Tusk’s stance on Nord Stream motivated by ‘economic expediency’ – Putin

One pipeline was initially envisioned running through Polish territory, but the plan was eventually scrapped, the president has said

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s position on the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage is motivated by the fact that Warsaw lost out economically on the project, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with Vesti published on Sunday.

The statement came just days after Tusk said that those responsible for the September 2022 blasts should not be ashamed, but rather those who built the pipelines. Warsaw had long opposed the pipelines’ construction over concerns about Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, he told reporters on Thursday.

According to Putin, the Polish prime minister’s “motives are very simple – economic expediency.”

The initial plan for the Nord Stream project envisioned one of the pipelines going through Poland, he said. However, the decision was ultimately made to “to run the second line along the bottom of the Baltic Sea in order to minimize risks,” he added.

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Even back then, Warsaw was against this, Putin added.

“Partly because it would lose certain economic advantages for Poland as a transit country. Secondly, Poland would lose revenue from the transit of our hydrocarbons. This position is absolutely nothing new,” he said.

Tusk’s statement came a day after a Ukrainian national suspected of taking part in the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines was arrested in Croatia on a European warrant.

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German investigators maintain that the sabotage was carried out by a small group of Ukrainians who used counterfeit documents to rent a sailing yacht and transport military-grade explosives to waters off the Danish island of Bornholm. There, the group allegedly used commercial diving equipment to set the charges on the pipelines at a depth of around 100 meters.

Moscow has long dismissed the theory as fantasy, arguing that the operation could not have been carried out in NATO-controlled waters without state backing.

In a 2024 interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin hinted that the blasts were likely orchestrated by the CIA.