MOSCOW, June 19. /TASS/. Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov believes that media reports regarding Ukraine’s involvement in the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage aim to undermine Western support for Kiev.

"I connect such publications with the desire to stop aiding Ukraine," Rezinkov said in an interview published Monday. In his opinion, such reports aim to sow doubt in the Ukrainians and to "lower the level of trust" between the Ukrainian military-political leadership and its counterparts from other countries.

The Ukrainian defense minister believes that for Kiev to carry out an operation to blow up the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany would risk losing the trust of Western allies.

He reiterated that Ukrainian authorities were not involved in blowing up the pipelines.

"What purpose would blowing up the Nord Stream serve for Ukraine? […] We have no purpose! Neither economic, nor political," he said.

On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported "unprecedented damage" on three strings of the offshore gas pipelines of the Nord Stream system. Later, Swedish seismologists said they had identified two explosions on the route of the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. Following the incident, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office initiated a criminal case on charges of international terrorism.