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As a Pole, you're giving our elected representatives and secret services/special forces too much credit.

Especially the latter were gutted by this government in its current and previous(2005-2007) incarnation under the guise of "decommunization" and replaced with people without the, to put it lightly, necessary qualifications.

I mean, quite a few government motorcades got into accidents because the poor fool behind the wheel wasn't a professional.

Poland has an ideal device for this sabotage

https://www.gospodarkamorska.pl/zdjecia/artykul/25081/135779...

If it was actually used this way I'll:

1. Eat my hat.

2. Go out and protest.

It would have been quite the new low, even for the current establishment.

Why does everyone assume the need for submersibles? Why not a small patrol boat dropping some depth charges on a time delay in the middle of the night?

> patrol boat dropping some depth charges on a time delay in the middle of the night

That's also an option, but you would have problems with precision and deniability*.

You could use some WW2 style device and blame it on German mines that are still present.

I'm not sure deniability is so important when it's multiple coordinated explosions.

How else could it have been done.. What about explosives being built in from day 0? Sort of like how some bridges in Europe were pre-mined during the cold war?

by deniability I mean that you cannot be sure if this is Russia, USA or someone else. If you use depth charges, they explode in certain way and leave some debris which say "this was XXX bomb so must be Russia/USA".

This is sabotage for sure.

It’s a pretty overt act to blow both up. Someone was making a statement

If you knew the exact position of the pipes, why would there be a problem with precision? Maybe there are lighthouses in sight which you could use to line up exactly, maybe you'd use gps/glonass, maybe you'd have some plane go by near at a specified time, doing it for you, saying via radio, all good, drop it?

Water currents could be one cause of inaccuracies

How much does an object drift in 100m of water and how accurate do you need to be?

Follow up:

It might have been a drone:

https://nyheder.tv2.dk/udland/2022-09-27-norge-advarer-om-my...

There's no way Poland pulls this off. If ANY of the government members EVER leak this their position in the EU is done for. It's a direct act of aggression.

This would be an extremely dumb move by Poland.

Why? At least in Sweden I would say most people are celebrating that Nordstream went kaputt.

That's a rather big claim and I would disagree.

That said, looking forward to paying 20 SEK per kWh, that'll be fun. Also, there's no wooden pellets or firewood for purchase no more - as it's all going to the continent.

Isn’t Sweden insulated from the energy crisis because so much of its electricity comes from hydropower and nuclear?

Sweden privatized its electricity sector. Then several nuclear power plants shut down, in some cases because prices were low at the time and it wasn't profitable and in some cases because they let it fall into disrepair. So Sweden has an energy crisis of its own now. Sweden does have hydropower and wind power, so prices are low when it has been windy and rainy, but prices are sky high the rest of the time.

Those who have something to lose would not have done it (aka the countries that need the gas, or the country that provides it). Poland is a very interesting idea, since even if they are caught, they are the ones providing the gas to Europe now, and refusing to deal with them is not an option.

> Russia wants the taps ON, not off.

Russia unilaterally turned the taps OFF repeatedly in the last months to keep Germany from meaningfully supporting Ukraine.

Russia turned the taps off in order to raise pressure for European concessions in order to turn them back on again. Germany has been tepid in its Ukrainian support because they want to have their cake and eat it, too. Now they can't no matter what.

With the pipes permanently broken (at least for this winter), Russia has lost that leverage.

Especially since gas prices have gone up so I don't think Russia suffered the price of rationing delivery

> Russia turned the taps off in order to raise pressure for European concessions in order to turn them back on again.

I don't want to sound dismissive, but that's a characteristically western take on things.

Nord Stream 2 was largely redundant and Russia missed the window to use those pipelines against Germany by allowing it to fill it's storage.

Russia is no stranger to causing damage to itself just to ensure that their enemies also suffer.

Case in point: back in 2015, as retaliation to sanctions they banned some imports of food from the EU deeming it "unsafe for consumption"(a particularly funny reason for someone familiar with the respective food standards). Contraband was publicly destroyed, upsetting a considerable chunk of the Russian public.

North Stream 1 was also hit.

Putin treats Russians as his property, but money from gas goes directly into his and his friend's pockets. His friends he listens to.

He also uses these money to arm police to keep population at bay.

There's also some weird pride he takes in having gas.

May be something else is in play here, but I don't think how this can be benefitial to his cause.

Little reminder that our (German) gas storage was only filled at 25% when the war started. On an unrelated note, we had sold big parts of that infrastructure to Russian companies.

Not sure that is correct, the companies contractually responsible for the nordstream 1 turbine maintenance/repair were European and Canadian, that were refusing to repair them because of the sanctions on Russia

https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-nordstream-si...

https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/oil-gas/germany...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ukrainian-group-sue-...

