RTThu, 22 Aug 2024 08:36 UTC
© Getty ImagesFILE PHOTO: Czech President Petr Pavel during hsi visit to Ukrainian capital, Kiev.
Pipelines will always be attacked during conflicts due to their strategic importance, the Czech Republic's Petr Pavel has said
The Nord Stream pipelines were a "legitimate target" for Ukraine during its conflict with Russia, Czech President Petr Pavel has said. However, he stressed that he does not have any data proving that Kiev really was behind the attack on the energy infrastructure.
During his interview with the outlet Novinky.cz on Wednesday, Pavel was asked to comment on an article published in last week's Wall Stall Journal which claimed that the September 2022 explosions which ruptured the key energy infrastructure built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Western Europe had been carried out by Kiev.
According to the US paper's sources, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, who had initially approved the attack, later tried calling it off under pressure from the CIA, but the then-commander-in-chief of the country's military Valery Zaluzhny nonetheless went ahead with the operation.
The Czech president started by stressing that he does not have any "clear incriminating" information that would link Kiev to the attack on Nord Stream.
However, he pointed out that "when an armed conflict is waged, it is waged not only against military targets, but also against strategic targets. And pipelines are a strategic target."
If the Nord Stream sabotage "was aimed at cutting off gas and oil supplies to Europe and [the flow of] money back to Russia, then... it would be a legitimate target," Pavel, who is himself a former NATO general, said."Pipelines have always been and will always be targets because they have the potential to influence the conflict in one direction or the other," he added.
The Czech leader acknowledged that if Ukraine's role in the destruction of Nord Stream 1 and 2 is proven, it may "affect the willingness of countries [in the EU] to provide assistance to Ukraine" in its fight with Russia.
"On the other hand, we have no other option but to support Ukraine at this time. It is not about whether we like Ukraine or not, but about whether we want to live in a world where one country can invade another just because it is bigger and stronger," he claimed.
Top officials in Moscow, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, have previously pointed the finger at the US as the possible culprit behind the Nord Stream sabotage. They argued that Washington had the technical means to carry out such an operation and also stood to gain the most from the attack that disrupted Russian energy supplies to the EU, forcing the switch to more expensive US-supplied liquefied natural gas.In early 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that explosives had been planted on the Nord Stream pipelines by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise, and were later detonated later on orders from US President Joe Biden. The White House responded by rejecting these findings as "utterly false and complete fiction."
Comment:
1) The statements from Czech President Petr Pavel are interesting for several reasons.
Petr Pavel is not just any former general, he was the Chair of NATO Military Committee.
He served in the Czechoslovak People's Army and joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1985. Following the Velvet Revolution in 1989, and the subsequent dissolution of Czechoslovakia, Pavel served in the newly established Czech Army and participated in the 1993 evacuation of Karin Base during the Croatian War of Independence, which earned him praise and international recognition. Pavel rose through the ranks of the military to become the Chief of the General Staff of the Czech Armed Forces from 2012 to 2015. He was subsequently selected as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee between 2015 and 2018, becoming the first military officer from the former Eastern Bloc to hold the post. At NATO, he oversaw the Alliance's response and fallout of the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the 2018 Turkish invasion of Afrin, as well as efforts to tackle rising Chinese influence. Pavel retired from the military after 44 years and was discharged with honors after his term expired.
About the
Chair of the NATO Military Committee there is:
The Chair of the NATO Military Committee (CMC) is the head of the NATO Military Committee, which advises the North Atlantic Council (NAC) on military policy and strategy. The CMC is the senior military spokesperson of the 32-nation alliance and principal advisor to the Secretary General. The chair is one of the foremost officials of NATO, next to the Secretary General and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe. The CMC is assisted by the deputy chair, who advises the Deputy Secretary General and serves as the principal agent for coordination of nuclear, biological, and chemical matters for the Military Committee.[1]
2) From the article the following has consequences:
If the Nord Stream sabotage "was aimed at cutting off gas and oil supplies to Europe and [the flow of] money back to Russia, then... it would be a legitimate target," Pavel, who is himself a former NATO general, said.
"Pipelines have always been and will always be targets because they have the potential to influence the conflict in one direction or the other," he added.
The Czech leader acknowledged that if Ukraine's role in the destruction of Nord Stream 1 and 2 is proven, it may "affect the willingness of countries [in the EU] to provide assistance to Ukraine" in its fight with Russia.
"On the other hand, we have no other option but to support Ukraine at this time. It is not about whether we like Ukraine or not, but about whether we want to live in a world where one country can invade another just because it is bigger and stronger," he claimed.
Using the reasoning of Petr Pavel, there is much infrastructure in Europe including Russia that now can be destroyed. Fukushima like events, with reactor meltdowns are welcome as long as it is "Ukraine" that is letting out steam, or trying to blame Russia for it, because going back to the days following the Nord Stream sabotage, it was Russia, the MSM wanted to blame.
