Russia-Ukraine war: Sweden launches sabotage investigation after explosions reported near Nord Stream pipelines – as it happened

• Denmark’s military has issued an image of gas bubbling at the surface of the Baltic Sea after “unprecedented” damage to the Nord Stream pipelines, which has seen three offshore lines of the system damaged in one day.

• Seismologists in Sweden say on Monday they detected what they described as two explosions in the regions of the Baltic sea where the leaks have occurred.

• Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has already called the leaks “an act of sabotage” which he said “related to the next step of escalation of the situation in Ukraine.”

• Russia’s “referendums” in Ukraine, which could lead to Moscow annexing 15% of the country’s territory, are due to end on Tuesday. Voting in the eastern provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia began on Friday, Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said on Tuesday that Russia wants to “save people” in the four Moscow-controlled territories.

• Russian media have announced early results, claiming that with approaching a quarter of the “votes” counted in each of the four referendums, all the regions have voted by at least 97% to be annexed by Russia. The process has been dismissed as a sham by western nations, and described as a “propaganda show” by Ukrainian authorities, which have pledged not to recognise the results.

• Putin is scheduled to address both houses of Russian parliament on Friday 30 September, and may use the address to formally announce the accession of the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine into Russia, the British Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence update.

• The United Nations human rights office has said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had caused a dire human rights situation and led to a wide range of rights violations, including extrajudicial killings and torture, that could amount to war crimes. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said in a report that it was particularly concerned about torture and ill treatment of detainees by Russian forces and affiliated armed groups, but said there had been rights violations by both sides.

• Georgia and Kazakhstan said that tens of thousands of Russians had flooded into their countries from neighbouring Russia as military-aged men avoid military call-up.

• Dmitry Medvedev, the hawkish deputy chairman of the security council of Russia, has again threatened the west with the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and said “Imagine that Russia is forced to use the most formidable weapon against the Ukrainian regime, which has committed a large-scale act of aggression, which is dangerous for the very existence of our state. I believe that Nato will not directly intervene in the conflict even in this situation. After all, the security of Washington, London, and Brussels is much more important for the North Atlantic Alliance than the fate of Ukraine, which no one needs, even if it is abundantly supplied with various weapons.”

Russian media has announced more details of the early results of whether four occupied areas of Ukraine – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – should be incorporated into Russia.

Displaced people from those regions were able to cast votes in Russia. Russian state news agency RIA said the initial counts from inside Russia showed huge majorities in favour of the move. They ranged from 96.97% in the Kherson region, based on 14% of votes counted, to 98.19% in Zaporizhzhia, based on 18% of the count.

The majorities in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics were just under 98%, with 14% and 13% respectively of votes tallied.

Valentina Matviyenko, head of the upper house of the Russian parliament, said that if the referendum results were favourable, it could consider the incorporation of the four regions on 4 October, Reuters reported.

Facebook says it has identified and stopped a sprawling network of fake accounts that spread Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine throughout western Europe, AP reports.

Meta, its parent company, says the network created more than 60 websites that mimicked legitimate news organisations but parroted Russian talking points about Ukraine.

More than 1,600 fake Facebook accounts were used to spread the propaganda to audiences in Germany, Italy, France, the UK and Ukraine. Meta says it was the largest and most complex network linked to Russia that the California-based company has identified since the Ukraine invasion began.

The Russian Embassy in Washington DC hasn’t responded to a request for comment, the news wire said.

Denmark’s armed forces released a video showing bubbles rushing to the surface of the Baltic Sea above the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, and said the largest gas leak had caused surface disturbance of well over 1km in diameter.

They posted a video on Twitter:

Ukrainian presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, has described the major leaks in two Russian gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea as a “terrorist attack”.

In a statement on Twitter, he called for more arms and said:

Russian media have announced early results from the four widely-derided “referendums” staged by pro-Russian proxy authorities in four occupied areas of Ukraine – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson

As widely predicted, authorities are claiming an overwhelming majority of the public there want to be annexed by the Russian Federation.

RIA Novosti reports that with approaching a quarter of the “votes” counted in each of the four referendums, all the regions have voted by at least 97% to be absorbed into Russia.

Ukrainian officials have described the process, which began on Friday, as a “propaganda show”, and western officials have said that the results will not be recognised.

The apparent leaks in the Nord Stream pipeline are both near the island of Bornholm, which belongs to Denmark in the Baltic sea.

Sweden’s SVT quotes seismologist Björn Lund saying that the area where they detected explosions is not an area usually used for military drills. He told SVT: “We usually get information about explosions that take place underwater, but sometimes we don’t get it. In this case, we have not received any information.”

According to Lund, one of the explosions had a magnitude of 2.3 on the Richter scale, and was recorded at 30 measuring stations in southern Sweden.

Prior to the reports from the seismologists, there had already been speculation about possible sabotage, as the pipeline operator had described three lines suffering significant damage within the space of a day as “unprecedented”.

The Swedish national broadcaster SVT is reporting that seismologists registered explosions near the Nord Stream pipelines in the last 36 hours. In a report published in the last few minutes it said:

SVT can reveal that measuring stations in both Sweden and Denmark registered strong underwater explosions in the same area as the gas leaks on Monday. ‘There is no doubt that these are explosions,’ says Björn Lund, lecturer in seismology at the Swedish National Seismic Network, SNSN.

The first explosion was recorded at 2.03am on the night of Monday and the second at 7.04pm on Monday evening.

The warnings about the gas leaks came from the maritime administration at 1.52pm and 8.41pm on Monday, respectively, after ships detected bubbles on the surface.

SVT has obtained the coordinates of the measured explosions and they are in the same area where the gas leaks were registered.

It further quoted Lund saying of the measurements: “You can clearly see how the waves bounce from the bottom to the surface. There is no doubt that it was a blast. We even had a station in Gnosjö that picked this up.”

Germany’s economy minister expects to have to extend the lifespans of the country’s last two nuclear power plants to avoid possible outages and grid bottlenecks in Europe’s biggest economy this winter, Reuters reports.

Germany had planned to complete a phase-out of nuclear power by the end of this year, but a collapse in energy supplies from Russia due to the war in Ukraine has prompted the government to keep two plants on standby until April.

Der Spiegel weekly quoted Robert Habeck saying: “We are already in a place where the stress test says: it may be necessary to use nuclear power plants for grid security.”