Russia’s defense ministry said on Saturday that British navy personnel blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines last month, a claim that London said was false and designed to distract from Russian military failures in Ukraine.
Russia did not give evidence for its claim that a leading NATO member had sabotaged critical Russian infrastructure amid the worst crisis in relations between the West and Russia since the depths of the Cold War.
The Russian ministry said that “British specialists” from the same unit directed Ukrainian drone attacks on ships of the Russian Black Sea fleet in Crimea earlier on Saturday that it said were largely repelled by Russian forces, with minor damage to a Russian minesweeper.
“According to available information, representatives of this unit of the British Navy took part in the planning, provision, and implementation of a terrorist attack in the Baltic Sea on September 26 this year – blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines,” the ministry said.
“To detract from their disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of defense is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale,” the British defense ministry said.
“This invented story, says more about arguments going on inside the Russian government than it does about the West.”
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, said Moscow will seek a reaction from the U.N. Security Council saying on social media Moscow wanted to draw attention to “a series of terrorist attacks committed against the Russian Federation in the Black and Baltic Seas, including the involvement of Britain in them”.
