MOSCOW, February 16. /TASS/. The US would have sued American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh for slander a long time ago if it had nothing to do with the sabotage at the Nord Stream pipelines, Russian Special Presidential Representative for Environmental Protection, Ecology and Transport Sergey Ivanov said in an interview with TASS.

"The investigation by Hersh, a famous journalist, which is being widely published, is being commented on. <...> Had the Americans been uninvolved, and I know the Western mentality and Western rules well, they would have filed a libel suit against him a long time ago and claimed financial damages worth hundreds of millions of dollars and fines for slander in America are usually just like that," he said. "Yet they are not doing this. This means that they understand that a court and a lawsuit won’t do them any good," the official stressed.

He expressed the opinion that Russia should also introduce multi-million dollar fines for slander following the US’ example. "I wouldn’t be against it if we introduced such fines for slander because here slander goes practically unpunished," the envoy noted.

Overall, according to him, the US and its allies’ attitude shows that the West cannot be trusted. "They are simply pretending that nothing happened, there were no explosions and they, together with the Norwegians, have nothing to do with it. This makes one draw long-term conclusions in general, that not only words but even written obligations by the collective West cannot be trusted, simply cannot," Ivanov concluded.

On February 8, Hersh wrote in an article, citing sources, that US Navy divers had planted explosive devices under the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the cover of the BALTOPS exercise in June 2022 and Norwegians activated the bombs three months later. According to the journalist, 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.