The US has used the ongoing Ukrainian crisis to drive a wedge between Russia and the EU while alleviating its own economic troubles at their expense, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s National Security Council, has said.
The security chef made the remarks on Tuesday during an offsite meeting of the council in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Patrushev squarely assigned blame for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines last fall to Washington, pointing out that the incident has greatly benefited the US.
“The US, using the Ukrainian crisis, managed to sever economic relations between Europe and Russia and eliminate its economic competitors. They solve their economic problems at the expense of other countries. And to make sure Europe could not receive gas from Russia, the Nord Streams were blown up,” Patrushev asserted.
The US has demonstrated a similar pattern in other regions as well, the security chief suggested, stating that Washington’s efforts to link the Ukrainian crisis to the new escalation in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas were an example of such behavior. Moreover, the US itself has largely provoked the new crisis in the region, the official asserted.
“They act in exactly the same way in Ukraine, where they provoked a coup d’etat, condoned the growth of neo-Nazi ideology, turned Ukraine into a testbed for military-biological experiments, turned a blind eye to the killings of civilians in Donbass, and prepared for military action against our country,” Patrushev told the council.
Now, he added, “representatives of NATO countries are already openly saying that Russia prevented them from approaching its borders, and the Ukrainians are an instrument for the West to contain Russia.” At the same time, the double standard and belligerent actions of the US – and the collective West that it leads – have severely damaged their own credibility, which is now effectively “exhausted,” he said.