MOSCOW, February 15. /TASS/. Moscow is making preparations for a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council to investigate the explosions on the Nord Stream gas pipelines, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, on Wednesday.
"We have contacted the UN [over the Nord Stream blasts] and raised the issue there. We are making preparations for a special Security Council meeting where we will demand some semblance for an investigation to be found," the Russian top diplomat noted.
He emphasized that Moscow did not accept the statement made by Spokesperson for the UN Secretary General Stephane Dujarric, claiming that the United Nations did not have the authority to investigate the Nord Stream incidents.
"When it was reported in Syria’s Idlib, which is not under government control, that there had been some activities in that territory that the government might have been involved in and that may have harmed the local population, the [UN] secretary general [Antonio Guterres] created an investigative team without asking anyone or waiting for journalists to ask him whether he planned to investigate anything. The team visited the site and presented very ambiguous conclusions upon their return," the Russian foreign minister went on to say. "So Mr Guterres - who is an experienced diplomat - should not be shy about studying the facts, and let’s not call it an investigation. <...> I think that it will be very difficult for the secretary general to distance himself from the facts which have been presented to the world and are very hard to deny," Lavrov said.
The Nord Stream AG company reported on September 27, 2022, that three threads of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 offshore gas pipelines had suffered unprecedented damage. Swedish seismologists recorded two explosions along the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office opened a case into an act of international terrorism over damage to the pipelines. On February 8, US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in an article, citing sources, that US Navy divers, with the assistance of Norwegian specialists, had planted explosive devices under the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the cover of the BALTOPS exercise in June 2022. According to Hersh, the decision to conduct the operation was made by US President Joe Biden. White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a comment to TASS that Hersh’s account was utterly false and complete fiction.