The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is once again carrying out military exercises on its Eastern flank. Earlier this week, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Washington used war games as a cover to plant explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines last year.

Dubbed Eagle Royal 23, the combat drills kicked off in Romania and areas of the Black Sea last week, with American and French soldiers leading some 350 troops participating in the war games.

During the military exercises, NATO forces fired munitions from the HIMARS launcher, dozens of which Washington has transferred to Kiev over the last year. On New Year’s Eve, Ukrainian forces attacked a Russian barracks in the town of Makiyivka with a missile fired from a HIMARS, killing at least 89 Russian soldiers.

Intended to test the alliance’s ability to defend its Eastern flank, the war games opened on February 2 and will conclude on Friday.

NATO is conducting Eagle Royal 23 as Hersh – a veteran investigative journalist known for breaking a long list of major stories, such as the massacre by US forces in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 – reported that Washington used the BALTOPS 22 war games as a cover to plant mines on pipelines carrying gas from Russia to Europe.

According to Hersh, the US detonated the explosives months later, then claimed the attack was carried out by Russia.

Prior to Russia’s invasion last year, the Kremlin accused NATO of smuggling weapons to Kiev under the guise of the Sea Breeze military drills hosted in Ukraine, claiming that foreign weapons would be ”delivered to the Ukrainian troops and nationalist formations stationed close to areas in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions uncontrolled by Kiev.”