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/r/stupidpol is abuzz with news of both NordStream pipelines being damaged, in what mainstream sources openly speculate to be an attack:
tagesspiegel.de (google translated)
welt.de (google translated)
Stupidpol being stupidpol, blames it all on the west (either the US or UK)... but it feels like the kind of have a point? Russian performance in the war doesn't exactly scream competence, so it would be surprising, if they pulled something like this off, so deep in NATOs turf.
When we were discussing the coming winter, some people were saying "the European gas storage is filled up, it'll be fine", but isn't the gas storage more like a buffer, designed to take advantage of the decreased demand over the summer, to even out the increased demand in winter, working on the assumption that there will still be a constant supply of gas coming in? Does this change the calculus at all?
IMO it's most probably NATO, though whether directly Americans or someone technically not subordinated but enabled by them, hard to say and not very interesting.
Among the trivial things this war has taught me:
It's never «they shelled their own» even if you can contrive a plausible story on how that's beneficial. False flag attacks are either done to third parties (reminder that Germany has long been a second-tier ally), to low-value props (like that car or a pro-Russian official in LDNR) or, apparently, just not done. (This does not rule out unintentional damage or lone wolf events). I suppose there are exceptions but as the first-line hypothesis this is non-viable.
Cui bono is the default and understandable lens for viewing any unsolved crime, but not infrequently it fails because people may have a very quixotic idea of their own or others' bono or just act irrationally, against their better judgement. Nevertheless it's a viable heuristic to prioritize hypotheses.
Nobody cares much who exactly delivered an unconventional and illegal attack, so long as it harms the enemy. If an attack is hard to claim as valorous, it's just ignored or turned into a cause for an unfunny circlejerk to assuage guilty conscience. So we shouldn't expect good analytics from the benefitting side.
Ukrainians have effective sabotage groups. Just today, a woman called Irina Navalnaya (not related) has been interrogated after being caught in a bombing operation not much different from the one that killed Darya Dugina. It's understandable that some people find more entertainment in speculations about maskirovka and ghoulish conspiracy theories about Dugin killing his daughter for esoteric reasons, but that's just noise whereas covert bombings actually happen.
Americans have their CIA. Well, you know how it works.
Cutting off Russian gas supplies precludes the possibility of Europe and specifically Germany buckling under the temptation to save their economy from what looks to be an inevitable deindustrialization, removes incentives to project the image of «unwilling American accomplice» to Russia, drag one's feet with military shipments to Ukraine and push for «diplomatic resolution». Many Western commenters unconcerned with more plebeian legal matters cheer the attack openly. It's a reasonable attack for people who don't lose anything of substance from it. Thus, Americans or their proxy.
I'm not even mad. Such infrastructure, eminently vulnerable to any party more sophisticated than a Mexican cartel, was a testament to a gentle era of common sense, globalization, business deals and little men pursuing their little happiness. Putin wasn't willing to accept that he's a little man too, smaller even than his European partners. So now we're living again in a historical era. Gentlemen's agreements are null and void, irrelevant in front of the simplest game-theoretical realities like the game of chicken, and logistics of competing war machines.
edit: one beautiful thing of the hypothetical true masterminds would have been to make the ultimate guilty party the radical wing of German Greens or some other environmental nuts. They are feverishly loyal to the US; have a long history of opposing NordStream; some greens are already accused of cooperating with Gazprom/Russia; and they're currently sabotaging German economy with their anti-nuclear power posture. Making them the scapegoat is a good move because it's believable, discredits dangerous Green Agenda and rescues EU and German economy, and – with NS out of commission – doesn't hurt potential American exports.
By far my favorite phrase of the day.
But these groups are surely even more ineffectual than the Mexican cartels, no? It takes a lot less sophistication to bomb an undersea pipeline than to put a man on the moon or whatever, but surely a lot more than it takes to block traffic, and I see the latter as more within the capabilities of enviro-nuts.
Edit: Seeing elsewhere in the thread that the pipe was only 350 feet underwater. Maybe this operation would have been within the capabilities of the enviro-nuts after all, and could have been disguised as such -- but the size of the actual explosion seems like it would have been beyond them.
Breivik made a bomb of that scale in his
garagebarn, alone, from freely available fertilizer. McVeigh's one was vastly more potent. Dumping something of that sort from a fishing vessel or a yacht, guiding it with a few underwater scooters to the pipe, is not much harder. I suppose you're contemptuous of Greens and believe they're intellectually below either of those men, but it's eminently doable.You could be right. I really don't know. Do you really just build a bomb like this and then shove it off the side of a boat? Do fertilizer bombs even detonate when they're waterlogged? Do the kind of detonators someone like Breivik could access even work under 350 feet of water pressure? Beats me.
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Half a ton of explosives (1009 kg per explosion according to Swedes) and some very good amateur divers could have done it.
Of course, right before the explosions and in recent weeks the areas was being patrolled by US Navy helicopters, according to a plane movement website.
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