Czech President Petr Pavel has called the Nord Stream gas pipelines running from Russia to Europe “legitimate strategic targets.”

He said this in the PoliTalk podcast for Novinek.cz.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has already compared it to “proscribed international terrorist cells.”

The Czech side has not responded to the Russian official’s statement.

Petr Pavel said the following about the gas pipelines going to Germany:

“And pipelines (such as Nord Stream) are a strategic target. If the attack was aimed at stopping the supply of gas and oil to Europe and money to Russia, then, I say conditionally, it would be a legitimate target.”

He added that he had no information to suggest that Ukraine was behind the explosion.

On August 15 this year, The Wall Street Journal published an article accusing Ukraine of involvement in the blowing up of three branches of the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

The publication claims that the plan was developed back in 2014 with the participation of Ukrainian intelligence and Western experts after the occupation of Crimea and the start of aggression in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. But then it was abandoned.

It was finalized and submitted to President Volodymyr Zelensky for consideration in May 2022, but then the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) learned about it and rejected it.

However, its implementation had already begun, and according to the voiced version, the then Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Army General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, ignored the ban. As a result, on September 26, 2022, Russian gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea were damaged by explosions.

According to the article, German intelligence services have already found the alleged perpetrators of the gas pipeline bombings, who were then in Poland. However, in response to a request to their Polish counterparts, they verbally replied that they should be rewarded, not arrested.