Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia will “watch what Germany does” to investigate explosions that tore through the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022 after Sweden dropped its own investigations.
The blasts at the pipelines, which brought Russian natural gas to Germany via the Baltic Sea, cut off energy revenues for the Kremlin.
Russia has variously blamed the United States, Britain and Ukraine for the pipeline incidents. All those countries deny involvement.
Swedish prosecutors said on January 7 they would drop their own investigation into the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines as they “lacked jurisdiction in the case” and hand evidence uncovered in their probe over to German investigators.
“Against the background of the situation we now have, we can state that Swedish jurisdiction does not apply,” Public Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said.
Sweden, Denmark and Germany launched separate investigations into the Nord Stream blasts, each tightly controlling information. The Danish and German probes are still ongoing.
“Of course, now we need to see how Germany itself reacts to this, as a country that has lost a lot in relation to this terrorist attack,” Peskov said on February 7.
“It will be interesting to see how thorough the German authorities will be when it comes to this investigation,” he added.
In July, Germany told the UN Security Council it had found traces of subsea explosives on a sailing yacht that “may have been used to transport the explosives” and that trained divers may have attached the explosives to the pipelines.
Some Western officials have said Russian military vessels were in the area at the time of the blasts but others have said there is no hard evidence to implicate Russia, which called the suggestion it was behind the attacks “absurd”.
