UNSC to hold Russia-requested meeting on Nord Stream on Tuesday
4 Min Read
The UN Security Council is set to hold a meeting on the sabotage that affected the Nord Stream pipelines in September.
-
Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia's First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, speaks during a Security Council meeting on the maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine, February 6, 2023 (AP Photo)
The United Nations Security Council on the Nord Stream explosions as requested by Russia will be held on Tuesday at 20:00 GMT, a UN source told Sputnik on Monday.
"The Security Council meeting on Nord Stream pipelines will be tomorrow afternoon," the source said.
The explosions occurred on September 26 at three of the four strings of Nord Stream 1 and 2 underwater pipelines, which are designed to transport a total of 110 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Europe each year.
Separate investigations were launched by Germany, Denmark, and Sweden into the suspected sabotage, with German media reporting trust issues among the three EU nations. The Russian prosecutor's office announced an investigation into possible international terrorism.
However, Denmark and Sweden have barred Russia from investigating the attack. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said this exclusion highlighted the West's double standards.
Additionally, Russian Ambassador to Denmark Vladimir Barbin said Denmark does not provide any information on the progress and results of the investigation into the explosions at the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which raises concerns.
Barbin said that the Danish side was currently not providing any information on the progress and results of the investigation into gas pipeline sabotage.
Famed US investigative journalist and Pulitzer award winner Seymour Hersh told German newspaper Berliner Zeitung in an interview published on Tuesday that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a press conference days after the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up that an important factor of Russia's power had been taken away from President Vladimir Putin's hand.
Hersh recalled how Blinken said destroying the pipelines was a tremendous opportunity to deprive Russia of its ability to use its pipelines as a weapon, and it would no longer be able to use the pipelines to pressure Western Europe to end US support of Ukraine in the war.
Additionally, Victoria Nuland, the US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, said that "the [US] administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2" would no longer be operational.
The reason for this decision, Hersh told the German daily, was that the war was not going well for the West, and the US was scared that the cold winter would push Germany into lifting the sanctions imposed on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, which was put on hold by Berlin in the wake of the Ukraine war.
The Pulitzer winner had said in early February that US Navy divers had planted explosives to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines in late 2022.
"Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning," Hersh wrote in a Substack newsletter.
The White House responded and dismissed the claims as "false and complete fiction."
Flightradar24 data showed in late September that US military helicopters habitually and on numerous occasions circled for hours over the site of the Nord Stream pipeline incident near Bornholm Island.
A US Navy Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk helicopter spent hours loitering over the location of the damaged natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea near Bornholm for several days in a row, September 1, 2, and 3, in particular.
With the anniversary of the Ukraine war nearing, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was asked about Russia's plans to mark this date. The Foreign Minister noted that there were many things that need to be remembered and demonstrated that would depict how the US establishes its hegemony.
"We are preparing a sort of a report of what happened this year, what we managed to discover, and this is not only the US military biological programs, from which they are trying to disown, they lie, as always, and not only the direct participation of the United States in the explosions at Nord Stream," Lavrov said.
