The US and the UK were directly involved in the 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has said.
Sergey Naryshkin made the remarks during a meeting of intelligence officials of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) states in Astana, Kazakhstan last week. The transcript of the speech was published on the SVR website on Monday.
The West’s ongoing investigation into the attack is unlikely to identify its true masterminds and perpetrators, while the public has been fed scarcely believable theories about the sabotage through the media, the SVR boss stated.
“Russia has repeatedly requested data on the explosions from the Europeans, but has never received it. Western media are trying to blame a group of Ukrainian amateur divers who allegedly acted independently. However, this is a version designed for a naive layman,” he said.
The SVR is in possession of “reliable information” that indicates “the direct involvement of the US and Britain in this major terrorist attack,” Naryshkin said. The attack involved special services from the two nations and “professional saboteurs.”
“The US administration deemed it justified to commit such sabotage in order to ensure the separation of Europe and, above all, Germany from Russia,” the intelligence chief said, suggesting that Washington “was unsure” whether it would be able to convince Berlin and other EU nations to ditch their “extremely beneficial” economic ties with Moscow.
“The US and the UK are steadily moving towards becoming state sponsors of terrorism. They will be held responsible for this. As the old saying goes, those who sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind,” Naryshkin concluded.
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were built under the Baltic Sea to deliver Russian natural gas directly to Germany. The pipelines were disabled by powerful underwater explosions in September 2022.
In a February 2023 article, Pulitzer Prize-winning US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that the attack had been commissioned directly by US President Joe Biden, with US military divers planting explosives at the pipelines, using a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea as cover. While Washington strongly denied the accusations, Moscow described this theory as plausible.
An alternative account of the attack emerged in the Western media shortly after Hersh’s bombshell revelations, promptly becoming the dominant theory in relation to the incident. The attack has been blamed on a privately funded group of Ukrainian amateur divers, who supposedly acted on behalf of Kiev’s then-top General Valery Zaluzhny, who has since become Kiev’s envoy to the UK.