White House denies report that US blew up Nord Stream pipelines

The White House on Wednesday denied a new report from controversial investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that the United States was behind the attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines linking Russia to Germany.

Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and former New Yorker staff writer whose reporting in recent years has frequently come under scrutiny, wrote in a Substack post Wednesday that the Nord Stream blasts were a long-planned, covert operation carried out by Navy divers operating under the cover of NATO military exercises.

"Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of [the NATO exercise] known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four [pipelines],” Hersh wrote.

He cited just one anonymous source in the lengthy post, whom he said had “direct knowledge of the operational planning.”