The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency reportedly warned Ukraine not to sabotage the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines last year after receiving a tip from the Netherlands' intelligence agency that a plot was under way.

The reports by several European and U.S. media outlets deepen the mystery of the Baltic Sea pipeline, which was mostly destroyed in September in explosions that remain under investigation.

In the aftermath of the blasts, Western officials blamed Russia for the September 26 incident, which all but destroyed the twin pipelines at a spot just east of a Danish island called Bornholm. The explosions were discovered as residual gas in the pipelines bubbled up to the surface.

The Ukrainian government has repeatedly denied responsibility for the attack.

The pipelines were built by Russia to deliver Russian gas directly to Germany and Europe while bypassing Ukraine, Poland, and other nations that had hostile ties with Moscow.

While the first pipeline was operational, the second had yet to receive final approval from German regulators. The United States had warned for years that the pipelines were a security risk for Germany and other European nations as they would make the countries beholden to Russian energy exports.

In the months that followed the blasts, the mystery over who was responsible deepened, with a spate of reports by European media organizations that focused on a yacht called the Andromeda that had been rented at a German port by a group of people, some of whom showed Bulgarian passports. German investigators reportedly found traces of explosives on the Andromeda, which had been reported in Bornholm prior to the explosions.

Other reports focused on the presence of a Greek-flagged tanker that had been seen drifting around the site of the blasts and later continued on to a Russian port.

Last month, the German newspaper Die Zeit and The Wall Street Journal reported that German police raided an apartment in the eastern German city of Frankfurt an der Oder, investigating a woman whose former boyfriend was a Ukrainian soldier. According to the reports, the soldier was among the crew members on the Andromeda prior to the blasts.

On June 13, Dutch public broadcaster NOS, along with German newspaper Die Ziet and public broadcaster ARD, reported that in June a year earlier, the main Dutch intelligence agency received a tip that a secret plot by Ukrainian operatives was under way to target the pipelines.

The Dutch agency forwarded the tip to the CIA, which then warned Ukrainian officials not to carry out the effort.

That reporting was later corroborated by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed U.S. officials. U.S. officials were reportedly told by Ukrainian counterparts that the plot had been aborted.

Then, in September, the explosions took place.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that German investigators were examining evidence that suggested the sabotage team had used Poland as a conduit or base for carrying out the attack.

A top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Mykhaylo Podolyak, called the latest reporting "endless anonymous sources [that are] artificially fueling the disinformation campaign about Ukraine's alleged involvement in the destruction of the Nord Stream."

It "should be viewed as a deliberate campaign to undermine Ukraine's credibility, reputation, and voice in the global arena," Podolyak said in a post on Twitter on June 13.

U.S. and European media have said the group that carried out of the attack may have done so without the knowledge of Zelenskiy or other top officials.

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The implications of this are enormous and represent a major problem for the federal health bureaucracy, several intelligence agencies, and the news media, to say nothing of politicians in both parties (but particularly those on the Democratic side) who've deflected public interest from the Wuhan Institute and gain-of-function research. The secrets of both the pandemic's origin and the reason for America's at-best-sluggish investigation of same have become the mother of all political footballs, and today's news is likely to be just the first in a series of loud surprises.

The bulk of this investigation was done by Michael and the Publicteam, who've been digging into this matter with impressive ferocity for a while now. My part was more incidental, and I'm a bit hamstrung in talking about the nature of it, except to say that in addition to the material Michael dug up in today's article, numerous federal agencies appear to have designed their probes of Covid-19's origins so as to discount the possibility of lab origin in advance.

We were told, for instance, that despite longstanding interest in the Wuhan Institute as a potential security concern, at least one intelligence agency overruled a majority of its in-house investigators to produce a report on the pandemic's origin discounting the lab-leak hypothesis.

The "patient zero" report is likely to focus even more attention on stories by publications ranging from the Washington Post to the Intercept to the Wall Street Journal about U.S.-funded "gain-of-function" research, which sources insist is the likely reason many agencies (with the notable exception of the FBI and the Department of Energy, which both pointed at lab origin as a possible explanation) were steered away from the Wuhan Institute as a possible outbreak source.

Moscow outlines conditions for use of nuclear weapons

© Sputnik / Maxim BogodvidMaria Zakharova, Director of the Department of Information and Press, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Russia could potentially resort to nuclear weapons only if its very existence were to be put at risk, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.

Speaking on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), which is being attended by delegates from more than 100 countries, Zakharova reiterated that Moscow regards its nuclear weapons as a last-ditch defensive measure.

"Russia's nuclear deterrent policies are purely defensive in nature, and the hypothetical use of nuclear weapons is clearly limited to extraordinary circumstances," Zakharova said.

She explained that those could include an attack on Russia or its allies involving nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, or "a conventional aggression that threatens the very existence of the state."

"This fundamental point remains unchanged," she stressed.

The spokeswoman went on to reiterate that "Russia is fully committed to the principle that a nuclear war should never be fought." "There could be no winners in it," she said, urging other nuclear countries to embrace this stance as well.

Zakharova's remarks come after last week Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow would start the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in early July once all the required facilities are ready. Russia first announced plans to place such weapons in the neighboring country in March in response to the UK having decided to equip Ukraine with depleted-uranium shells.

Commenting on the matter on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg denounced Russia's nuclear rhetoric as "reckless" and said that the US-led military bloc is closely monitoring the situation. However, he noted that "so far, we haven't seen any changes in the [Russian] nuclear posture that requires any changes in our posture."

Fears that Russia might use its vast nuclear arsenal amid the Ukraine conflict were rekindled in the West after late last year Putin signaled that Moscow would use "all the means available to us" to defend its people and territory. However, senior Russian officials have on numerous occasions insisted that Moscow is not threatening anyone with nuclear weapons.