President Biden on Nord Stream 2 Pipeline if Russia Invades Ukraine: "We will bring an end to it."
When asked how he will do that. "We will, uh, I promise you we will be able to do it".
When asked how he will do that. "We will, uh, I promise you we will be able to do it".
Doubtful. I think the most rational reason Russia might have done it was to remove a bargaining chip from any Russian challengers to Putin. But this seems like a stretch; if Putin thought some gazprom executive was going to use the pipeline to negotiate a peace with Europe, he'd probably just order that executive and his family murdered. That seems to be the way he operates.
Self-sabotage to preempt coups is not unheard of though. The organizational dysfunction and poorly trained state of several militaries around the world is probably attributable in part to self-sabotage, by politicians who fear military coups.
That makes no sense for anyone but Russia (leave the option slightly ajar for selling gas later on). And the contracts would not quite be irrelevant since they could then try to seize more assets from Russia.
Also a Norway-Poland gas pipeline was opened up just one day before the NS attacks, so could also be sending a message.
Maybe they wanted to, but simply failed? One of the bombs did not go off, or something like that.
A former Navy SEAL was interviewed and stated pipelines are what they called (IIRC) "friendly targets" — it doesn't take much explosive to take them out (I imagine their pressurization helps, but I don't have subject matter knowledge).
That's a shakey presumption. 3 out of 4 may have been a compromise between the arguments for taking out the pipelines and the arguments against it. We cannot know for certain how many pipelines the attacker, whoever it was, intended to destroy.
Interesting take— have you seen what the US has done in the Middle East lately?
At the end of the day, if Russia were involved, no one would be holding their tongues about the results of their investigations. The only reason the results are being kept secret is because the European vassal states are afraid of publicly accusing the US. Which, given that the US was at least complicit in an attack on Germany, I can’t really blame them.
The rest is also complete nonsense - NS1 doesn't go anywhere near Ukraine. It's a subsea pipeline in the Baltic sea. Ukraine borders the Black sea and not the Baltic sea. Also NS2 is right next to NS1..
Restarting the NS2 certification process was nowhere to be seen on the horizon, so there is no real point to blow it up from the standpoint of the US (nevermind that actually blowing it up would be insane for the US.. the reality would be diplomatic and soft-power options, of which the US has plenty). It was dead already. Also all signs were pointing towards NS1 and NS2 being dead in the water for the future too, since the gas storage was filling up despite no more imports at all from Russia, the new LNG terminals making good progress, existing LNG import terminals running at capacity.
And would still like to see any kind of evidence from you that Germany would have certified NS2 if the US hadn't said anything.
That - plus basic cui bono logic - rules Russia out, and it certainly points to another NATO member. Primarily UK with assistance from Poland and coordination and tech gear provided by the US. But it's easy to sheep dip a soldier, you swear them in and they officially become members of the Polish army, they maneover the drone, and then they revert to being British. Then the UK can legally say none of their soldiers did anything, and Poland can say they don't have the technical means, etc. In this way, you can deny everything to the press while not technically lying, even though everyone knows who is responsible.
In a German poll, 95% of the public believed the US was responsible. It's shocking how uninformed Americans are about the actions of their own government, and how differently the US is perceived by the rest of the world vis-a-vis its own people. A similar principle applies to perceptions of NATO (which has only ever fought offensive wars) by people within NATO countries vis-a-vis those without.
In this battle of perceptions, there is a split between the 1 billion in the West and the 7 billion in the rest of the world, with the latter having positive views of Russia and negative views of NATO, while the former have it reversed. This is studied in a Cambridge report entitled "A World Divided" [pdf warning]: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...
Page 12 and 13 have some striking graphs on how these two groups, which used to have approximately the same opinions about Russia and the US, are now moving very far apart, basically living in opposite realities. This is why people can say with a straight face that Russia chose to blow up its own pipeline, whereas the US, which threatened to stop the pipeline and has blown up pipelines twice in the past, and was caught planting explosives under the very same pipeline in 2015, is "ruled out" by some in the West. To anyone outside the West, it's absolutely clear who is responsible. And also to 95% of Germans.
do you have a source on that? Haven't seen this before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65saUjbbNLM
They got this from a German government press conference about the investigation being closed. I emailed them if there is an online link to a transcript (it will be in German, but that's fine). If I get a response, I will update. You can search german transcripts of press conferences from Oct 16-17 on the subject of ending the investigation.
The Duran is a heavily pro-Kremlin source:
>Founded in 2016, The Duran is a strongly right-leaning news and opinion website with ties to Russian state media. Based in Cyprus, the website’s editor is Alexander Mercouris, who in 2012 was disbarred as an attorney in London. According to the Telegraph, he then went on to become a “pro-Russian commentator on world affairs for Russian TV news outlets and websites.”
>In review, The Duran publishes news and opinions with a conservative and pro-Russian perspective
17th October (EDIT: or the days before, slightly conflicting info) apparently the German ships that took part in the first official inspection came back, but ... that's not "ending the investigation"!
Citation needed. That doesn't square my personal perception. And the only nordstream related polls I managed to find where in regards to opening NS2 post-invasion, where > 50% where against it [1].
[1] https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Mehrheit-ist-gegen-Offnung-von-N...
Also, the Western media selects what it reports from Russia.
They don't want to advertise their capabilities in an official manner, even though they were the ones threatening all the internet cables around. Not sure if Sweden's investigation proved it was from outside or inside, but of course, if it's from inside then it really limits who could have done it.
"I see zero reasons why Russia would attack its own infrastructure" only points at one's lack of imagination or intellectual honesty really.
Imagination can help one paint any kind of picture in their head indeed, but maybe lets keep it in check at least to the point of basic sanity and reason?
It was a hot topic in Russian media outlets.