The chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Christoph Heusgen, said on February 13 that he considered it a mistake to support the construction of Nord Stream 2 during the time when he served as an adviser to ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Heusgen explained that he supported the construction of the gas pipeline because of the accident at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, as one of its consequences was the search for alternatives to nuclear energy.
“The decision on Nord Stream 2, which today everyone accompanies with the exclamation “how could you”, can only be explained by the context of 2015, when after Fukushima in Germany it was decided to abandon nuclear energy earlier,” Heusgen told the press -conference, broadcast on the website of the German government.
According to Merkel’s ex-adviser, at the time when the pipeline was being negotiated, Russian gas was considered the best transitional energy carrier on the path to green energy. In addition, Heusgen added, the decision to build the gas pipeline was then supported by the majority of politicians and the population of Germany.
At the same time, he noted that even then there were objections from the United States, but he did not comment on the explosions that occurred on the gas pipeline.
In September 2022, leaks were discovered at Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2. The representative of the seismic center of Sweden, Bjorn Lund, said that two powerful underwater explosions were registered in the area of leaks in pipelines at the time of the emergency.
On February 8 of this year, US journalist Seymour Hersh published an investigation in which, citing sources, he indicated that American divers planted explosives under gas pipelines during alleged NATO exercises, and the Norwegians activated it. He also noted that the White House intended to force Germany to provide military and financial support to Ukraine.
After the release of the investigation, the Pentagon denied the involvement of the United States in undermining the gas pipelines. In turn, the editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine, Igor Korotchenko, in an interview with Izvestia, noted that the United States would do everything to prevent a wide discussion of Hersh’s publication.
Against the backdrop of this investigation, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Sergei Ryabkov assured that the United States of America is waiting for the consequences after the Hersh investigation.
