WE ARE no nearer the truth seeing the light of day for those actually responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.

Any rational observer knows the United States was responsible for the act of sabotage that broke international law.

The brilliant investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a bombshell article on his Substack in February 2023 showing how the US planned and executed the audacious and heinous acts of sabotage that could have come straight out of a James Bond movie.

Sources told Hersh that in June 2022 US navy divers, under cover of a widely publicised Baltops 22 Nato exercise, planted the remotely triggered explosives that were used to destroy three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.

The source said the decision to sabotage the pipelines came directly from the then US president Joe Biden. The source claimed the issue for the Biden administration was never about whether to carry out the sabotage but only about how to destroy the pipelines without getting caught.

Biden’s neoconservative team of secretary of state Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and undersecretary of state for policy Victoria Nuland believed the pipelines increased Russian power in Europe and therefore must be opposed.

The two pipelines run parallel to each other for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea, beginning in western Russia near the Estonian border, passing near the Danish island of Bornholm and ending in northern Germany.

Opposition to the pipelines was completely bipartisan in the US.

Right-wing Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz raised concerns over the political threat posed by cheap Russian natural gas during the hearing held to confirm Blinken as secretary of state.

Hersh’s sources said that in December 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sullivan convened a meeting of a task force composed of members from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Central Intelligence Agency as well as the State and Treasury Departments.

Sullivan reportedly made it clear that he wanted the task force to come up with a plan for destroying the two Nord Stream pipelines and that the order came directly from Biden himself.

The CIA eventually crafted a plan for deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.

The Baltops 22 Nato exercise was to be used as a cover to plant the camouflaged explosives which would be detonated weeks or months later by a sonar signal. Long enough to cover the relation with the military exercise.

The increasingly out-of-it Biden let slip during a visit to the White House by then German chancellor Olaf Scholz that “if Russia invades [Ukraine] there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

In Europe there had also long been opposition to the pipeline.

As far back as 2007, the then defence minister of Poland, Bogdan Klich, labelled the proposed Nord Stream 1 pipeline as “the most outrageous attempt by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to divide and damage the European Union.”

But Germany was the key driver in Europe behind the Nord Stream project.

The Germans went on to reap the benefits of the pipelines. In 2016, nearly 30 per cent of the gas needs of Germany were met by Russian suppliers through Nord Stream 1.

The importance of the pipeline for the already under pressure German economy was underlined when the country’s former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined the board of Russian energy company Gazprom and later became chair of Russia’s oil giant Rosnet.

No doubt the cash on offer to Schroeder for the role also helped.

But the importance of Russian energy for Germany is highlighted by the economic collapse of the country since the pipelines were destroyed.

Four years after the explosion Germany faces record energy costs, deepening inflation and growing domestic discontent over its energy policy. Recent data shows heating prices have almost doubled since 2021.

Germany now imports almost half its gas from Norway, with smaller volumes from the Netherlands and Belgium, at prices far higher than those offered by Moscow before the war in Ukraine.

After the explosions Western powers made the ridiculous claim that Russia was responsible for blowing up its own pipeline.

Russia had invested heavily in Nord Stream and relied on it to export natural gas directly to Germany, bypassing other European countries. Any disruption or sabotage of the pipeline would clearly have negative economic consequences for Russia, cutting off a major source of revenue.

Many independent experts have slammed this preposterous claim.

But connected European politicians knew better. Post-explosions, Radoslaw Sikorski, European Parliament member and former Polish foreign minister, shared a photograph of a gas leak on his social media, saying: “Thank you, USA.”

Adding that “Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine.”

He later deleted the tweet.

Hersh is not known for getting things wrong in his many decades of reporting on national security.

Even when his reporting is initially denounced as lies by the US authorities later they have always had to admit, at least to some extent, that he was correct. He is able to do this because he has spent years cultivating impeccable sources.

It is clear to most geopolitical analysts that the US was responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines.

But last week Italy’s highest court approved the extradition to Germany of a Ukrainian man, Serhil Kuznietsov, on suspicion of setting off the Nord Stream pipelines explosions.

German prosecutors say that Kuznietsov organised and carried out the detonation of at least four bombs.

Kuznietsov has denied involvement in the explosions, saying he was in Ukraine where he was serving as an army captain at the time of the blasts.

Another Ukrainian, Volodymyr Zhuravlov, was also held in Poland on suspicion of carrying out the blast but was freed in mid-October.

German prosecutors allege the pair were “part of a group of individuals who placed explosives on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines near the island of Bornholm in September 2022.”

The team allegedly used fake identities to rent a yacht to ferry them and their equipment to the blast site.

Yes — the pair are accused of carrying out this sophisticated act of sabotage from a rented yacht in the hostile waters of the Baltic Sea!

This is so obviously absurd as to be an insult to any rational analyst.

We must reject the false narrative that the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was somehow divorced from and not carried out under the full control and authority of the US.

The bottom line is they have wilfully destroyed the economy of an alleged key ally in Europe to satisfy their own geopolitical priorities.

Nobody reading this will be the remotest bit surprised by that.