US Navy vessels were operating at the scene shortly before the explosions that crippled the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea, Danish newspaper Politiken has reported, citing a local harbormaster.
The crucial energy infrastructure, built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe, was ruptured by underwater blasts in September 2022.
The piece by Politiken was published on September 26 but largely went unnoticed. However, it resurfaced on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, with claims being reposted by Glenn Greenwald and other prominent independent journalists.
According to the article, American warships had been operating in the area east of the Danish island of Bornholm with their transponders switched off.
The paper spoke to John Anker Nielsen, the harbormaster at the Danish port of Christianso, located near Bornholm. He said he had decided to share details of the events of September 2022, despite initially being “not allowed to say a thing” about them.
According to Nielsen, he launched a rescue operation in the area four or five days before the Nord Stream blasts after spotting ships with their transponders switched off and assuming there was an emergency.
However, when Danish rescuers approached the scene, they saw that the vessels in question were US Navy ships, Nielsen said. The Naval Command then told Nielsen and his colleagues to turn back, the harbormaster recalled.
Politiken said Nielsen does not believe Western media claims that Nord Stream was sabotaged by Ukraine, supposedly using a yacht, named Andromeda, and a small crew to carry out the sophisticated attack.
According to the paper, the harbormaster instead has “some faith” in the version of events provided by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
In early February 2023, Hersh authored a report claiming that US President Joe Biden had given the order to destroy Nord Stream. According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives that were detonated on September 26, 2022 had been planted at the pipelines during the previous June by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise called ‘Baltops 22’. The White House denied the report, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Senior Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have previously 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.