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| Photo Credit: AP. |
(AP) - The Kremlin and Russian state media are aggressively pushing a baseless conspiracy theory blaming the United States for damage to natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in what analysts said Friday is another effort to split the U.S. and its European allies.
The Russian
position is also reverberating on social media forums popular with American
conservatives and far-right groups.
NATO leaders
believe the damage to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines between Russia and
Germany is the result of sabotage. NATO has refrained from identifying a
suspect pending an investigation into the damage.
Russia began
blaming the U.S. quickly after the damage was reported Monday night. On Friday,
speaking at a ceremony to annex four Ukrainian regions, Russian President
Vladimir Putin said “Anglo-Saxons” in the West were behind the “terror attacks”
but did not specify any nations.
Pravda and
other Russian state outlets reported Thursday that the U.S. operates underwater
robots capable of carrying out the acts of sabotage. The Russian Foreign
Ministry spokeswoman wrote about her suspicions of U.S. involvement in a
Telegram post.
“Europe must
know the truth!” Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram Wednesday.
President
Joe Biden on Friday dismissed Russia’s claims.
“It was a deliberate act of sabotage. And now
the Russians are pumping out disinformation and lies,” Biden said. “... When
things calm down, we’re going to send the divers down to find out exactly what
happened. We don’t know that yet exactly. But just don’t listen to what Putin’s
saying. What he’s saying we know is not true.”
The
assertions of U.S. responsibility cite Biden’s threat in February to stop the
recently completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine. “If Russia
invades ... then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” Biden said. “We will
bring an end to it.”
The two Nord
Stream lines were not in operation but were filled with tons of methane that
began bubbling to the surface following the damage. Russia recently shut off
the Nord Stream 1 pipeline as it ramped up energy pressure on Europe. Nord
Stream 2 has never been used.
Fox News’
Tucker Carlson played the Biden clip on his show Tuesday and brought up the
possibility that the U.S. was behind the sabotage.
“If they did this, this will be one of the
craziest, most destructive things any American administration has ever done,
but it would also be totally consistent with what they do,” Carlson said.
Former
President Donald Trump also reposted Biden’s remarks on Truth Social along with
a call for the U.S. to remain “cool, calm” in its relations with Russia. “Wow.
What a statement. World War III anyone?” he wrote.
Contacted
for a response, a spokeswoman for Fox News forwarded transcripts from past
episodes of Carlson’s show, including one in which he discussed a conspiracy
theory about supposed secret bioweapon research in Ukraine.
A
spokeswoman for Trump did not immediately respond to a message on Friday.
The
suggestion that the U.S. caused the damage was circulating on online forums
popular with American conservatives and followers of QAnon, a conspiracy theory
movement which asserts that Trump is fighting a battle against a Satanic
child-trafficking sect that controls world events.
The claim’s
popularity among the American far-right and the speed with which it spread from
Russian state media reflect mounting skepticism about America’s role in the war
in Ukraine, according to Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Washington,
D.C.-based Stimson Center and an expert on security and energy.
“Russia is
quite good at capitalizing on these divides, but it doesn’t create them,” she
said.
It’s not the
first time Russia has spread disinformation seeking to redirect blame for the
war and undermine Ukraine’s allies. Earlier this year, Kremlin-controlled media
mounted a disinformation operation asserting the U.S. had been running secret
bioweapon labs in Ukraine. Carlson helped amplify that theory too.
Networks
allied with the Kremlin have also spread frightening tales about Ukrainian
refugees, and blamed atrocities committed during the war on Ukrainians.
Seen in that
context, the conspiracy theory alleging U.S. responsibility for the pipeline
damage is consistent, the researchers concluded.
“The central
theme is that this is a “false-flag” operation, an American plot designed to
convince Europe that it was a Russian attack intended to signal the
vulnerability of Europe’s energy supplies,” the researchers wrote.
Follow the
AP’s coverage of misinformation at https://apnews.com/hub/misinformation