MOSCOW, March 22. /TASS/. The US government was aware of preparations to carry out the September 2022 sabotage attack on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream-2 gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told the Rzeczpospolita newspaper.
"If you believe the media, the one who did it [sabotaged the gas pipelines] was the one who had an interest in carrying it out. The American side knew about it (preparations for the attack - TASS) in advance and did nothing to interfere," the top Polish diplomat said. He avoided answering a reporter’s question, however, on whether Ukraine may have been behind the blasts that destroyed the pipeline.
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.
Later, noted American journalist Seymour Hersh published an article, citing anonymous sources inside Washington, claiming that the explosive devices were placed under the gas pipelines in June 2022 by US Navy divers with the assistance of Norwegian specialists, and then were detonated in September. Subsequently, the New York Times quoted US officials as saying that the sabotage of the gas pipelines could have been carried out by an unidentified "pro-Ukrainian group" that acted without the knowledge of US authorities.