The journalist accuses the United States of being behind the attack on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines.
(Photo: imago/Engelhardt)
Brussels It’s a day of celebration for foreign policy mavericks: it was the Americans, clearly, now it’s out. A blog post by former investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is getting a lot of response. Hersh claims the US carried out the attack on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 Baltic Sea pipelines, which destroyed three of four pipes carrying Russian gas to Germany last September.
It is mainly the Kremlin’s apologists who are spreading the article. Hersh’s theses fit into her agenda. They reinterpret the harsh denials of the US government as a disguised admission of guilt, ignoring the fact that the article only refers to an anonymous source.
Hersh has earned merit in his reporting career, that’s undeniable. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for exposing a US war crime in Vietnam. But his Nord Stream piece isn’t worth the fuss that’s being made about it.
Hersh constructs a conspiracy without asking the right questions. The most important is: Why? The German-Russian natural gas partnership was history when the pipes burst on the seabed. The federal government had stopped the commissioning of Nord Stream 2 after Russia’s attack on Ukraine and announced that it no longer wanted to import Russian gas in the future. As a result, Nord Stream 1 no longer had a future.
Why should the Americans blow up an investment ruin – and risk a rift with Germany for a failed energy project? To sell LPG to the EU? Corresponding contracts had long been concluded in September 2023. It was the Europeans themselves who wanted to free themselves from gas dependence on Russia.
So who has the German-Russian energy relationship on their conscience? Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, who ordered the invasion of Ukraine.
More: Experts in the committee of inquiry make it clear: the construction of Nord Stream 2 was superfluous