Strangely, gas turbines supplying Hungary which showed a more friendly posture towards Russia didn't break all of a sudden... I obviously can't prove that the Russia controlled companies that operated this equipment deliberately broke anything but in the past outages like this were relatively rare.

The thing is that it was a scheduled maintenance. So presumably it was expected

But you can theorize that Russians were being too picky with the repairs which normally possible wouldn't

But even if they did, EU and Canada withholding the turbine is playing to their game, don't see the purpose

Still, anything is possible... cloak and daggers

> The Polish prime minister immediately called "sabotage" and fingered Russia, while everyone else is still saying "it could be sabotage but we need to investigate first".

Pipes of both Nordstream 1 and 2 blew up simultaneously. It seems pretty immediately obvious that it was done intentionally by someone.

I'm sure the perpetrator will eventually become known; I don't pretend to know who it is now. But that it was sabotage seems clear, so I wouldn't hold it against someone to claim such.

> Pipes of both Nordstream 1 and 2 blew up simultaneously. It seems pretty immediately obvious that it was done intentionally by someone.

Playing devil's advocate: it could be that one of them blew up first, and the other blew up in a sympathetic explosion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_detonation). Or it could be that the pressure wave from the first one blowing up weakened the second one, leading to a catastrophic failure of the later. That would allow for both blowing up without requiring an intentional act.

(Of course, you can mix and match the theories: for instance, "the intention was to sabotage only one of the pipes, but a miscalculation led to the other one also being affected and failing catastrophically" would be yet another theory.)

The leaks are separated by almost 4 miles, and 17 hours. A sympathetic explosion seems unlikely.

My previous description of "simultaneous" was incorrect.

I'm sure you have heard about these technical problems Russia is having with the terminal on their side, the technical problems they claim are behind the reason the gas is turned off? Well it's not really technical problems, it's "technical problems" because otherwise the shut off would have been contact violations. This is no different, now they can keep the gas off without violating international trade law.

I think Russia is well past the point of caring about international law.

Russia can close the valves and noone can do anything. But russia would want the valves to be the only obstacle between their gas and germany, so germany would always have an option to sit down with russia, make some kind of a deal, and the same day, gas could be reopened.

Now, with the pipes destroyed, it will probably take months to fix them, and even if people in germany protest against their governments, the talks with russa are pointless.

On the other hand, USA will sell a lot of very overpriced gas now to quite a few EU states.

USA is already selling as much gas as they can. They can't sell more than now due to technical limitations.

Source?

Not Poland. Not any country with a pipeline that can be similarly retaliated against.

There is disagreement, conflict even, between Putin and his energy sector. Effectively destroying these pipelines is a pure-Putin way of reminding disgruntled Russian elite whose still in-charge.

If not Putin, the UK, who desperately wants Germany to confront Russia, free of hopes not doing so will magically open NS1 or NS2.

Damaging the pipeline destroys a major source of Russian leverage against Germany. And now that they're desperate enough to play the nuclear card with a "this is not a bluff" chaser, it's pretty obvious that they need all the leverage they can get.

Russia already supplied Germany via Ukrainian and Belarus pipelines. NS1 & NS2 were supplying nothing prior to this incident. Russia has lost nothing in leverage, but Putin has now gained leverage internally over energy interests who view this war (and Putin) as bad for business. Strategic narcissism is focusing on Putin's threats to the West, over his internal challenge of remaining in power.

> Russia has lost nothing in leverage

Russia has lost the option to provide extra of that much needed gas to Europe, along with billions and years of investments into that infrastructure.

> but Putin has now gained leverage internally

What exactly is this "internal leverage" and how is it supposed to work? Sorry, but this is really vague and unclear.

I’d say Poland wouldn’t be capable of this. I mean, you’ve got to be really really really confident that it won’t be public knowledge you’ve done this. And I’d be worried to what extent my intelligence services had been infiltrated if I hadn’t done this type of intervention a dozen times before and gotten away with it.

The same logic leads me to conclude it’s one of the major powers, a country that regularly does major ops and gets away with it. One that wouldn’t be worried about being caught because they hadn’t been caught before.

So: Russia, US, China, Israel, U.K. would be contenders

> If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on Poland.

That's sweet but I don't think my government has any capacity or means to that.

The fallout is that there’s now a sudden realization that these pipelines are subject to sabotage, including the pipeline to Poland, which creates unrest in the gas market. This, in turn, hinders the expected recovery of the gas price in the winter, and somewhat increases pressure on Europe.

I wouldn’t say that the act of sabotage is minimal.

  "Russia wants the taps capable of being turned ON at their discretion, not permanently broken."

There's two assumptions embedded in this sentence.

