"Nord Stream is legitimate target in war, - Czech President Pavel
Czech President Petr Pavel believes that the Nord Stream pipeline is a legitimate target for attack in a war.
This is reported by Censor.NET with reference to Novinky.
According to him, during an armed conflict, not only military targets are attacked, but also strategic targets.
"And pipelines are a strategic target. If the attack was aimed at cutting off gas and oil supplies to Europe and returning money back to Russia, then - and I'm speaking conditionally - it would be a legitimate target," the Czech leader said.
Pavel added that he had no clear information that Ukraine was behind the pipeline bombings.
The Czech president denied that the attack on Nord Stream caused significant problems for Europeans
"At the time, we already had a number of alternatives, so Nord Stream was not a critical pipeline on which Europe's energy security depended. Of course, it caused some complications, but not ones that we could not handle," Pavel explained.
Undermining Nord Stream
As a reminder, at the end of September 2022, four leaks occurred on two lines of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm. The investigation showed that the pipelines were blown up by underwater explosives, but it remains unknown who was behind the explosions.
At the same time, Western media outlets have reported suggesting that non-governmental groups, including Russians and Ukrainians, may have been behind the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
Denmark, Sweden, and Germany launched their own investigations into the incident.
The EU did not officially accuse Russia of involvement in the gas pipeline explosions, but did not rule out the possibility.
For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the United States, Ukraine, and Poland the beneficiaries of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, and before that, he accused the "Anglo-Saxons" of blowing up the pipelines.
In February 2024, Denmark announced that it was closing its investigation into the 2022 explosions on Russian Nord Stream gas pipelines transporting gas to Germany due to a lack of evidence.
Earlier in February, Sweden suspended its investigation into the explosions, saying it had no jurisdiction over the case, but handed over the evidence it had found to German investigators, who have yet to publish any conclusions.
On 14 August 2024, the media reported that Germany had issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian suspected of blowing up Nord Stream.
At the same time, the Polish prosecutor's office said that the suspect had left for Ukraine.
According to the WSJ, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy initially approved the Nord Stream pipeline blow-up, but then tried to cancel it after the CIA intervened
