As of this writing, the Security Council has yet to vote on Russia’s request that the UN investigate the mysterious destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines last September.
Well-known American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an article on February 8 claiming that the operation was carried out by the Americans on the orders of President Biden. The claim was met with skepticism by the US media and dismissed by the State Department.
According to the article, US Navy divers planted C4 blasts on Nord Stream pipelines during NATO exercises in the Baltic Sea in June 2022. The explosives were then detonated on September 26 by a sonar buoy dropped by a Norwegian reconnaissance aircraft.
The journalist criticized the American media for ignoring his revelations, and particularly criticized the New York Times and Washington Post for covering the White House denial that his report was “completely false, a complete fiction”. hadn’t even published.
Hersh has a very long career as an investigative journalist. In 1971 he won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the massacre of several hundred Vietnamese farmers in the village of My Laï, Vietnam, by American forces. It was he who exposed the torture of prisoners by the US army at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war in 2004.
Some of these more recent investigations have been criticized, including one that claimed Turkey, not Russia, was behind a chemical weapons attack in Syria.
If not Russia, then who?
After the explosions, Moscow was quickly blamed for the bombing. It has been suggested that the Kremlin wanted to block the flow of energy to Western European countries, and Germany in particular, in order to persuade them to end their financial and military support to Ukraine.
A Washington Post team interviewed 23 diplomats and intelligence officials from nine countries, all of whom told the newspaper there was no evidence Russia was behind the sabotage.
Before the start of the Security Council meeting, the ambassadors of Denmark, Sweden and Germany – the three countries whose territorial waters are crossed by the two pipelines – sent a letter to its members confirming the sabotage by high explosives. Council members oppose the inquiry.
Washington happy
President Biden publicly threatened the pipeline on February 7, 2022: “If Russia invades … Nord Stream 2 will be gone. We will end it.”
During a meeting with our Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly on September 30, Foreign Minister Blinken said this was “a tremendous opportunity to eliminate dependence on Russian energy once and for all”.
And Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said US officials were pleased with the destruction of Nord Stream. As a permanent member of the Security Council, the United States has veto power there.
