BEIJING, March 3. /TASS/. American journalist Seymour Hersh has admitted that from the very beginning he believed that the United States was behind the explosions on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, according to his interview with CCTV published on Friday.

"We've put now $113 billion into the war [in Ukraine] so far. And that is just by the government's count, not counting the money that came from Germany, and West, and NATO and other countries of the Western Union. The only suspect [in the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage] in terms of discovering the obvious was the United States," he said.

As Hersh pointed out, for him, the involvement of US authorities in the explosions was more than obvious. "If you knew something about the history of the pipeline, something about that the oil business as I do. And I did, still do, not much but enough, and so I see people, you know, I’ve been doing stories, without naming sources, for the New York Times, and New York Magazine, and London Review of Books. When I worked at The New York Times I must have written a dozen stories about CIA wrongdoing in Chile spying on its own citizens in violation of the law," he explained.

Nord Stream AG reported that three threads of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 offshore gas pipelines had suffered unprecedented damage on September 27. Swedish seismologists later revealed that two explosions had been recorded along the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26. After that, investigators from Russia’s Federal Security Service initiated an probe into this act of international terrorism in connection with the explosions.

On February 8, Seymour Hersh, an American journalist who specializes in investigative reporting, stated in an article citing a source that explosive devices had been planted under Russian gas pipelines in June 2022 under the cover of the Baltops exercise by US Navy divers supported by Norwegian experts. According to Hersh, the decision to conduct the operation was made by US President Joe Biden after nine months of discussions with administration officials involved in national security issues.

In response to a TASS request, White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson slammed the version presented by Hersh "utterly false and complete fiction."

On March 2, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at the G20 Foreign Ministers Meeting in New Delhi that Russia insisted on a swift and honest investigation with its own participation into the sabotage of the gas pipelines. At the same time, according to him, Russia's call to reflect in the G20 declaration the need for a fair investigation of the Nord Streams sabotage was ignored.