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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   1432 thread views

Transnational Thursday for August 15, 2024

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Who wants to hear about who blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline in September 2022?

If you haven't heard in the news yet- the official take of the 2022 Nordstream Pipeline explosion is hitting the news, as Germany has issued an arrest warrant for a person of interest, and the Wall Street Journal is fielding one of those totally-not-Government-assisted exposes on what happened (somewhat).

Was it the dastardly Yanks? Perfidious albion? The sinister Russians?

No, it was someone that many including the Russians insisted at the time couldn't be responsible because the culprit was so blindingly obvious it didn't need to be discussed further...

Putin has publicly blamed the U.S. for the attacks. A senior Russian diplomat in Berlin echoed that claim, and said the German investigation findings were “fairy tales worthy of the Brothers Grimm.”

...which is to say, it was the Ukrainians.

To quote-

One of the most audacious acts of sabotage in modern history, the operation worsened an energy crisis in Europe—an assault on critical infrastructure that could be considered an act of war under international law. Theories swirled about who was responsible. Was it the CIA? Could Putin himself have set the plan in motion?

Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told. The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. It involved a small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers. One was a woman, whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise.

“I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites,” one officer who was involved in the plot said. “The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country.”

If sorry / not sorry hashtag could apply, I suspect this would be one of those moments it would.

Various points of interest from the WSJ article include-

Zelensky was initially on board with it, but (supposedly) tried to turn it off after being warned by the CIA-

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the plan, according to one officer who participated and three people familiar with it. But later, when the CIA learned of it and asked the Ukrainian president to pull the plug, he ordered a halt, those people said. Zelensky’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was leading the effort, nonetheless forged ahead.

The CIA, warned by the Dutch, also warned the Germans in advance, indicating all three knew of the plot in advance.

But the next month, the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD learned of the plot and warned the CIA, according to several people familiar with the Dutch report. U.S. officials then promptly informed Germany, according to U.S. and German officials.

If true, this would both explain why the 'USA did it!' theory never held sway in the upper German government, and also why the government was keen to keep it underwraps (because it would be not only a scandal on the foreign policy side, but a government-competence issue to have been warned but still failed.)

The position of the article is that Zelnsky tried to cancel the project after being found out, but that his military Commander in chief Zaluzhniy went rogue.

The CIA warned Zelensky’s office to stop the operation, U.S. officials said. The Ukrainian president then ordered Zalyzhniy to halt it, according to Ukrainian officers and officials familiar with the conversation as well as Western intelligence officials. But the general ignored the order, and his team modified the original plan, these people said.

...a bit of a skip to when the attack occurred...

Zelensky took Zaluzhniy to task, but the general shrugged off his criticism, according to three people familiar with the exchange. Zaluzhniy told Zelensky that the sabotage team, once dispatched, went incommunicado and couldn’t be called off because any contact with them could compromise the operation.

“He was told it’s like a torpedo—once you fire it at the enemy, you can’t pull it back again, it just keeps going until it goes ‘boom,’ ” a senior officer familiar with the conversation said.

Take that for what you will, and be as skeptical of the claim as you want. Valeriy Zaluzhniy was relieved in very early 2024 as part of the start-of-year Ukrainian reorganization... but possibly as (well-premptive) damage control, and other potential motivations.

Earlier this year, Zelensky ousted Zaluzhniy from his military post, saying a shakeup was needed to reboot the war effort. Zaluzhniy, who has been viewed domestically as a potential political rival, was later appointed Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.K., a position that grants him immunity from prosecution.

So if Germany wanted to pursue this line of prosecution, it'd involve going after an ambassador in a European partner.

The resourcing of the operation was not particularly impressive.

Following the May 2022 pact between the businessmen and the military officers, it was agreed that the former would finance and help execute the project, because the army had no funds and was increasingly relying on foreign financing as it pushed back against the onslaught of its gargantuan neighbor. A sitting general with experience in special operations would oversee the mission, which one participant described as a “public-private partnership.” He would report directly to the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, the four-star Gen. Zaluzhniy.

...a skip of an initially more elaborate plan...

After dismissing that idea due to its cost and complexity, the planners settled on using a small sailing boat and a team of six—a mix of seasoned active duty soldiers and civilians with maritime expertise—to blow up the 700-mile-long pipelines that sat more than 260 feet below the sea’s surface.

Note this is actually one of the reasons the Russians had an interest in downplaying / denying a Ukrainian attribution- the Russians have invested great sums in having state capacity to target underwater infrastructure as part of their deterrence / great power model vis-a-vis NATO. A minor group of oligarchs being able to do the same not only could give ideas to others, but would undercut the Russian exclusiveness of the threat.

