MOSCOW, February 17. /TASS/. Washington should present its version of the incident involving the Nord Stream gas pipelines as long as it doesn’t agree with US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s conclusions, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing on Friday.
"Since the investigative report and the data that have been published are of no value to the US administration, they [the Americans] should present their own version. They are knee deep in it," the diplomat said, adding that for years, Washington had been expressing interest in "making sure that this energy infrastructure project would not exist anymore."
Zakharova slammed the lack of reaction to Hersh’s investigation as a conspiracy, saying that such a position adopted by the US "is nothing new." "The scale is probably really shocking because this is about an act of terrorism of a global scale," the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman emphasized, adding that silence and confusion were the West’s only reaction to the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.
On February 8, US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in an article, citing a source, that US Navy divers, with the assistance of Norwegian specialists, had planted explosive devices under the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines with the assistance of Norwegian specialists under the cover of the BALTOPS exercise in June 2022. According to Hersh, US President Joe Biden made the decision to conduct the operation following nine months of consultations with national security officials.