>...
>"This is utterly false and complete fiction," said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. Spokespeople for the CIA and State Department said the same.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/white-house-says-blog-post-...
And of course, proving innocence is effectively impossible without proving someone else did it.
Given that Nord Stream AG is (majority owned) by Russia, this would point at Russia since it's remarkably silent. But to me this doesn't make sense since I still don't understand how it benefits Russia. But perhaps it's another FSB plan which went wrong, as many others did in 2022.
It's a lot more convenient to explain that you totally would retaliate if only you knew who did it, rather than claiming you knew who did it but you're not going to retaliate anyway because you fear escalation. So everybody plays dumb.
That doesn't make sense. Russia can use this as a propaganda tool without having to act on it. And it's not like that Russia didn't accuse USA from blowing it up - they did, just not very forcefully. It's strange, because they could have used it in e.g. Germany to split the society: "bad Americans want you to freeze, they blew up your gas pipelines".