MOSCOW - Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Western governments on Wednesday of seeking to silence media coverage of Seymour Hersh's Nord Stream report.
The Pulitzer-winning American journalist wrote in a blog post last week that the United States had allegedly sent navy divers to blow up three of the four Russian Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, which run to Germany under the Baltic Sea. The journalist said that the details of this operation were shared with him by a single source with direct knowledge of the planning.
The report went largely unnoticed by major American and British newspapers, which Lavrov said was a tell-tale sign of "Western governments trying to keep the media under control".
"It is funny that none of Western media has been writing about this, leaving Seymour Hersh to fend for himself on social media and on select internet platforms," the diplomat told foreign journalists in Moscow.
"Imagine something like this being attributed to Russia, for instance (an attack) on the Canadian-American oil pipeline. You would have nothing else to do. You would be told to cover only that," Lavrov said.
The White House dismissed Hersh’s report as lies.
Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, blew the whistle on US atrocities in Vietnam War and more recently on prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
Sweden, Denmark along with Germany, the main beneficiary of Russian gas, opened separate probes into the blasts.
Hersh wrote that cheap Russian gas had been a boon for the German economy, fuelling its post-war rise to prosperity while diminishing Europe's dependence on the US.
He cited a source with direct knowledge of the US operational planning as saying that Norway allegedly played a key role in helping the US organise the attack and keep the Swedish and Danish navies in the dark.
The US and Norway dismissed the allegations as lies.
On September 26, 2022, three of the four strings of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines were damaged after an underwater blast.
Meanwhile, Russia says it has requested a UN Security Council meeting on February 22, 2023, on the Nord Stream Pipeline blast.
The Russian Deputy Permanent Representative Dmitry Polyanskiy confirmed on Wednesday that the Russian Mission to the UN was planning to organise the meeting
"In the light of new information regarding the undermining of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, we requested a meeting of the UN Security Council on February 22,” Polyanskiy wrote in his Telegram account.
Sputnik