '22 and got recruited by private Western rich folks with interesting political views... Or the domestic intelligence services of weherever they ended up, or of the country two over to the left. Quite possible one posing as the other, to them, so they didn't even know who they were working for.
Sure, that all sounds like tinfoil-hattery... That's because it is. I'm not saying that's what happened. Only that at this stage, it's not much more unlikely than anything else -- and fun to speculate about. As for who this possible actor hiring this gang (be they Ukrainians or not) could be... Anything from Statoil (Hi, Gryge!) to Mossad, via Japan's security services and a cartel of Argentinian and Brazilian cattle ranchers. The least unlikely perhaps some British M-whatever agency; motive: The Germans need stiffening their backbone. The most funny(-Macchiavellian): The Germans themselves. Either private(-slash-political) actors, presumably on the right; motive: Scholz and the SPD need stiffening their backbone. Or, perhaps most fun of all: Private(-slash-political) actors on the left, or even the BND / GSG9(*) / Kampftaucher unit of the Bundeswehr Marine; motive: Scholz himself felt "the Germans need stiffening their public backbone", in the sense that he felt politically trapped into maintaining his foot-dragging and pandering to the "pacifist" Putin-Versteher and the large proportion of the populace they've turned into cowardly useful idiots, but didn't actually want to run too far in that direction, and therefore wanted to make sure he physically couldn't (and therefore couldn't be made to) re-open it. Yeah, that last one is really twisted... Must be why I like it the most. :-)
___
(*): Successor unit called something else nowadays, can't recall what.