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Comment by yucky | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what the alternate theory of Nord 2 sabotage is? Does anybody other than the US benefit?

It lets plenty of EU politicians off the hook for the upcoming winter of suffering.

The narrative will no longer be "Why did we get in bed with the Russians for our energy?" and instead will be "Too bad about the broken pipeline!"

Why would the US only blow up one of the two Nord Stream 2 pipelines?

Pipeline B of Nord Stream 2 is unscratched and can deliver 30 billion cubic meter of gas per year.

Gazprom now says that two of three "destroyed" pipelines are now in a stable condition hinting that they can be repaired.

Why would the US only destroy 1/4 of the pipelines?

I'll ignore the fact that you responded to my question with other questions instead, and actually answer yours. It's a proxy war. We're pretending we're not actually at war with Russia and this is all the heroic effort of Ukrainians. So the same reason we don't impose a no-fly zone over parts of Ukraine - we're trying to balance escalation that achieves a goal without escalating too far that there is no return.

Now your turn. Who other than the US benefits from this?

could as easily(likely, in my opinion) be Russia. Putin knows that the bridges to Europe are already burnt - might as well try to hurt the Europeans as much as they can for supporting Ukraine. Yes it hurts Russia economically, but for Europe it’s even worse.

Putin controls the valves, he doesn't need to blow it up to hurt the Europeans. As it turned out recently it is quite easy to come up with a ton of excuses to stop the supply. With the NS blown there is no leverage anymore. So, IMO this version doesn't hold to scrutiny.

> Putin controls the valves, he doesn't need to blow it up to hurt the Europeans.

If the plan is to come in later as the savior of an impoverished Europe then yes, he does need to blow it up. Shutting off the valves makes him the bad guy, and people will remember. Having it blown up by some unknown party, ideally the US, lets him pretend it was all out of his control and he's doing the best he can to help his dear friends in Europe.

>Shutting off the valves makes him the bad guy

Nothing in the world could make him not look like the bad guy in the west. Shutting/not shutting valves would change zero opinions of Putin.

There's a sucker born every minute, and betting against human gullibility rarely works out well. You'd be amazed how many people can be taken in after a year or two, let alone longer time periods.

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