Obviously this has its own implications for German foreign policy...

The findings could upend relations between Kyiv and Berlin, which has provided much of the financing and military equipment to Ukraine, second only to the U.S. Some German political leaders may have been willing to overlook evidence pointing to Ukraine for fear of undermining domestic support for the war effort. But German police are politically independent and their investigation took on a life of its own as they pursued one lead after another.

“An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash,” said a senior German official familiar with the probe.

...but said foreign policy runs into the reality that Germany's NordStream policies were, shall we say, not supported by the neighbors whose views on its destruction differ from those who would want Germany to take a hard line.

In June, German officials issued a confidential arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen who the Germans believe was one of the crew members. According to people familiar with the investigation, a van driving the Ukrainian sabotage team from Poland into Germany in 2022 was snapped by a German speed camera, and the man, a diving instructor living with his family near Warsaw, was in the photo.

Authorities in Poland didn’t act on the warrant. The instructor is believed to have since returned to Ukraine. Poland’s failure to arrest him is a major blow to the German probe, because he and other suspects have now been tipped off and will avoid travelling outside Ukraine, people familiar with the investigation said. Ukraine doesn’t extradite its own citizens.

As for why the Ukrainians did it? Despite claims to the contrary years ago that only the US had an incentive, well-

In May of 2022, a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen had gathered to toast their country’s remarkable success in halting the Russian invasion. Buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor, somebody suggested a radical next step: destroying Nord Stream.

After all, the twin natural-gas pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe were providing billions to the Kremlin war machine. What better way to make Vladimir Putin pay for his aggression?

...

In a subsequent broadcast interview, he said that the sabotage had two positive effects for Ukraine: It helped loosen Russia’s grip on the European countries supporting Kyiv, and it left Moscow with only one main avenue for channeling gas to Europe, pipelines traversing Ukraine. Despite the war, Ukraine collects lucrative transit fees for Russian oil and gas estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

...

In the wake of the attack, which took out three of the four conduits forming the pipelines, energy prices surged. Germany and other nations scrambled to nationalize energy companies that handled Russian gas but collapsed after the pipelines were destroyed. Even today Germany is paying around $1 million a day alone to lease floating terminals for liquefied natural gas or LNG, which only partly replaced the Russian gas flows channeled by Nord Stream.

So there are three general incentives characterized, though not with emphasis, in the article.

1- To hurt Russia

2- To reduce the economic leverage Russia had over Germany and other Russian-gas-dependent countries (which was a major factor in 2022 in blocking aid, i.e. the German helmet aid package)

3- (Unstated) Economic incentives to force Russia to continue paying gas transit fees to Ukraine (as opposed to cutting off the pipeline)

Inflicting costs on Germany is framed as a consequence, not a goal in and of itself- though I do fully expect this to be the angle the anti-Ukraine partisans to appeal to going forward.

Though maybe not the Russian state-backed angle. One of the implicit reasons Russia had to push against the Ukraine-Nord Stream theory in the past was that it undercut the Russian positions on both underseas deterrence (casting it as a difficult state-only capacity that gave it deterrence leverage and could be used as evidence to blame the US when the pipeline was destroyed), and because it would reveal the fragility of the Russian energy-connection arguments that a lot of the pro-Russian arguments relied on.

This is because if a country with marginal projection capabilities like Ukraine could blow up a pipeline when their security interests were threatened, so could any other Baltic country if Russia attempted to leverage the energy blackmail like it was attempting over Ukraine. The energy leverage over German policy making can't be rebuilt once the argument of 'good relations with Russia could lead to reliable cheap energy' was blown up, because even if an angry German government wanted to retaliate and make energy alignment with Russia a priority again, it could, again, just be blown up. German-Russian energy ties transitioned from being a bilateral issue that could isolate other countries, to being hostage to the Russian ties to everyone who could sever them, which is frankly nearly anyone.

This not only undercut one of Russia's early/pre-war goals (to increase German energy dependence on Russia), but explains why the German government has been largely sitting on the issue over the last two years. Not only was the pipeline not as popular in-country or in the near-abroad as it was with the government and business circles, but the foundations for the energy relationship have been fundamentally blown up on multiple angles. The connections aren't reliable even if the Russians wanted it to be, and the Russians demonstrated they were willing to be unreliable suppliers for political purposes, and the limits of the German state to protect it were revealed even when pre-warned by NATO and European allies, and the necessary neighbor support to go after the issue after the fact was opposed by other NATO/European allies. While the German government may not like that, it's the reality of a strategic context they have to act within.

