Kyiv’s defense minister has said a recent media investigation pinning blame for last year’s Nord Stream attacks on Ukraine is “delusional.”
One of the theories floated by the extensive Der Spiegel report – titled “Investigating the Nord Stream Attack – All the Evidence Points to Kyiv” is a team of six saboteurs under the overall command of Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, carried out the attack.
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In a response to a Kyiv Post reporter at a press conference on Monday evening, Oleksii Reznikov, said: “With all due respect to the media, but this is a delusion. Zaluzhny has clearly defined tasks.
“And these tasks do not include operations abroad. His task is to repel armed aggression on the territory of Ukraine.”
The Der Spiegel report – which claims President Zelensky had no knowledge of the attack – also cites the Federal Court of Germany, which calls the incident “an attack on the internal security of the state [of Germany].”
Reznikov said that Ukraine is focused solely in liberating Ukrainian land occupied by Russia, saying: “We need to liberate our temporarily occupied territories.”
The Nord Stream attacks have spawned a mass of accusations, hypotheses and conspiracy theories. While the accepted cause is believed to be sabotage, investigators are yet to draw any solid conclusions about who carried out the attack.
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On Sept. 26, 2022, multiple ruptures in both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines were detected, with methane gas bubbling up to the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Subsequent investigations by Swedish authorities determined sabotage to be the most likely cause.
The attack severely damaged Russia’s ability to reap millions of dollars by selling natural gas to Western Europe.
Just about everyone was a suspect – Ukraine and their Western allies including the US, arguably had an incentive to cut off one of Russia’s most important revenue streams.
On the other hand, Russia could have benefitted from carrying out a false flag operation itself to raise the pressure of high global energy prices for Ukraine’s allies to reduce support for Kyiv.
In March, the New York Times, citing its sources among American officials, concluded that intelligence data indicated the work of a pro-Ukrainian group.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the President’s Office, wrote on Twitter at the time that “Ukraine has no relation to the incident in the Baltic Sea and has no information about "pro-Ukrainian sabotage groups.’”
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