3) If one takes a step back and considers the US as a prime mover on the Nord Stream sabotage project, then some of the arguments Pavel brings up can still be used. The pipeline was not so much a strategic issue for Ukraine, as it was for the US in its struggle to severe ties between the EU and Russia and weaken the companies of the European allies. From this perspective, the last paragraph above could be rewritten to say something like: <we have no other option but to support the Deep State at this time. It is not about whether we like the Deep State or not, but about whether we want to live in a world where the Deep State can lord it over us - and we do.>
4) The statements from Petr Pavel "we have no other option but to support Ukraine at this time" can serve as a reply to the German politicians Alice Weidel from AfdD and Sarah Wagenknecht from BSW who in recent social media posts both have taken up the topic of the Nord Stream sabotage and the expenses for Germany. From
Alice Weidel:
Sahra Wagenknecht wrote today on her public
FB page, if translated from German:
We demand clarification: What did the federal government know about the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines and when? The Wall Street Journal's research shows that the German and US secret services were informed about the plans from the Netherlands before the explosion. The booming silence of the traffic lights is a scandal! The fact that it rejects an international investigation under UN supervision, as the federal government announced at the request of our Parliamentary Managing Director Jessica Tatti, is a deep insight. Pawn sacrifices and further cover-ups by the actors involved are now even more likely.
We are calling for an investigative committee in the Bundestag to finally clarify, almost two years after the destructive attack on German infrastructure, the extent to which states and their militaries were involved in the sabotage.
5) The observations of Wagenknecht are similar to some of those made by Russia. Monday, 19 Aug 2024 11:03 UTC there was via RT this article:
Germany must provide full disclosure over Nord Stream bombings - Lavrov
Later in the day, there was a report about the reply from the office of the German Foreign Ministry:
19 Aug, 2024 18:14
Germany says it's sharing Nord Stream attack information with Russia
[...]
Germany does share with Russia some information about the investigation into the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, a spokesman for the nation's Foreign Ministry said during a press conference on Monday. Moscow has previously accused Berlin of a lack of transparency in handling the probe.
[...]
"We are [engaged] in information exchange with the Russian authorities," the German Foreign Ministry spokesman said when asked to comment on recent statements by Moscow.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier accused Berlin of concealing facts about the attack and demanded full transparency in the investigation.
Germany must "stop categorically refusing to present the facts that it couldn't have failed to discover," he said in an interview with Izvestia published on Monday. Commenting on the development, the German spokesman insisted that Berlin cannot share any preliminary results of the probe because the investigation is still ongoing.
Information that can be shared without "jeopardizing" the investigation is handed over, the official maintained.
In his interview, Lavrov said that Moscow had already filed an official complaint regarding Berlin's probe and would request a transparent international inquiry into the incident.
[...]
'Information that can be shared without "jeopardizing" the investigation is handed over,' but is very little indeed. The day after, there was this response from Russia Foreign Ministry:
21 Aug, 2024 17:48
Germans lying about Nord Stream exchange - Moscow
Berlin has not shared information about the pipeline probe, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said
Berlin has not provided Moscow with any actual information about the attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said
The pipelines which ran under the Baltic Sea were used to transport Russian natural gas to Germany and other parts of Western Europe. They were damaged in September 2022 by a series of explosions near the Danish island of Bornholm.
Russia has accused the US of orchestrating the attack, while some media in the West have blamed a "pro-Ukrainian group."
Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Germany of refusing to officially share information about the investigation, suggesting that leaking it to the media instead raises "suspicions that all of this is staged" to deflect blame from the actual culprits.
German Foreign Ministry spokesman Sebastian Fischer responded on Monday that Berlin has engaged "in information exchange" with Moscow. Speaking on Wednesday, Zakharova accused him of lying.
"What Mr. Fischer said does not correspond to reality at all," Zakharova told reporters. "Simply put, it is a lie. For almost two years, the German side has responded to all inquiries from Russian authorities regarding the destruction of the Nord Streams with only empty formalities that contained no factual information."
Fischer's statement "only strengthens our suspicions of Berlin's intention to 'blow up' the investigation, which is being conducted in total secrecy, by not allowing it to identify the true instigators of the attack on the largest trans-European energy infrastructure facility," Zakharova added.
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Germany is also persecuting media outlets that are actually trying to discover what happened, which "shows that Berlin has something to hide and is extremely uninterested in conducting a real investigation and having the truth made public."
The original Nord Stream was built after the 2009 gas transit dispute between Kiev and Moscow, enabling Gazprom to supply Western Europe without depending on Ukraine and Poland. The second pipeline was finished in late 2021, despite delays due to US sanctions.
Western media narratives about "Ukrainian saboteurs" being behind the blast, whether acting on orders from Kiev or alone, began appearing only after US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh blamed Washington. Citing sources within the intelligence community, Hersh argued that CIA divers working with the Norwegian Navy planted remotely-triggered bombs on both pipelines, using a NATO exercise in the region as cover.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has maintained that Russia blew up its own pipelines, which Moscow has dismissed as ridiculous.
For more on the Nord Stream sabotage, see the link collection in this article:
Biden's attack on Nord Stream pipelines was aimed at Germany - Seymour Hersh
As firstly Biden said or implied he was going to do it, as the American military loaded the explosives, from their ships and their 32 diver teams, installed explosives and as Liz Truss phoned to inform Biden the deed had been done, admittedly she was sacked within five weeks for being so stupid, as her phone was open comms, the Russians picked the call up! America was caught with a very large hook, that even the lying political bastards and the CIA AND FBI in America cannot wriggle out of this one!