"Coordinated Media Hoax Campaign" - Russia Blasts NYTimes Report On Nord Stream

"As a reminder, last month, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh concluded that the United States blew up the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream natural gas pipelines last September as part of a covert operation under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise.....four weeks after Hersh's bombshell report, anonymous US intelligence officials told the NY Times that the saboteurs are likely "pro-Ukraine, possibly government-trained Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two," but that "no American or British nationals were involved."....Mikhail Podolyak, adviser to the head of President Zelensky's office said:

"Ukraine has nothing to do with the incident in the Baltic Sea and has no information about "pro-Ukrainian subversive groups."

That should not be a surprise as the report goes on (multiple times) to claim that there's "no evidence so far of the Ukrainian government's complicity in the attack on the pipelines. Russia reacted to the New York Times report by dismissing it as a propaganda ploy designed to obfuscate the truth.

“I wonder who allows such leaks, filling the media scene with them?” asked Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

“The answer is: those who do not want to conduct an investigation in the legal field and are going to divert the attention of the audience from the facts in every possible way.”

Andrey Ledenev, Minister Counselor of the Russian Embassy in the United States, said the report served to protect the true culprits behind the attack.

“We have no faith in the “impartiality” of the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence. We perceive anonymous “leaks” as nothing more than an attempt to confuse those who are sincerely trying to get to the bottom of things in this egregious crime. Shift the blame from the statesmen who ordered and coordinated the attacks in the Baltic Sea to some abstract individuals,” Ledenev said.

Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said the New York Times story had “instantly got a ‘green light’ in the local information field” and was intended to distract from the facts presented in Hersh’s piece.

“Obviously, those who have masterminded the [Nord Stream] attack want to divert attention. Obviously, this is a coordinated media hoax campaign,” he asserted." ZH