“Thank you USA,” said Poland’s former defense and foreign minister Sikorski
While the United States, Russia and most European governments were reticent to judge who might be behind Monday’s explosion that damaged both Nord Stream pipelines and cut Germany off from Russian gas, former Polish minister and MEP Radoslaw Sikorski had no such qualms.
“Thank you USA,” Sikorsky tweeted on Tuesday, along with a photo of the massive gas leak in the waters of the Baltic Sea. Both pipelines were seriously damaged off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm, in what everyone is now calling a deliberate act.
Sikorsky tweeted laterin Polish, that damage to Nord Stream means that Russia must “talk to the countries that control the Brotherhood and Yamal gas pipelines, Ukraine and Poland” if you want to continue supplying gas to Europe. “Good work,” he concluded.
Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 lost all pressure on Monday, after what Swedish and Danish authorities later said were a series of underwater explosions. The first pipeline was operating at reduced capacity after what Russia said were technical difficulties, while the second was fully pressurized but not operating, due to German refusal to certify it.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wondered if Sikorsky’s tweet amounted to one “official statement that this was a terrorist attack.” Meanwhile, Moscow’s deputy UN ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, thanked Sikorski for “makes it crystal clear who is behind this terrorist-like targeting of civilian infrastructure!”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki did not quite go as far as Sikorski, choosing to describe the Nord Stream incident as “an act of sabotage, related to the next stage of escalation of the situation in Ukraine.”
Not just any MP, Sikorski is a former British citizen and fellow at several US and NATO think tanks, as well as Poland’s former defense (2005-2007) and foreign minister (2007-2014). In October 2014, he was arrested manufactures a claim about Russian President Vladimir Putin who wanted to divide Ukraine with Warsaw, and was forced to back down.
Sikorski called Russia a “serial rapist” in January 2022 and in June told Ukraine’s Espreso TV that NATO had the right to give Kyiv nuclear weapons. He is married to the American expert Anne Applebaum, who is also one outspoken enemy of Russia.
While Sikorski thanked the US for the Nord Stream sabotage, Kyiv blamed Russia. President Vladimir Zelensky’s adviser Mikhail Podoliak called it a “a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression against the EU”, to argue that the best response would be to send German tanks to the Ukrainian army.
Source: sn.dk