Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday accused the West of sabotaging Russia-built gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea to Germany, a charge that has been vehemently denied by the United States and its allies.
Nordic nations said the undersea blasts that damaged the pipelines this week and have led to huge methane leaks involved several hundred pounds of explosives.
The claim by Putin came ahead of an emergency meeting Friday at the U.N. Security Council in New York on the attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines and as Norwegian researchers published a map projecting that a huge plume of methane released by damaged pipelines will travel over large swaths of the Nordic region.
Speaking Friday in Moscow at a ceremony to annex four regions of Ukraine into Russia, Putin claimed that the “Anglo-Saxons” in the West have turned from sanctions on Russia to “terror attacks,” sabotaging the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in what he described as an attempt to “destroy the European energy infrastructure.”
He added that “those who profit from it have done it,” without naming a specific country.
In Washington, President Joe Biden’s administration dismissed Putin’s pipeline claims as outlandish.
“We’re not going to let Russia’s disinformation distract us or the world from its transparently fraudulent attempt to annex sovereign Ukrainian territory,” White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said Friday.
Moscow says it wants a thorough international probe to assess the damage to the pipelines, which carry Russian natural gas to Europe. Putin’s spokesman has said “it looks like a terror attack, probably conducted on a state level.”
European nations, which have been reeling under soaring energy prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have noted that it is Russia, not Europe, that benefits from chaos in the energy markets and spiking prices for energy. The West has charged that Putin is using “energy blackmail” and reducing gas flows to Europe to divide the continent's support for Ukraine.
Even before Putin’s comments, State Department spokesman Ned Price strongly rejected any claims that the U.S. might have sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines.
“The idea that the United States was in any way involved in the apparent sabotage of these pipelines is preposterous. It is nothing more than a function of Russian disinformation and should be treated as such,” Price said Wednesday.
