US is legitimizing terrorism – Moscow

Washington’s reluctance to comment on reports of Ukraine’s involvement in the Nord Stream attack is indicative, Russia’s envoy has said

Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, has accused the US of trying to shift the blame for the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines onto its “puppets” in Ukraine.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the 2022 attack that ruptured the key energy infrastructure built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Western Europe had been masterminded by a group of Ukrainian military commanders and businessmen.

According to the US outlet’s sources, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky had initially approved the operation. He reportedly later tried to call it off, following pressure from the CIA, but the country’s then-commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny told him that it was too late to do it, as the sabotage group had already been dispatched and there was no way to contact it.

When addressed by journalists regarding the issue on Thursday, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said “I am not going to comment on the Wall Street Journal reporting on this.”

Washington’s reluctance to address the reports of Ukraine’s involvement in the Nord Stream attack is “indicative,” Antonov said in a post on Telegram on Friday.

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Zelensky’s top aide denies Kiev’s involvement in Nord Stream attack

The administration of US President Joe Biden “is trying to take the favorable position of an outside observer. They want everyone to forget the inconvenient statements from the US leadership about the importance of destroying the gas pipelines.”

In February 2022, Biden openly warned that if Russia launched a military operation against Ukraine, “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

The officials in Washington “are trying to shift all responsibility [for the destruction of Nord Stream] onto their Ukrainian puppets. Although they understand perfectly well that Kiev will not take any step without the ‘go-ahead’ from Washington,” the ambassador stressed.

The behavior of the Biden administration amounts to “latent legitimization of terrorism, even when it comes to the territory of their own allies. In fact, the US is writing a ‘blank check’ for similar crimes in the future,” Antonov insisted.

According to the diplomat, Russia, for its part, will keep working towards identifying and holding accountable “the true culprits” of the Nord Stream blasts and making sure that such attacks will not be repeated in the future.

Top officials in Moscow, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, have previously pointed the finger at Washington, arguing that it stood to gain the most from the sabotage that disrupted Russian energy supplies to the EU, which forced the bloc to rely on more expensive US-supplied liquefied natural gas.

READ MORE: Zelensky gave initial order for Nord Stream attack – WSJ

In early 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that explosives were planted on the Nord Stream pipelines by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise, and detonated later on orders from Biden. The White House had rejected Hersh’s findings as “utterly false and complete fiction.”