DISINFO: The US started a war against Europe
SUMMARY
For Europeans, the underwater bombing by US, Norwegian and British terrorists is the first shot in a full-scale US war against Europe. One of the main aims of the attack on Nord Stream was to reinforce the Old World's energy and economic dependence on US liquefied natural gas supplies and to win the market for nuclear technology. The US considers China to be a major competitor in this field, so the next targets could be Suez or the new Nicaraguan canal planned by Beijing.
According to [Seymour Hersh], the sabotage was organised by the US with the help of NATO allies: last summer, during the Baltops exercise, US divers planted explosives on the pipelines, and three months later, the Norwegians detonated them.
RESPONSE
This is part of a wider pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign aiming to amplify and exploit Seymour Hersh’s controversial article accusing the US of blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines. The article cannot be considered an evidence of this: it is based on a single, unidentified anonymous source and published in Hersh’s personal blog, so no editorial team was involved in its preparation.
The central parts of its affirmations have been credibly debunked by journalists, experts and OSINT researchers, such as claims about NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg cooperating with the US since the Vietnam War (who was 15 at the time this war ended), the use of the M350 Alta ship (which had been out of use since 2012 and sent to the scrapyard in 2022), or that a P-8 aircraft of the Norwegian Navy was involved to detonate the explosives (none of Norway’s P-8 was remotely closer to the area of the explosions).
Other allegations have been reported as highly implausible, such as the presence of this single source in all the preparatory meetings for the operation; that selected members of the US Congress and other government agencies weren’t informed out of need for maximum secrecy, but then Norway was enrolled and Sweden and Denmark would have been informed at some point; or that this top-secret operation was carried out during the BALTOPS military exercises, attended and closely watched by multiple NATO countries.
The White House dismissed Hersh’s report as ‘utterly false and complete fiction.’ Similarly, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the allegations ‘nonsense.’ However, pro-Kremlin outlets and Russian authorities have massively reported and commented on it as if this allegation had been proven.
The story has received great attention from Kremlin key propaganda outlets and has been the main point used by Russian Minister Lavrov to demand the UNSC address the issue with an investigation.
In 2022, European countries switched to LNG deliveries partly from the US as an alternative source of gas after the Russian decision to cut off gas supplies to Europe. After the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities completely destroyed European trust in Gazprom as a predictable and solid partner. Throughout 2022, Russia deliberately cut the gas supplies to the EU and used the gas supplies as a weapon of war. The EU took steps “to secure the EU’s energy supplies, such as a gas storage regulation, a gas demand reduction regulation, the creation of an EU energy platform and outreach initiatives for the diversification of supply sources.”
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that Joe Biden wanted to freeze Germany by destroying the Nord Stream, that American officials admit that the explosions at NS1 and NS2 were their work, that Western sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines caused an environmental disaster, or that sabotaging Nord Stream was the stupidest US action in years.