Russia has threatened to destroy its enemies’ underwater communication cables over the West’s reported involvement in the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline which carried gas from Russia to Germany.
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev who is now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council issued the threat in a tweet yesterday.
“If we proceed from the proven complicity of Western countries in blowing up the Nord Streams, then we have no constraints – even moral – left to prevent us from destroying the ocean floor cable communications of our enemies,” Medvedev tweeted.
Nord Stream Pipeline, a multibillion-dollar project that carried Russian gas to Germany, was blown up last year.
Some U.S. and European officials initially suggested Russia had blown up its own pipelines, a claim dismissed as idiotic by President Vladimir Putin.
Russia accuses the West, particularly the United States and Britain, of being behind the blasts but the two countries deny involvement.
According to Reuters, in recent months, U.S. newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have reported that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency knew of a Ukrainian plot to attack the pipelines. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has denied Ukraine attacked them.
Reuters further reported that the intelligence chief of the NATO military alliance cautioned in May that Russia may sabotage undersea cables to punish the West for supporting Ukraine.
The undersea cables which criss-cross the world’s oceans have become the arteries of global communications and this, according to Reuters, has made them the focus of growing geopolitical competition between China and Russia on the one side and the United States and its Western allies on the other.
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