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Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has claimed that the United States issued the order for the 2022 attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines. On 26 September 2022, a series of underwater explosions occurred on 3 of 4 pipes of the Nord Stream 1 (NS1) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) natural gas pipelines. Both pipelines were built by the Russian majority state-owned gas company, Gazprom, to transport natural gas from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. Lavrov made the comments when speaking to reporters during a visit to Azerbaijan on Monday, echoing Moscow’s long-stated claims that the West was involved.
“It is clear that to carry out such a terrorist attack, there was a command from the very top, as they say. The very top for the West is, of course, Washington,” Lavrov told Izvestia newspaper in a video interview published on its Telegram channel.
According to Lavrov, “attempts to blame everything on a group of drunken officers,” were not serious. Back then, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ukraine’s top military commander at the time, Valery Zaluzhny, oversaw the plan to blow up the pipelines. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky approved of the plan but tried to have it aborted after Washington warned him against it.
Europe’s imports of Russian gas have declined from about 450 million cubic meters per day (mcm/d) at the end of 2021 to about 150 mcm/d currently. However, commodity analysts at Standard Chartered have reported that the continent has made little progress in cutting any more Russian supplies in nearly two years despite calls from some nations to completely do away with Russian energy commodities even as the war in Ukraine shows no signs of slowing down. According to StanChart, there has been zero progress in reducing imports since flows through the Nord Stream pipeline system ceased. On the contrary, Europe’s gas imports from Russia have climbed ~50% since Q1-2023.
