News reports emerging from Germany and the United States claim that a pro-Ukrainian group was behind the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in September 2022.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

German daily newspaper Die Zeit, public broadcasters ARD and SWR, and the ARD political magazine Kontraste reported in March 2023 that investigators were able to reconstruct how the pipelines from Russia to Germany were sabotaged on September 26, 2022.

Citing several unnamed officials, the investigation by the news outlets revealed that five men and a woman used a yacht hired by a Ukrainian-owned company in Poland to carry out the attack.

The New York Times also reported that U.S. intelligence is suggesting a pro-Ukrainian group was behind the blasts.

The Times said that U.S. President Joe Biden and his top aides "did not authorize" the attack.

The New York Times typically behaves like a mouthpiece for the State Department. The Times was forced to issue an apology in 2004 over its misleading coverage about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was essentially used by the State Department to parrot the lines that justified the illegal war carried out by the U.S. and its allies.

But here we are again—this time after a report by award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, which accused the U.S. of ordering the bombing of Nord Stream pipelines under cover of a NATO exercise.

Hersh explained how the Norwegians helped U.S. divers set the remotely triggered explosives under the pipelines in June 2022.

Washington and its allies have denied the accusation made by Hersh. The New York Times, true to form, has chosen to parrot the lines given to it and hand-picked German outlets.

Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that he had read the news reports "with great interest" but warned against drawing quick conclusions on the issue.

"We need to clearly differentiate whether it was a Ukrainian group that acted on the orders of Ukraine or… without the government’s knowledge," he told reporters.

This is so different from the insistence by the U.S. and its allies that Russia was responsible for blowing up the pipelines it earned money from by supplying vast quantities of energy to Europe.

The Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov rejected suggestions that the attack might have been ordered by Kyiv.

He told reporters: "It's like a compliment for our special forces, but this is not our activity."

Of course he denies it. He will already be aware that the U.S. was responsible for the explosion.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby declined to comment on the New York Times report, noting that investigations by Denmark, Germany, and Sweden are still ongoing.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the latest media reports as a coordinated manipulation intended to conceal the origins of the attack.

He said: "The masterminds of the terror attack clearly want to distract attention."

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his officials have accused the U.S. of staging the blowing up of the pipelines, which they described as a "terror attack."

Jan Oberg, the director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Researchsaid that once the reporting by Hersh is vindicated and the role of U.S. Navy forces proven, "Europeans will wake up and finally understand that they no longer share interests with the U.S."

The Women-led peace organization CODEPINK issued a statement that "We need a real, public investigation into this crime against the environment!"

Not for the first time, national organizer for Black Alliance for Peace, Ajamu Baraka, got it right when he tweeted: "The arrogance of the white supremacist mind makes it impossible for it to understand how latest propaganda ploy with the misinformation campaign on the U.S. attack on Nord Stream pipelines is making the U.S. press a laughing stock around the world."

"Since the U.S. claims it wants to crack down on misinformation campaigns, perhaps it should investigate the [Times’] misinformation campaign on the Nord Stream attack?”

Author Bio: Roger McKenzie is the international editor of the Morning Star newspaper. Follow Roger on Twitter on @RogerAMck.

War is an ugly part of the human experience. Everything about it is hideous. War is most obviously the act of invasion and the brutality that goes along with its operations. No war is precise; every war hurts civilians. Each act of bombardment sends a neurological shudder through a society.

This article was produced by the Morning Star and Globetrotter.

World War II demonstrated this ugliness in the Holocaust and in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From Hiroshima and the Holocaust rose two mighty movements, one for peace and against the perils of further nuclear attacks, and the other for an end to the divisions of humanity and for a nonalignment from these divisions. The Stockholm Appeal of 1950, signed by 300 million people, called for an absolute ban on nuclear weapons. Five years later, 29 countries from Africa and Asia, representing 54 percent of the world’s population, gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, to sign a 10-point pledge against war and for the “promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.” The Bandung Spirit was for peace and for nonalignment, for the peoples of the world to put their efforts into building a process to eradicate history’s burdens (illiteracy, ill health, hunger) by using their social wealth. Why spend money on nuclear weapons when money should be spent on classrooms and hospitals?

Despite the major gains of many of the new nations that had emerged out of colonialism, the overwhelming force of the older colonial powers prevented the Bandung Spirit from defining human history. Instead, the civilization of war prevailed. This civilization of war is revealed in the massive waste of human wealth in the production of armed forces—sufficient to destroy hundreds of planets—and the use of these armed forces as the first instinct to settle disputes. Since the 1950s, the battlefield of these ambitions has not been in Europe or in North America, but rather it has been in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—areas of the world where old colonial sensibilities believe that human life is less important. This international division of humanity—which says that a war in Yemen is normal, whereas a war in Ukraine is horrific—defines our time. There are 40 wars taking place across the globe; there needs to be political will to fight to end each of these, not just those that are taking place within Europe. The Ukrainian flag is ubiquitous in the West; what are the colors of the Yemeni flag, of the Sahrawi flag, and of the Somali flag?

Return to Peace, Return to Nonalignment

We are overwhelmed these days with certainties that seem less and less real. As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, there is a baffling view that negotiations are futile. This view circulates even when reasonable people agree that all wars must end in negotiations. If that is the case, then why not call for an immediate ceasefire and build the trust necessary for negotiations? Negotiations are only feasible if there is respect on all sides, and if there is an attempt to understand that all sides in a military conflict have reasonable demands. To wit, to paint this war as the whims of Russian President Vladimir Putin is part of the exercise of permanent war. Security guarantees for Ukraine are necessary; but so are security guarantees for Russia, which would include a return to a serious international arms control regime.

Peace does not come merely because we wish for it. It requires a fight in the trenches of ideas and institutions. The political forces in power profit from war, and so they clothe themselves in machismo to better represent the arms dealers who want more war, not less. These people in the blue suits of bureaucracy are not to be trusted with the world’s future. They fail us when it comes to the climate catastrophe; they fail us when it comes to the pandemic; they fail us when it comes to peacemaking. We need to summon up the old spirits of peace and nonalignment and bring these to life inside mass movements that are the only hope of this planet.

It is not merely sentimental to reach back to the past to breathe life into the Non-Aligned Movement of today. Already the contradictions of the present have raised the specter of nonalignment in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most of these countries voted against the condemnation of Russia not because they support Russia’s war in Ukraine, but rather because they recognize that polarization is a fatal error. What is needed is an alternative to the two-camp world of the Cold War. That is the reason why many of the leaders of these countries—from China’s Xi Jinping to India’s Narendra Modi to South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa—have called, despite their very different political orientations, for a departure from the “Cold War mentality.” They are already walking toward a new nonaligned platform. It is this actual movement of history that provokes us to reflect on a return to the concepts of nonalignment and peace.

Nobody wants to imagine the full implications of the encirclement of China and Russia by the United States and its allies. Even countries that are closely allied with the United States—such as Germany and Japan—recognize that if a new iron curtain descends around China and Russia, it would be fatal for their own countries. Already, the war and sanctions have created serious political crises in Honduras, Pakistan, Peru, and Sri Lanka, with others to follow as food and fuel prices rise astronomically. War is too expensive for the poorer nations. Spending for war is eating into the human spirit, and warfare itself increases people’s general sense of despair.

The warmakers are idealists. Their wars do not settle the major dilemmas of humanity. The ideas of nonalignment and peace, on the other hand, are realistic; their framework has answers to the children who want to eat and to learn, to play and to dream.

Author Bio: Roger McKenzie is a reporter for the Morning Star. He is the general secretary of Liberation, one of the oldest UK human rights organizations. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.