The UN Security Council was convened at the request of the Russian Federation after a Ukrainian national was arrested in Italy for allegedly coordinating the September 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.
Russian Chargé d’Affaires Dmitry Polyanskiy gave a brief press briefing prior to the UNSC meeting, which is excerpted below, and followed by a summary of various nations’ responses in the Security Council hearing.
Polyanskiy: “[W][e believe that the situation around the Nord Stream sabotage is critical. It is developing in a wrong way. You know that from the outset we have been criticizing the investigations by Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Two of them—investigations by Sweden and Denmark—have already concluded by establishing the fact that there was indeed a sabotage of Nord Stream. This is, of course, something very ‘substantial’ for one and a half years of investigation. We are noticing that there are new details transpiring now about the course of the German investigation, but it still remains very obscure and non-transparent for the Security Council, which we think is very bad, because the direction where it all moves is towards shifting the blame from those who are really behind this sabotage and presenting to us a kind of scapegoats who may have been involved in this crime, but who could not have done it alone. I think everybody understands this.
“We are serious people in the Security Council, and we should engage in serious things. That’s why we are not satisfied with this, and we want to raise awareness of everybody that an international investigation of this act of sabotage is very important. It is important not only for Russia, and not only for Germany—whose economic interests are very much at stake—but it is also needed to exclude such situations in the future and not to give a wrong example to all kind of international terrorists and other rogue actors who might be inspired by the inability of the international community to find those accountable for this terrorist attack and bring them to justice.”
When asked by a journalist about the recent arrest in Italy, Polyanskiy replied: “I can tell you that this version is—let me put it diplomatically—very questionable. Because they ask us to believe that a group of amateur divers are capable of putting an explosive device at the depths of 80 meters in the center of the Baltic Sea—every inch of which is monitored by NATO member states—and that nobody was aware of this and nobody helped these guys. And they are absolutely rogue actors without any help. This is for a Hollywood movie, but not for real life.”
