BERLIN, February 9. /TASS/. Germany acts as "a minion" of the United States, even though this is against their interests, considering that it was next to impossible to carry out the act of sabotage on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines without US support, MP Steffen Kotre, a politician for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and a member of the Bundestag committee on energy and climate protection, told TASS.

"The government is not acting in favor of Germany. That should have been clear long ago," Kotre said when asked to comment on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s remarks in his interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson. Putin said that the German government was acting in the interests of the collective West, not its own.

The lawmaker is convinced that it was impossible to carry out any sabotage on the Nord Stream system without being spotted.

"Without the support from the United States, such a thing cannot even be imagined," he emphasized.

Kotre pointed out that the German government acts as "a minion" of the United States despite the fact that "German interests have been and are still being intensely torpedoed."

"However, it is okay with that. It no longer wants to use gas, and much less Russian gas. With its suicidal energy policy, it assumes that an industrialized country can run only on wind and solar power," the politician believes.

"This is absolutely wrong and leads to the start of deindustrialization," Kotre concluded.

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. On September 28, 2022, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office opened a case concerning an act of international terrorism.

On February 8, US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article that claimed, citing anonymous 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 that the Norwegians then activated the bombs three months later.

Later, The New York Times reported, citing American officials, that a certain "pro-Ukrainian group" that acted without the knowledge of the US authorities could have committed the sabotage on the gas pipelines.