The UN Security Council failed to pass a Russian draft resolution on an international investigation into the terrorist attack on the Nord Stream pipelines yesterday. The vote was three in favor—Russia, China and Brazil—and twelve abstentions, reported TASS.
Russian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia told the council that the Russian resolution called for the establishment of an international independent commission to conduct a comprehensive, transparent, and impartial investigation into the circumstances of the incident. “At the final stages of consultations on our draft resolution, the only argument that we heard from the colleagues who doubted whether an international investigation was needed, was that we first should wait for the results of national investigations,” he said. “To that, we must say that such inquiries may last forever in the same inefficient and non-transparent manner, while we lose precious time.” He had already noted earlier that the Danish, Swedish, and German investigations had provided Russia with nothing but formal replies. “Therefore, unless there is an objective and transparent international investigation, we will not be able to find out the truth,” he said. (https://russiaun.ru/en/news/270323_b)
After the vote, U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood, Alternate Representative for Special Political Affairs, not only denied U.S. involvement in the attack—an accusation that Nebenzia didn’t make—but said that the Russia resolution “was an attempt to discredit the work of ongoing national investigations and prejudice any conclusions they reach that do not comport to Russia’s predetermined and political narrative. It was not an attempt to seek the truth.”
“When we raised the issue of an objective international investigation, the tactic of our American and European colleagues narrowed down to denying the involvement of the United States on the one hand and preventing a transparent and impartial inquiry into the circumstances of the sabotage on the other,” Nebenzia said in his remarks following the vote. “The more evidence testifying to the involvement of Washington and its NATO allies came to surface, the more vocal the Western bloc was getting about alleged inexpediency of an international investigation.