MOSCOW, March 20. /TASS/. Russia will continue to highlight the need to carry out a transparent investigation into the act of sabotage that destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipeline in September 2022, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

"We will wait for the investigation’s results. Even if the West fails to complete a probe, there’s one going on here. On the international stage, we will continue to continuously emphasize the need for transparency," the diplomat told Sputnik radio.

According to Zakharova, fact-based logic suggests that Washington, namely the administration of US President Joe Biden, was the party most likely to benefit from the Nord Stream blasts. The diplomat stressed that in the pre-sanctions era, Russia "and European Union countries achieved fantastic results, building true and practical integration in the economic field, including in the energy sector." "This was precisely one of the reasons why the United States <...> started to target those ties," the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman noted. She added that the US simply could not tolerate such a relationship between Russia and the EU and, thus, took radical measures to disrupt it.

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. US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later published an article claiming that US Navy divers, with the assistance of Norwegian specialists, had planted explosive devices under the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in June 2022. In turn, the New York Times reported, citing US officials, that a certain "pro-Ukrainian" group may have committed the act of sabotage on the gas pipelines.