Posted by 
Czech President Petr Pavel has triggered the Kremlin.
Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova on Thursday compared Pavel to a “terrorist,” after his remarks this week that Ukraine — if indeed it was the culprit — could have been justified in attacking the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022.
“I read this speculation and thought that even for such an outrageous loser, it was too much,” Zakharova said in a Telegram post. “Moreover, previously only representatives of banned international terrorist cells have spoken with such ‘thoughts.’”
New reports in recent weeks have suggested that Ukrainian operatives may have been behind the September 2022 attack in the Baltic Sea, which ruptured multiple strands of the controversial Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline.
Pavel, a key ally of Ukraine in its fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invading forces, wasn’t particularly bothered if Kyiv did blow up the pipeline.
“When an armed conflict is waged, it is waged not only against military objectives, but also against objectives of a strategic nature. And pipelines are a strategic goal,” Pavel said Wednesday on the PoliTalk podcast.
Underlining that he had no “incriminating clear information that it was really Ukraine who was behind the attack,” the Czech president theorized that “if the attack was aimed at cutting off gas and oil supplies to Europe and money [flowing] back to Russia, then — and I am deliberately using a conditional verb — that would be a legitimate goal.”
“But I don’t have that information,” he added.
