NEW YORK, February 15. /TASS/. The US sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines so that Germany would not choose cheap Russian gas over its support for Ukraine, American journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview with the democracynow.org portal.

"What he [US President Joe Biden] did is he said, I'm in a big war [in] Ukraine. It's not looking good. I want to be sure I get German and West European support. And I know winter's coming and if it's going to be bad, I don't want the Germans to say we got to check out [helping Ukraine] because we're getting massacred. We'll be massacred. With no cheap fuel, and our economy will go bonkers. We're going to check out and we're going to open up the gas line which they could do. So we (the US - TASS) took away that option," the investigative reporter said.

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.