The Biden Administration is bristling at suggestions that the U.S. was somehow behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. At the White House yesterday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan accused Russia of doing the things it was accusing others of doing, but at the same time he wasn’t ready to flat-out accuse Russia of blowing the pipelines up. “Well, first, Russia has done what it frequently does when it is responsible for something, which is make accusations that it was really someone else who did it. We’ve seen this repeatedly over time,” he said. “But the President was also clear today that there is more work to do on the investigation before the United States government is prepared to make an attribution in this case.”
While a definitive determination will have to wait for the outcome of an investigation, “what we can say unequivocally is the suggestions Russia has made about the United States and other countries are flat-out false,” Sullivan said. “Russia knows they’re false. But, of course, this is part of their playbook.”
Earlier, President Biden said that Russia was “pumping out disinformation and lies” about the pipelines and that the U.S. and its allies will conduct an investigation “at the appropriate moment” to find out what really happened. “We don’t know that yet. Just don’t listen to what Putin’s saying—what he’s saying we know is not true,” Biden said.
