|
Finland said on Tuesday that a subsea gas pipeline and a
telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia under
the Baltic Sea had been damaged in what may have been a
deliberate act.
"I do not have technical information, I do not know if our
special services have such information, but of course, this is
quite disturbing news," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told
reporters when asked about the pipeline.
The damage to the gas pipeline was believed to have taken place
in Finnish waters, while the telecoms cable breach was in
Estonian waters, Finnish authorities said.
Peskov added that there had been dangerous precedents in the
Baltic - blasts on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September
2022 that Moscow blames on the United States and Britain.
Washington and London have denied involvement.
"We know that dangerous precedents for carrying out terrorist
attacks against critical infrastructure facilities in the Baltic
have already been created, I mean the attacks against the Nord
Stream pipelines," Peskov said.
It is still a mystery who was behind the attack on Nord Stream.
A sharp drop in pressure on both pipelines was registered on
Sept. 26, 2022 and seismologists detected explosions. Swedish
and Danish investigators have yet to determine who was
responsible.
U.S. newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York
Times and The Wall Street Journal have reported that the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency knew of a Ukrainian plot to attack
the pipelines. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has
denied Ukraine attacked them.
In a February blog post, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh cited an unidentified source as saying
that U.S. navy divers had destroyed the pipelines with
explosives on the orders of President Joe Biden.
The White House dismissed Hersh's report as "utterly false and
complete fiction". Norway said the allegations were "nonsense".
The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines have a joint
annual capacity of 110 billion cubic metres - more than half of
Russia's normal gas export volumes. Sections of the 1,224-km
(760-mile) long pipelines, which run from Russia to Germany, lie
at a depth of around 80-110 metres.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Gareth Jones and Emelia
Sithole-Matarise)
[© 2023 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2022 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.
|
|
