UNITED NATIONS, February 15. /TASS/. The United Nations has no mandate to conduct an inquiry into incidents involving Russia’s Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, Spokesperson for the UN Secretary General Stephane Dujarric said on Tuesday.
When asked to comment on the Russian parliament’s draft request to the UN Security Council launch an inquiry into the matter, Dujarric replied: "For us to conduct any sort of investigation in anything we need <…> we would need some sort of a mandate from a UN legislative body."
When asked whether any country should be held responsible if its role in the incident is proven, Dujarric replied that he has "no information."
In his words, the leak "had severe impacts all around, <…> including ecological impact."
"I'm not going to get ahead of my skis here and pronounce myself on something of which I have no information on," he added.
"People who do things should be held to account. But, as I say, I have zero information as to what the source and the cause of the leak is," the spokesman said.
On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported unprecedented damage that occurred the day before on three strings of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 offshore gas pipelines. On September 26, Swedish seismologists registered two explosions on the pipeline routes. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office launched a criminal case based on charges of international terrorism.
On February 8, US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published 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. The story cited an unidentified source with direct knowledge of the operational planning as saying that US President Joe Biden personally authorized the operation. Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council at the White House told TASS, replying to the news agency’s question, that the Hersh story was totally false and complete fiction.