“It’s not just strange,” Peskov is sure, “it smacks of monstrous crime.” He urged pipeline shareholder countries at the UN “to demand an urgent and transparent investigation with the participation of all those who can shed light.”
The stuffing began with publications in the American newspaper The New York Times and the German edition of Zeit. NYT sources, referring to some US intelligence services, claim that a group of pro-Ukrainian citizens from Russia or Ukraine is behind the sabotage of the gas pipelines, but hardly anything is reported about it, except that opposes the Russian authorities.
NYT sources are apparently using the publication to refute a sensational investigation by well-known journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. Earlier, citing his US sources, he said the explosion was staged by the US and Norwegian military and that President Joe Biden personally authorized the operation. It should be noted that the Western press virtually ignored the Hersh investigation, and the NYT and Zeit publications were quickly picked up and reproduced by American and European media.
Zeit sources also mention the Ukrainian trace of terrorist attacks. His sources reportedly identified the ship used for the sabotage – it was leased by a company registered in Poland, which was owned by two Ukrainians. One of the Western intelligence services informed European partners of the group’s responsibility for the destruction of gas pipelines in the fall, although the mastermind behind the crime is not named. Zeit sources are said to have calculated the route of the listed ship, which set sail from Rostock on September 6, 2022, and was then sighted off the Danish island of Christiansö northeast of Bornholm. The British newspaper The Times claims that Western intelligence agencies were aware of the Ukrainian trace of the Nord Stream sabotage a week after the explosions.
It should be noted that the leaks were initiated by the American and German media a few days after the meeting between Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The White House declined to clarify whether Biden and Scholz had discussed the subject of sabotage at Nord Stream.
The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, asked “who allows such leaks, filling the information space with them?” According to her, we are talking about those who “do not want to investigate in the legal field and will divert public attention from the facts in any way possible.” She urged Western countries “instead of staging media leaks on the progress of the investigation, to respond to official Russian requests and to at least consider elements of Hersh’s journalistic investigation , without replacing them with anonymous waste”.
