The timeline of the Biden administration’s preparations to attack the Nord Stream pipeline outlined by Sy Hersh in his bombshell Substack article offers clues to understanding why former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kiev on NATO’s behalf in the spring of 2022 to sabotage the outlines of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, says former UN weapons inspector and retired US Marine major Scott Ritter.
“A lot of times people ask the question why? Why would [NATO and Johnson] do that? Why would the United States do that? And the answer is simple. Go back to February 7th [2022]. The only time Joe Biden has said anything that was true is when he said if Russia invades Ukraine, Nord Stream 2 will not happen. That was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” Ritter said, speaking to Sputnik’s Garland Nixon and Wilmer Leon on The Critical Hour radio show, referring to Biden’s famous February 2022 threat to “end” the Russian pipeline.
“If we had accepted peace in April, then Nord Stream would have still existed. In fact, it would have thrived because there would have been peace. No more reason to shut it down. We had to terminate the peace effort while we put the pieces in place to shut down Nord Stream 2, which was the objective,” Ritter said.
The destruction of the pipeline network was designed to hurt Germany and Europe, not Russia, the retired officer believes.
“Which means everything we say is a lie. We don’t talk straight to anybody. We claim to be your friend, but we blow up your infrastructure. We claim to be your allies, but we carry out the economic equivalent of Pearl Harbor. When is the world going to wake up to this? I mean, at what point in time does Europe stop behaving like an abused spouse and acknowledge that the Americans are abusers and [that] it’s time to put a court order, to break this relationship off?” Ritter asked.
In his article, citing a source “with direct knowledge of the operational planning” behind the Nord Stream sabotage attack, Hersh revealed that in June 2022, US Navy divers under the cover of NATO’s BALTOPS 22 exercises planted remotely-triggered C4 explosives on the Nord Stream network’s four lines, destroying three of four pipelines on September 26. The US received planning assistance for the attack from Norway, according to Hersh’s information.
The attack on Nord Stream, coming weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin promised to turn the pipelines on immediately if the West dropped its sanctions and agreed to long-term, ruble-based gas contracts, deprived Germany of a crucial source of energy to power its highly industrialized economy.
11 February 2023, 15:39 GMT
Before the escalation of the long-running Donbass crisis into a full-blown NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, the Nord Stream offered by far the largest capacity for shipping Russian gas to Germany and other countries in central Europe – with a combined volume of up to 110 billion cubic meters per year promising to feed the region's energy-hungry economies for decades. The measures introduced by Brussels to reduce reliance on Russian energy last spring, combined with the sabotage attacks against Nord Stream, heightened Europe’s dependence on more expensive American energy to unprecedented levels, with some economists, politicians and industrial leaders voicing concerns that the energy crunch will ultimately lead to the deindustrialization of Europe and plunge the region into poverty.
Listen to more of Ritter's discussion with Nixon and Leon on The Critical Hour here.