Washington has given the green light to energy infrastructure sabotage in Europe, the Russian foreign minister has said
The US instructed Ukraine to target the TurkStream gas pipeline after sabotaging the Nord Stream sub-sea connectors in 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has claimed.
On Monday, the Defense Ministry in Moscow said Kiev had launched an unsuccessful attack with nine kamikaze drones on a gas compressor station near the village of Gaikodzor in Russia’s Krasnodar Region. The site is crucial for the operation of the TurkStream pipeline, which delivers Russian natural gas to Türkiye and several other European nations, via the Black Sea.
During a press conference on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that the United States may have been involved in an attempt to sabotage a gas facility.
“I have a firm belief that the US needs no competitor in any fields, starting with energy,” Lavrov stated.
The minister went on to accuse the US of encouraging actions that undermine Europe’s energy stability, claiming that American officials “in headlong manner give a go-ahead to perpetrate terrorist attacks that ruin the energy well-being of the EU.”
The US “prod their Ukrainian clients now to take out TurkStream after the [attack on] Nord Stream,” Lavrov alleged.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Monday that Budapest would consider any attempt to sabotage TurkStream as undermining its national sovereignty. The pipeline “is indispensable for the supply of natural gas” to Hungary, Szijjarto explained, calling on “everyone to respect the safety and operability of this transport route.”
On the same day, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the attack in Gaikodzor as a continuation of Kiev’s “energy terrorism.”
In the fall, German outlet Der Spiegel reported that then commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, had approved a plan to blow up the TurkStream pipeline at the same time as Nord Stream, shortly after the escalation of hostilities between Moscow and Kiev. However, the attack on TurkStream failed, sources claimed.
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Western Europe, were destroyed by blasts at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in September 2022.
In early February 2023, legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh authored a report claiming that it was US President Joe Biden who had given the order to destroy Nord Stream.
Senior Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have also pointed the finger at the US as the possible culprit behind the Nord Stream explosions. They have argued that Washington had the technical means to carry out the operation and stood to gain the most, considering that the attack disrupted Russian energy supplies to the EU and forced a shift to more expensive US-supplied liquefied natural gas.
