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Breaking news from the Spiegel (German weekly center left newspaper) on the sabotage of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline:
While the article itself doesn't speculate at all what this could mean, commenters are less reluctant. General tenor: this indicates that the saboteur was a state actor within NATO, probably the US, maybe Poland with US backing, and Sweden is paying ransom in order to be able to join NATO.
I just don't understand how there's any confusion as to who's behind the sabotage. We know there were explosions - Danish and Swedish seismologists reported fairly substantial explosions of 100 kg of TNT or more.
We know the US benefits a great deal from this - they said so themselves. The US has consistently opposed Nordstream 2 and wants these pipelines shut down.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/10/03/blinken-deems-the-bombing-of-nord-stream-pipelines-a-tremendous-opportunity-n2613896
The US had many methods to blow up these pipelines. People have raised the P3 overflights over the area, US navy in the region. My personal favourite is the USN's minelaying exercises just off Bornholm Island in June, in the precise part of the Baltic Sea where the explosions happened. Leave a few mines (or the advanced underwater drones they were testing) from the exercises behind, just in case Putin does escalatory moves like mobilizing more troops for Ukraine. Lo and behold, shortly after he mobilizes, the pipelines explode.
If it were the Russians, why would they blow up their own pipeline and not an enemy pipeline? They control Nordstream, they don't control the Norwegian-Polish pipeline or other pipelines that reduce their leverage and fuel their enemies. Why would they do something that creates a 'tremendous opportunity' for the US to sell LNG to Europe and render them more dependant on America? Why do they reduce their own leverage over Europe? People have suggested that it was Putin's plot to secure himself from regime change by denying a revenue source that a successor could draw upon by rapprochement with the West. But a successor to Putin can draw upon the resources of the entire Russian state! There's hundreds of billions of dollars worth of seized foreign currency reserve that they could angle to get back. And there are many other oil and gas pipelines and opportunities for graft in Russia. These pipelines in particular might add a few marginal tens of billions on top of an already vast sum of loot. The burning-bridges theory is not compelling, nor is the signalling theory. If you want to show you can blow up a pipeline, you blow up an enemy pipeline not your own.
The argument that Putin blew up his own pipeline that gives him leverage over Europe is silly. The US has both the means and the motive. When Iranian nuclear facilities are sabotaged we don't imagine that it might be the Iranians blowing up their own facilities - we know it's the US or Israelis or both.
In this case, it's the US either directly or via Poland. Poland and the US have identical interests and are very closely aligned. They're basically the same entity. It's not reflexive anti-Americanism to blame America for sabotage that advances their perceived strategic and commercial interests and hurts one or perhaps two US rivals. If it were the Polish-Norwegian pipeline that exploded, I'd blame Russia.
Ukraine has to be the number one suspect. Ukraine is at war with Russia and blowing up infrastructure is what you do in war.
Ukraine doesn't have the ability to project power inside it's own sovereign territory, let alone under the Baltic sea.
It certainly has the motive, but it has no means.
Ukraine shells Russian border regions, destroying power plants, and assassinates people near Moscow; at the moment, it's one of the most militarized countries on Earth with millions of fanatical defenders. Ukrainian representatives tell Musk who provides their state with critical infrastructure to fuck off. Ukrainian decision makers consider Europe not humoring Russian demands a matter of personal, national and perhaps ethnic survival.
Come now. Baltic sea isn't the Moon, 350 ft isn't that deep and 100 kg TNT isn't a lot.
Did you miss that part that a lot of Ukrainians live in Russia, and Ukrainians still can enter Russia without a visa, while Baltic sea isn't full of Ukrainians boats/subs?
No. Did you miss that Russia (and particularly Moscow) has one of the highest proportions of cops to civilians in the world, whereas the Baltic sea is, well, a sea, and only significantly observed by NATO members and soon-to-be members?
More directly: this is a silly objection. There is no need to fill the sea with boats to carry out a small diversion, and there was apparently no need to involve local Ukrainians in any known operation in Russia. The presumption of complexity of such an operation is unfounded. We can list reasons to argue that one or the other kind of attack is a priori "easier" till we're blue in the face, but ultimately both are trivial for a nation state like Ukraine, so this is not a helpful criterion to narrow down the list of suspects.
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