None of this was advantageous from a Russian perspective, and while the Russians may adapt to the change... well, they've been resisting the Ukrainian accusation for the last two years already, and minimizing the threat Ukraine can pose to them abroad remains in their negotiating interest for what they're trying to frame for peace talks in the future.

I suspect this issue will be used by angry partisans, particularly from those far from government, but I'll be surprised if the German nation significantly shifts. Not only has this been hinted at with increasing directness for awhile, and I've not seen evidence that the German public is particularly moved, but the government's strategic interests aren't really changed from when it was last informed about it 2 years ago.

This isn't new news, but this is a new directness of what was once the primary contemporary anti-American conspiracy theory. While it will be interesting to see who pivots with as much vigor, this has a lot of the characteristics of stories that- even when publicized- quickly fade in general disinterest.

But I found it interesting enough to elevate here. Cheers.

Christ. If this true, Ukraine deliberately sabotaged European infrastructure and, by extension, our long-term economy. And our response will be to make a frowny-face and give them lots more money. Can we please, just once, try and find some allies who don't sabotage us? Both inside and outside the UK. As it is, I feel like I'm being ruled by masochists.

That depends on who you think 'we' are, and who 'our' economy refers to, and what an alliance entails in terms of from others to you, but from you to others.

In the case of Nordstream, for example, it was not European infrastructure in a political sense- it was German-Russian infrastructure project series, built over the objection of European partners, only stalled due to organized Anglo-European lobbying against German interest groups and German government positions which prioritized German economic self-interest over the economic and security concerns of a number of their eastern neighbors. It was an extension of an economic dependence to a power who would- just as predicted by the warning of Germany's allies which were repeatedly disregarded- attempt to blackmail the German economy to the European detriment. And it was one which the Germans- even when aided by the warnings of allies- was unable to defend, but relied on other parties to ignore even if doing so came at the expense of their own interests and to german benefit, even though the Germans were not allies (and were shaping their policy on the basis of the Russian blackmail to Russian benefit vis-a-vis Ukraine).

If one wants to apply a bad-ally model, this would beg the question of who the bad ally up for consideration is: the Ukrainians being a bad ally to the Germans and Europeans, or the Germans being a bad ally to the Europeans and Ukrainians. It's not as if the Germans were ignorant of the history of Russian gas-coercion against European Union members when they were investing in Nord Stream, which would have had the effect of negating German costs, and thus inherent alignment with their European allies if the Russians did so again in the future (as they ended up doing).

That the German economic model at the heart of Europe was dependent on what was functionally a subsidized Russian export scheme to cultivate influence was never a secret, and neither were the consequences if that link of subsidized gas broke.

Ultimately, international relations is anarchy, and anarchy sucks. It's not masochism to endure it, it's that it doesn't suck less if you break off connections with people who don't prioritize you over their own interests even as you do the same to them.

I think an alliance more-or-less entails long-term mutual support, which in practice usually requires some distance. Britain and Portugal have been allies for 900 years, Britain and Japan have usually got on pretty well. Likewise Britain and Australia. It is fundamentally different from vassalage (support from a superior power in exchange for obedience from a lesser one) and mutual cooperation (countries who pursue their own competing interests but cooperate on occasion).

Almost no countries in the EU are allies, except of convenience, and I find the constant desire to pretend otherwise tiresome. Britain's politicians fawn over every foreign connection they can find, our newspaper write stirring paeans to the bravery of Ukranian troops who we basically treat as meat-shields and who would in turn butcher us all if they thought it would help against Russia, and we just tank knife after knife in the back with a smile on our face.

Allies of convenience are still allies, and expecting others to pretend otherwise based on one's own unique definitions of what an alliance is / is not is certainly a position one can take, but it's also one that will be continually doomed to disappointment. Particularly if the criticism comes from a position dripping with historical irony- there are reasons Perfidious Albion is and has been an international relations meme for centuries. (Centuries longer than the last British-Japanese war even, which makes that appeal an interesting example of alliance-compatible behavior.)

If common understanding of alliances breaks with your convictions of what an alliance fundamentally should be... swell! Such a standard also means there is no moral injury deserving sympathy over the violation of a standard that never applied. If long-term mutual support on the time frame of centuries is required for there to be an alliance, then countries that have not existed as independent polities in their current form for even 50 years will never be able to be bad allies. Being a bad ally is conditional on being an ally, after all.

But it does undercut the earlier criticism of Ukraine's actions as being those of a bad ally, as the new standards of alliance and allies puts even less onus on the Ukrainians of having committed any sort of immoral action for you to be aghast over. After all, what was targeted was not 'our' infrastructure, but the infrastructure of non-allies by not-allies that was being leveraged against the interests of other not-allies, both in the immediate context and for years/decades prior.

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