Sputnik News
The United States, Poland and Ukraine had openly expressed their opposition to the Nord Stream project in the past and, therefore, could have interest in the pipelines getting damaged, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Sunday.
"The US, Ukraine and Poland said that this infrastructure would not operate as they would do everything they can to ensure it. That is why we should seriously look into this," Novak told the Rossiya 1 broadcaster.
When asked if the pipelines could be rendered inoperable by the water that surged inside, the senior official noted that it was impossible to say for certain as no such incidents happened before.
On Monday, the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 offshore pipelines in the Baltic Sea were damaged by explosions and rendered inoperative. The Swedish and Danish authorities said they discovered gas leaks caused by undersea explosions, with the consensus being that the incident was a result of sabotage.
On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the United States and its allies are now switching their policy from imposing sanctions to destroying energy infrastructure. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office is investigating the incident as an act of international terrorism.
The United States and Britain are the primary suspects in the sabotage attacks against Nord Stream 1 and 2 based on a cost-benefit analysis, former Trump Pentagon advisor Douglas Macgregor believes.
“Let’s use the process of elimination. Would the Russians destroy their own pipeline? 40 percent of Russian gross national product or gross domestic product consists of foreign currency that comes into the country to purchase natural gas, oil, coal and so forth. So the Russians did not do this. The notion that they did I think is absurd,” Macgregor said, speaking to syndicated columnist Judge Napolitano on the Judging Freedom podcast.
Germany, the pipeline’s primary European beneficiary, is also “extremely unlikely” to have sabotaged the infrastructure, Macgregor said, pointing to Berlin’s economic interest in the pipelines, and dependence on Nord Stream for the country’s energy security.
“Who else might be involved? Well the Poles apparently seem to be very enthusiastic about it. As you know the [former] Polish foreign minister said ‘Thank You United States of America’ for doing this,” Macgregor added, referring to Radoslaw Sikorski’s now-deleted tweet about the incident.
“Then you have to look at who are the state actors that have the capability to do this. And that means the Royal Navy, the United States Navy Special Operations. I think that’s pretty clear. We know that thousands of pounds of TNT were used because these pipelines are enormously robust. You have several inches of concrete around various metal alloys to move the natural gas. So it’s not something that you could simply drop a grenade down at the end of a fish line and disrupt. That means it takes a certain amount of sophistication,” the former official, who is also a retired US Army colonel, explained.
On Wednesday, sources told the Wall Street Journal that Danish officials at a NATO meeting had calculated that the force of more than 500 kg of TNT had been detected in each of the explosions disrupting the Nord Stream pipelines, which led to the release of massive methane bubbles on the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Macgregor suggested that the sabotage attack on the Russian gas pipelines may have ultimately been perpetrated after Berlin, the economic and military “gorilla in the room when it comes to the EU and NATO,” began “to give the impression that they were no longer going to go along with this proxy war in Ukraine.”
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