Russia To Invoke UN Security Council To Investigate Hersh’s Nord Stream Revelations

Feb. 15, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—In a “Government Hour” today with the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian Federal Assembly, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reported that his government has contacted the United Nations and is making plans to hold a special Security Council session on Feb. 22 in order to launch an investigation into the Sept. 26, 2022 explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, TASS reported this afternoon. Lavrov referred to an earlier investigation begun by Russia’s Prosecutor General, following the sabotage, and then the Feb. 8, 2023 article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who provided details on the role of the Biden administration, U.S. military and intelligence services in coordination with Norway, in planting explosives under the pipelines under cover of the BALTOPS military exercises, and later detonating them.

Lavrov also reported that Russia rejects the statement by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric claiming that the UN doesn’t have the authority to conduct such an investigation. He recalled a time when Guterres created an investigative team on his own authority after reports surfaced that the Syrian government might have been involved in actions that harmed the population in the Idlib area not under the government’s control.

If Guterres doesn’t want to call it an investigation, then call it something else, Lavrov said. Guterres is an experienced diplomat, so “he should not be shy about studying the facts.” But, he added, “I think that it will be very difficult for the Secretary General to distance himself from the facts which have been presented to the world and are very hard to deny,” TASS reported him as saying.

Seymour Hersh himself responded to TASS today that he has no plans to address the Feb. 22 UN Security Council session that Lavrov is planning. Asked if he had received an invitation to attend, he replied, “I don’t do anything with the government, or anybody else’s government.” Nor, he said, does he plan to make any public speeches, at the U.S. Congress for example. “I don’t go to Congress. I don’t speak to Congress, if I have an offer. It’s just standing: I don’t speak to Congress.”