CLAIM: Former President Donald Trump asserted that President Joe Biden “approved” the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, dramatically increasing Russia’s capacity to sell natural gas to Europe and serving as the prelude for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
VERDICT: True. In May 2021, Biden rescinded Trump-era sanctions on the company responsible for the construction of Nord Stream 2 and the top executive in charge of the project. Less than a year later, Russia announced its “special operation” to invade Ukraine and depose President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump addressed Biden’s record on Russia and sanctions Trump had placed on Moscow during his tenure during Tuesday night’s presidential debate against Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris. Harris accused Trump of implementing policies favorable to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, to which he replied, “If I were president, Russia would have never” invaded Ukraine.
“Putin endorsed her last week, said, ‘I hope she wins’ – and I think he meant it,” Trump said, “because what he’s gotten away with is absolutely incredible.”
“I told you our favorite, if you can call it that, was the current president, Mr. Biden,” Putin told reporters on Thursday. “He was removed from the race, but he recommended all his supporters to support Ms. Harris. So, we will do the same. We will support her.”
In those remarks, Putin also condemned Trump for having “introduced such a number of restrictions and sanctions against Russia that no president has ever introduced before.”
One of those restrictions was on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which is now defunct after a series of mysterious undersea explosions destroyed its infrastructure and that of its sister pipeline, Nord Stream 1, in September 2022.
“I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and Biden put it back on day one,” Trump said on Tuesday, “but he ended the XL pipeline, the XL pipeline in our country, he ended that, but he let the Russians build a pipeline all over Europe and heading into Germany, the biggest pipeline in the world.”
“Why does Biden go in and kill the Keystone pipeline and approve the single biggest deal that Russia’s ever made, Nord Stream 2, the biggest pipeline anywhere in the world going to Germany?” Trump later asked again.
The Keystone XL pipeline project would have been an oil pipeline connecting Canada to the United States. Biden canceled the proposed project on his first day in office in 2021. The decision cost thousands of jobs and billions of dollars, the U.S. Department of Energy affirmed in a 2023 report.
Trump raised the issue of the Nord Stream 2 sanctions being rescinded, as it was an outstanding event precipitating the Russian “special operation” in Ukraine. In June 2021, shortly after Biden lifted the sanctions, Zelensky offered an outraged interview to the Washington, DC, outlet Axios, warning that the anticipated financial windfall for Russia from the pipeline project would make Putin more belligerent and endanger Ukraine’s national security.
“It still seems to me that Nord Stream 2 … we understand that this is a weapon, a real weapon, and I speak openly about it,” Zelensky explained, “A weapon in the hands of the Russian Federation, and it is not very understandable, I feel, and definitely not expected, that the bullets to this weapon can possibly be provided by such a great country as the United States.”
Zelensky suggested that Biden had told him he would not lift sanctions but did so anyway.
“You know, we had this first conversation with President Biden; it was a phone conversation, and I received all the signals. They were direct signals, and I was very happy about it,” Zelensky said. “Biden knows Ukraine better than any other previous, former president, and, therefore, he understands all the issues and what’s most important, all the security risks. That is why, again, we were very unpleasantly surprised.”
Shortly after the launch of the full-scale Russian invasion, Biden bafflingly claimed that “no one” believed sanctions on Russia were effective, apparently defending his decision to lift the Nord Stream sanctions.
“No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” he told reporters.
Less than a week before Biden’s statement, Harris told reporters, “Absolutely, we strongly believe” sanctions to be an effective deterrent to Russian belligerence.
