Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'd vote for Russia too, not direct evidence obviously but makes more sense than anybody else. Elites who decide see that EU wants and will cut itself off from Russia anyway, just a question of when and its coming soon. So harsh punishment of this pesky EU right before winter starts to feel the consequences of daring to break away from Russian dependence.

Russia made tons of money in past months on oil and gas due to elevated prices. Money ain't what they need desperately now, rather massive civil unrest in EU to weaken Ukraine support and punish. Those who decide have stellar-size egos which are getting continuously humiliated by recent development. Don't underestimate pettiness of a ego-maniac person who has tremendous power and thinks about themselves as somebody larger-than-life and on a life mission. Anyway financial consequences of not selling gas anymore won't affect anyhow the folks on top, and clearly russian population is just cannon fodder for them.

Its political and military move. Realistically only US and Russia have the capacity to do 3 attacks like this simultaneously. This all benefits US too in some ways, but if I have to decide between those 2 options, for me personally its a no brainer.

Has anybody checked Russian reaction? Sometimes its quite obvious from how they say things / what they don't say whats really happening and how much they actually care. For me its not easy to see this in western media and I don't speak russian to check source directly.

This makes zero sense to me. What does Russia get by destroying their own pipeline? If they wanted to shutoff gas, thats just a turn of a valve.

Russia looses massive leverage by no longer being able to deliver gas, even if they wanted to.

Prior to this, if the public got cold enough, they could tell their government "forget Ukraine, we need gas. Go agree to get it or we will vote you out ASAP". Now.... There's no point in settling anything with Russia, since you're not going to get their gas anyway.

People need to stop thinking of 'Russia' (or any other country for that matter) as a single monolith. For example, a possible motive that may be bad for Russia but good for Putin is that maybe he wants to deter any would be assassination attempt coming from within the Kremlin by making it abundantly clear that there will be no going back to business as usual if he was to be eliminated. Blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines is a very good way to achieve that.

We as regular citizens have limited info, really we don't know what's going on. But don't assume it definitely isn't Russia because of whatever reason that happens to seem plausible to you.

This could be the same for the US or Ukraine. So considering that, all things being equal, it sounds pretty terrible for the main Russian goals, so I'm going to say no it wasn't Russia.

Nobody knows what the "main Russian goals" are. I mean, I'd hope that nobody is taking this whole "denazification" business seriously.

There's a very real possibility that the actual goal of this entire mess is/was for Putin to get into the history textbooks as one of the great Russian leaders before he dies from cancer (or whatever it is that he has).

This is exactly the same point the previous poster made. Sure we don't know the real hidden motives of Russia or Putin, but you could say the same for the US and Biden. So ignoring crazy random guesses, you can say that all things being as sane as you'd hope they are, Russia destroying their own ability to say "if you agree to this or that, we will turn back on the gas flow you need to provide affordable energy to your citizens" would be pretty foolish.

On the other side, Ukraine destroying the pipeline and making sure EU members don't give it to Russia in order to restore the flow of gas makes pretty good sense.. as long as you don't care about the EU citizens.

I was countering the idea that was being repeated throughout this thread which was "of course it couldn't be Russia who did this, it is they who stand to benefit if it is functioning". This conclusion is errorsome for all kinds of reasons as there are plenty of motivations for why Russia and more specifically Putin would do such a thing.

Russia benefits if the western powers fight over responsibility.

Argument in favor: It's obvious sabotage. If Ukraine, the USA, et al did it, it would have been in their interests to make it look less deliberate.

If they just turn a valve, they break contract. If they pipeline blows up, its force majeure. They can still pump gas using the other pipelines (yamal etc). But they will shut down all of them eventually. Why? Because they are past the point of no return.

A decent portion of EU citizens think going without Russian gas is a terrible idea. And that's this summer. Just wait until it gets cold. Going back is very easy. Most of the public wants to go back, and you can go back.

You keep asserting in this thread that most EU citizens want to get russian gas right now. This doesn't really correspond with what I perceive in my country or understand to be the case in the rest of the EU... Do you have any public polling to back this up and are you talking about any regions in the EU in particular?

Maybe I misspoke with most, if I said that. I meant Many. There were large protests in Germany just this week to get more energy flowing.

Yeah, on one hand "large protests", on the other, more than 70% of Germans are for continued help to Ukraine despite gas shortage.

What is it with all these comments that think contractual obligations have any weight in a geopolitical dispute like this?

> This makes zero sense to me. What does Russia get by destroying their own pipeline?

1. To do the repair EU needs to lift sanctions

2. Gas prices spiked = short term monetary gain

3. Not so subtle message: hey Norway-Poland nice pipeline you opened here today, you should hope that nothing bad can happen to it.

4. Gazprom needs to pay financial penalties to companies that signed contracts with them because they have stopped supplying gas, now they can claim force major situation and extend this indefinitely due to lengthy trials

> Realistically only US and Russia have the capacity to do 3 attacks like this simultaneously.

I'm no military expert but why? From reading about the pipeline, sections of it are between 80 meters and 110 meters deep which technical scuba divers can reach and the subsea blasts were equivalent to 100kg of dynamite.

Seems to me basically any country could wrangle up a decent sized boat, a few technical divers, 3 100kg bombs, and some time delayed chargers and planted bombs on the pipelines weeks or even months ago.

> Its political and military move. Realistically only US and Russia

> have the capacity to do 3 attacks like this simultaneously.

No need to do 3 attacks simultaneously. An attacker could have placed explosives there some time ago and the detonated it remotely now.

Formar Naval Special Operator and now teacher in marine engineering and doctoral student at the Swedish Försvarshögskolan, Patrik Hulterström, alleged that "An experienced diver can in theory manage it himself" according to https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/4ozy8o/orlogskaptein-tr... ( in Norwegian).

> An experienced diver can in theory manage it himself.

This is incorrect for a different reason and it has nothing to do with capability, but instead, deniability.

Anyone could do it. But deniability and covertness is different.

Deniability for this requires covert operators with access to a top notch with great submarine with excellent acoustics (really lackthereof) for an underwater insertion and recovery.

Ding Ding Ding.

Suddenly the list of countries capable of doing became a great deal shorter

Reply on news.ycombinator.com