American warships were operating in the area with their transponders switched off, Danish Newspaper reports
According to a Danish daily newspaper, Politiken, a harbor master saw the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship, USS Kearsarge, approaching the pipeline a few days before the attack with its transponder turned off. Upon approaching the US naval vessel, the harbor master was ordered to turn back and move away.
The crucial energy infrastructure, built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe, was ruptured by underwater blasts in September 2022. The piece by Politiken was published on September 26 but largely went unnoticed. However, it resurfaced on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, with claims being reposted by Glenn Greenwald and other prominent journalists.
According to the article, American warships had been operating in the area east of the Danish island of Bornholm a few days before the explosions with their transponders off. The circumstances prompted a local harbormaster at the nearby Danish port of Christiansø, John Anker Nielsen, to launch a rescue mission. However upon reaching the scene they saw that the vessels in question were US Navy ships, Nielsen said. The Naval Command then told Nielsen and his colleagues to turn back, the harbormaster recounted.
An X poster, Stefan Homburg, referencing Wikipedia, said that the USS Kearsarge entered the Baltic Sea in August 2022 and formed the largest US battle group there since the end of the Cold War. A video on YouTube shows the ship leaving the Polish port of Gdynia on September 19, 2022. On September 25, 2022, it returned to the North Sea from Riga. On September 26, 2022, NordStream was destroyed by an explosion, probably remotely detonated. All this fits with Seymour Hersh’s research that the US was responsible for the explosion.
In early February 2023, Hersh reported claiming that US President Joe Biden had given the order to destroy Nord Stream. According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives that were detonated on September 26, 2022 had been planted at the pipelines during the previous June by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise called ‘Baltops 22’. The White House denied the report, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Senior Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have previously pointed the finger at the US as the possible culprit behind the Nord Stream explosions. The Russians have argued that Washington had the technical means to carry out the operation and stood to gain the most, considering that the attack disrupted Russian energy supplies to the EU and forced a shift to more expensive US-supplied liquefied natural gas.
More recently, Russia’s SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) has said the US and the UK were directly involved in the 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.