Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin replied to NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg’s comments about including China as a “challenge” in NATO’s defense planning, saying, “NATO claims to be a regional defensive alliance, but it has constantly sought to breach its geographic confines and expand its agenda, stoke division and tensions, and create fears and confrontation. We urge NATO to abandon the outdated Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation, stop creating imaginary enemies and destabilizing Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and do something good for peace and stability in Europe and beyond,” Wang said.
The same questioner also referred to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s call for a UN investigation of the Nord Stream pipeline explosion. “On your second question, the Nord Stream pipelines are vital cross-border infrastructure projects. The explosions have had a major serious impact on the global energy market and ecological environment and caused international concerns over the security of major cross-border infrastructure. There should be an objective, impartial and professional investigation into the explosions, and those responsible must be held to account.
“Immediately after the explosions, we saw extensive coverage in US and other Western media with one-sided speculations on who was ‘responsible’ for the sabotage. What we see now, however, is that these media, hailed as free, professional and impartial, have fallen silent over Seymour Hersh’s detailed report. Just as Hersh wrote, ‘The New York Times published everything I wrote—most if not all on the front page—when I was an investigative reporter on the paper from 1972 to 1979. The Washington Post has followed my career as the loyal opposition and ran a long magazine profile of me more than two decades ago. Neither paper has run a word at this point about the pipeline story, not even to quote the White House’s denial of my reporting.’
“Do these Western media really not care about the truth behind the Nord Stream blast,” Wang went on. “Or is something else going on? What exactly do they know? Is there anything they are trying to hide? I suppose any truly objective, impartial and professional media will want to seek out the truth.”
