The Nord Stream pipelines have long slipped from headlines, apart from the occasional whodunnit narratives, and they have remained damaged and offline. The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombings occurred on September 26, 2022 - but their future fate is still up in the air and being wrangled over, including by Washington.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has alleged that Washington now it wants to buy the part of the pipelines owned by European companies, in order to assert influence and control over European energy.
"Take a look at how the Americans are planning to restore Nord Stream. I am talking about two gas pipelines, and they were blown up," he told RT in an interview this week.
"The Americans under Biden said that these gas pipelines would not work, but now they accuse the Ukrainians of blowing up these two pipelines," he continued, before noting: "Actually, four pipelines. Three out of four were blown up. The Americans want to buy out the part that was owned by European companies."
He further explained that the US "wants to strike the deal at a price that is 10 times lower than the initial European investments" - according to Russian state media.
He explained that this would be about US control, and the ability to dictate the price of gas - instead of what would have been a prior mutual agreement between Russia and Germany, before the pipelines were sabotaged.
"They [the US] openly stated that they wanted to halt gas transit via pipelines from Russia to Europe through Ukraine in order to control these flows as well," he alleged.
Last year ZeroHedge asked Trump directly about who was behind the Nord Stream sabotage op. "If you can believe it they said Russia blew it up," Trump initially responded at the time.
"Well probably if I asked certain people they would be able to tell you without having to waste a lot of money on an investigation," the president said. "But I think a lot of people know who blew it up, but I was the one who blew it up originally because I wouldn't let it be built, and then when Biden got in he allowed it to be built."
President strongly suggested that based on classified intelligence he knows exactly who was behind the September 26, 2022 covert operation which ended in the Baltic Sea explosions and major leaks which took the vital Russia to Germany natural gas pipelines permanently offline. Of course, with no investigation whatsoever (a serious European inquiry didn't even begin till the following year), Western mainstream press coalesced around the dubious "Russia bombed their own pipeline!" narrative.
In early 2023, famed journalist and Pulitzer price winner Seymour Hersh published a bombshell report which concluded that the United States blew up the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline as part of a covert operation under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise. Hersh's report has been subject to a lot of pushback since then, but he's not backed off this initial reporting and investigation.