Anyone that wants to keep Germany off Russian gas no matter the developments.
The USA has long wanted to interfere in Germanys' relations with Russia and has done so, over and over, to ensure they are never true allies.
So, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume the US is behind these attacks.
> Biden: “If Russia invades -- that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,”
> Journalist: “But how will you do that exactly, since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?”
> Biden: “We will, I promise you, we’ll be able to do it,” Biden replied.
I don't want to play conspiracy guy, but the statement stuck in my mind since he said it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy
It is a conspiracy.
Did you not read the quote?
Besides which, the US unilaterally gives itself the right to do these sorts of things at its own discretion on a regular basis.
I have no strong opinions yet in the argument over whether or not the USA conspired to sabotage the NS pipelines. I'm just here to point out that secrecy is not a required part of a conspiracy. The literal translation of "conspire" from Latin would be something like "to breathe together", insinuating a synchronization of movements, a plotting together.
But, in our world today, all conspiracies (both confirmed and theoretical conspiracies) seem to get bucketed together. And so in common parlance, as soon as a thing is publicly confirmed as actually happening, in most people's minds it moves out of the "Conspiracy" bucket into the "History" bucket. But that's just a loss of language on our part. As always, my go-to resource in recovering the meanings of English words is Webster's 1828.
China are another answer. If they can't get the gas, there is less incentive for peace so more chance of the conflict rolling on and distracting from their activities. Plus, more gas for them to buy more cheaply etc.
Chunks of the middle east as well, they want to replace Russian gas in European markets despite their higher prices.
The list really is quite long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_submarine_incidents#Af...
Though I doubt there is any foul play here at all...
With this, even if they negotiate, there won't be any gas soon.
So, it's bad for russia, bad for eu, and the only one being better of is USA... who was threathened to do exactly this more than once.
It seems quite clear to me that in the short and medium term this ideological stance isn't going to hurt "evil Russian empire" a whole lot, while being extremely disruptive and harmful to everyone in the EU.
I don't know why people keep repeating this lie, do they want to support Russia so badly?
The real risk for Europe is a recession due to gas prices for industrial use - but that would mostly impact extremely rich places, like Germany.
Even with subsides and a social support net, we're still kicking the can down the road. The bill WILL come due and it's going to hit those who are poor and "lower middle class" the hardest, as always.
People are increasingly in need of food donations and financial support with skyrocketing energy prices. Similarly, donations have decreased and every charity in my country is running thin on resources. Elderly and other vulnerable populations are especially at risk here as they might not have the resources to even reach out for help and follow through any bureaucracy.
I don't support Russia, I hope they lose and dissolve into irrelevance, but I take a serious issue with the often-repeated viewpoint that brushes all of this suffering aside like it's not a big deal, only to claim that we are all too happy to lower the thermostat by 3 degrees and take some kind of collective stance that will meaningfully contribute to destruction of Russia.
The suffering is greater than most people are willing to admit, meanwhile its effectiveness is questionable at best. I simply don't believe that energy imports from Russia are what's keeping the war going in any meaningful fashion, something that we could easily change if we just stopped importing their gas.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this, but so far I've only seen handwavy explanations that don't amount to anything more than "every little bit probably helps".
But I'm pretty sure both US and various EE countries would not want to do that, leading to fracture and instability in EU and NATO in pretty critical time. For example people of Poland, which hosts literally millions of Ukrainian refugees would probably freak out if what they see as "rich west people" start complaining about money and ask for support for Ukraine to stop because gas is now expensive.
To summarise, we can't buy the Russian gas because they would ask us to do unacceptable things for it, and it would probably destroy EU from within. That's my take at least.
Also seems that someone is taking that choice away now, with blowing up Nord Stream.
As for the impact of sanctions and the energy war, I'm not an expert but I find Perun's videos pretty insightful - but I admit "hour long powerpoint presentation by military analyst on youtube" is pretty strange genre. This video touches on sanctions, economy and the energy war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce5TR-qWCk4
You're right I was pretty blasé about the suffering of people, and partially it's because I live pretty close to Ukraine, but still I shouldn't have.
Realistically.. even if they found an american submarine with "pipecutters" still connected to the pipeline, they'd say they'll do everything in their power(!!!)... and then send an angry letter to USA and replace an ambassador or two somewhere.
Wow Just wow. Ready to place responsibility at everyone but Russia's feet right? Such a blameless third party victim in all of this /s.
The pipeline itself was in good part Merkel's olive branch to connect Putin economically to the rest of the EU. The hope was that giving Russia more to lose would prevent these conflicts. Sure the US, among others, we're wary of this kind of interdependence.
Well, now we know how things shook out and we're all dealing with it. Germany from the back foot this round.
Now I'm not attributing any great foresight to naysayers (US among them), it was a nobel bid for peace on Germany's part and there's always a chance we'd be talking about the brilliance of deepening those connections with Russia.
But we can't.
Russia drove its tanks into Ukraine, nobody made them. They weren't under any great duress. Even the most unjustifiably charitable take of Russian justification accounts for what, just Luhansk and Donetsk? But they tried to take Kiev. Tried to take every bit of Ukrainian's coastline with the Black Sea through Odessa. Russia good out of it's way to poison their reputation here with conquest.
So what.. just a meaningless war in a meaningless country, a for the same reasons nato bombed yugoslavia in 1999 and noone cared.
Americans drove tanks to afghanistan, syria, libya, a bunch of eu countries helped them, nato forces are still in syria, and again... noone cares. Yes, some individuals maybe do... especially people living there... but not the EU as a whole.
But now, suddenly, while still having our soldiers station in eg. syria (i live in a small eu country, so we're not eg. france, that we'd had our soldiers occupying a bunch of african states), the media told us to sacrifice our standard of living, work, so the government can take money and send it to ukraine, to be cold, to not shower as much as we wanted, for what? A country that was just a few years ago was the most corrupt country in europe, full of nazis [0], and all the provocations were instigated by the US [1]? We should forget all this, fuck our livelihoods for some geopolitical shitshow?
Thank you, but no.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/mRAaOo0.jpg
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukrain...
This could range from a small group staging a false flag to push Putin further (he is a surprise moderate of the extremely hawkish Russsian elements) to a different small group staging some form of protest by sabotage .. to any other ridiculous scenario imaginable.
How naive...
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/as-imports-of-u...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JW_Formoza
Not that I believe that would be orchestrated by the Polish gov.
No transit fees necessary for Nord Stream.
Under these circumstances, I'd much rather avoid being dependant on Ukrainian gas and would prefer Russian one every day of the week.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis... (definitely worth the read, gives some background information about why we see what we see in this russoukrainian war today)
There are no political alignments that would reverse that given that other options, such as allowing fracking again in Germany, are not even contemplated.