Firstly, who is saying it is permanently broken? If the repairs are cheap, Russia may decide the cost of that is worth the amount of distrust it has introduced.

Secondly, how do you know that Russia hasn't decided that NS2 will become a sunk cost, due to the way that EU has committed to diversifying away from Russia? If Russia has decided that NS2 is a sunk cost, it's actually optimal to destroy it if destroying it gives some value.

> Firstly, who is saying it is permanently broken? If the repairs are cheap, Russia may decide the cost of that is worth the amount of distrust it has introduced.

Experts, apparently. These pipelines weren’t made to carry salty seawater, and are now filling up with that. This means a lengthy repair is required.

> lengthy repair

I know, but at what cost? If Russia can sow distrust for $X million, maybe it's worth it? And who will pick up that repair bill? Is it strictly Russia? I see a lot of handwaving saying the project is forever destroyed with no sources. If we're going to be speculating on incentives from our armchairs, these details are pretty important.

> Poland doesn't receive gas via Nordstream, so damaging it doesn't hurt them in any way.

Not directly, but via Germany.

> It could be argued that since Europe has already decided to never turn on Nordstream again...

If true, I don't understand why Poland would even need to do this. I'm going to go with Russia for reasons yet unknown because it's something only a shitty country like Russia would do.

Maybe Gazprom has penalties in their contract when they don't deliver the gas. This way they could blame it on external factors. I read it somewhere but can't remember where.

My first thought was Poland too, but don't rule out Russia

> Russia wants the taps capable of being turned ON at their discretion, not permanently broken.

I'm not an expert, but I read somewhere that Gazprom could escape a penalty for not delivering the gas that their contract states.

Then also the Uzgorod pipe is still providing gas to Europe. It runs through Ukraine.

Must be nice for Ukraine to be able to station troops and equipment near Russia's financial arteries.

Update: Turns out it was the Russians after all.

So the "One who smelt it, dealt it" argument.

> Russia wants the taps ON, not off. This hurts their bargaining position in a big way because they've just lost their biggest source of leverage against Germany.

No, it's the other way around. It signals that Russia is burning bridges, and makes it nuclear threat seem much more real.

Russia likes bridges, since germany knows that they only need to sit down with the russians and make a deal (eg. no more weapons to ukraine), and the gas starts flowing.

Now, even with internal pressures of protesting people in germany, there is no incentive for germans to sit down with the russians, and the only ones profiteering from this are the americans

> Now, even with internal pressures of protesting people in germany, there is no incentive for germans to sit down with the russians

Yes, and that's exactly what Russia wants to signal now: "we're ready to go all in and use strategic nukes against NATO countries, we don't have anything to go back to".

Why would russia want that? Russia wants to remove nato from ukraine, take the prorussian regions, and then continue business as usual... ie. selling gas to EU.

Russia would be happiest to remove NATO from the equation entirely. Steamrolling Ukraine, sowing dissent within the alliance, and then grabbing one or more of the Baltic states would have done that.

I’d be _immensely_ proud if it was Poland.

What is there to be proud of? Some kind of weird payback for being kicked out of the Deutsche Bahn first class?

Because it resolves a major strategic problem for European security - that of Germany being blackmailed by Russia. At the same time it doesn’t really have any drawbacks aside from (probably minor) pollution. In particular it’s not a problem for Germany, because both pipelines were unused.

ed: got this wrong, ignore!

> Russia wants the taps capable of being turned ON at their discretion, not permanently broken. This hurts their bargaining position in a big way because they've just lost their biggest source of leverage against Germany.

As I understand it this leak is in the new NordStream 2 pipeline and NordStrem 1 is unaffected, so they can still supply gas in to the EU through NS1.

You understand wrong.

Right you are, my mistake.

All of this, but it was the French. They have tons of nuclear capability, good subs, and a top-5 intelligence agency few know exists.

Or, Russia realizes that Nord Stream leverage isn’t working and is now moving to attacks which implicitly threaten other pipelines (e.g., Baltic Pipe) for a stick to replace the apparently useless carrot.

Yes, the next logical move for Russia is: if we can't sell our gas to the EU & Co., nobody gets to (to the extent they can help it).

That is, the next obvious offensive move is for Russia to start sabotaging more of allied Europe's energy infrastructure, increase the pain proactively. Pipelines coming out of Norway are clear targets.

Putin is an adult child throwing a tantrum because he's losing badly, being humiliated, and being shown to be weak and not brilliant. His position entirely rested on a wrong perception (that he was a highly competent authoritarian), which is now being displayed very publicly globally.

> If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on Poland.

That's exactly the narrative that Russia is trying to sell now since 2 decades now. It's not the first time pipelines are damaged. Please read up on the recent history, if this year hasn't been lesson enough what then...