Some people believe the Nord pipeline blowup was self-sabotage.
Update: I did not say I believe this myself. I'm just using this as a counter argument to say that the reasons might not be obvious at first glance and people tend to believe all sorts of things.
There is no uncertainty when the pipeline is damaged irreparably.
Destroying the pipelines doesn't benefit neither germany nor russia.
Russia has been reducing gas supplies through Nord Stream 1 for a number of months.
In June, it cut deliveries through the pipeline by 75% - from 170m cubic metres of gas a day to roughly 40m cubic metres.
In July, Russia shut it down for 10 days, citing the need for maintenance. When it reopened, the flow was halved to 20m cubic metres a day.
In late August, it shut down Nord Stream 1 entirely, blaming problems with equipment. The pipeline has not been open since then.
If Nord Stream is shut down suddenly through “force majeure,” a sudden uncontrollable stop that is the fault of neither party, then Russia can void its obligations toward European stakeholders without legally breaking contracts, thus dodging the many penalties in doing so.
They had Zero reasons to blow it up and very good reasons to keep it alive if and when the Germans wanted that gas again.
The only beneficiary of the pipeline going bust are the USA.
The idea that the US would risk making itself a pariah amongst its NATO allies, particularly right now does not seem believable to me.
That isn't enough to blame them for it of course, but to assume that Putin is not behaving logically because the alternatives are so "unthinkable" is misguided.
News for you: Everyone is spying on everyone else. Always have, always will be. Germany was also spying on the US. Spying, a.k.a having inside knowledge, is always a preference by all regimes. Whether one has the means to do it is another matter.
NATOS biggest financial backer, strongest military that is actually capable of something and projects force all over the world, financial power that can tell to Swiss banks how high to jump or else and tell other countries what they can sell and to whom.
Without the US NATO is irrelevant. I think your "US would risk making itself a pariah" statement is pure fantasy. There is zero risk for the US.
So blowing the pipeline up is the better alternative.
Also, as soon as that pipeline got blown up, EU got forced to take much more expensive American liquid gas.
It's not hard to believe in and it makes 100x more sense than Putin blowing it up for funzies.
I have news for you, US is NATO.
It does not care what it's "allies" say. And it will do all it can to make them toe the line.
And that line is: Russia is the enemy that needs to be dismantled and destroyed. You shall not deal with Russia, period.
Why is it difficult for you to understand this simple logic?
A famous journalist who believed obl was imprisoned by pakistan in 2006 and the assassination was staged, siria didnt use chemical weapons, and skripals weren’t poisoned by novichok. You see the pattern here?
This was reported at a simmilar timeframe (compared to the war) and from the same groups of people who said iraq had weapons of mass destruction, so not trusting them would not be that stupid... especially if you have better inside sources that "normal people" do.
On the other hand, this has cause many other countries to think the famous "what if we're next?", and switching from dollars to their local currencies, forming new alliances (either within BRICS or SCO) which seriously endangers the power of dollars and in turn euros.
Just that Russia did have credible motives, and that for Russia, blowing up the line anonymously is better than just saying "no more gas for Europe".
But given the stakes, they are not the only ones that have motives. And I never said otherwise.
They've already invaded a nation. What you're suggesting here is like a violent machine-gun toting bank robber in ski mask making sure to pay his parking bill before driving off, because he's worried about what other people might think of him.
Using international trade to coerce nations is a far lesser crime than invading them and leveling their cities with artillery.
so as opposed to now, someone will talk poorly about them? I dont quite know how putin would sleep at night if someone said he was a bad dude
Ukraine and Norway are also beneficiaries. Ukraine because it reduces the risk of Germany getting squishy about supporting them and Norway because they’ve cornered the European natural gas market.
They're pretty good at improvisation. Odds are good that they could pull off such a thing if they were so inclined. You don't need a traditional submarine fleet to do something like this.
They're not at the top of my suspects list though.
The “Russia did it” argument for Nord Stream is about internal politics. Putin’s war ruined the lifestyles of his elites, who spent most of their time in mansions and yachts in the West. All of that is gone now. It’s tempting for those elites to want to find a way to turn back the clock to February 23, 2022, get the gas money flowing again, and get back to the family villa in the Amalfi Coast. Like Cortes burning the ships to remove the temptation to mutiny, blowing up Nord Stream lets Putin close off this avenue.
Truth is you can tell a plausible story for a lot of actors to do it. But I lean toward the Russia hypothesis because they had less to lose if they got caught.
The US has spent immense political and literal capital on building a coalition to sanction Russia, which could all be undone if it got caught committing an act of war against Germany (no, phone spying is not the same, everyone does that to everyone). Besides, the benefits for the US are hazy, since Germany did not appear open to ever reactivating the pipelines. Why take such a huge risk to prevent something that didn’t appear likely to ever happen, let alone any time soon?
But if it was Russia, what is Germany gonna do to Russia that it’s not already doing? Maybe it would’ve sped up tank deliveries by a few months if they’d caught Russia red-handed, but tanks still happened eventually.
Then a cold winter comes, gas prices get very high (especially since the americans are inflating the price), german industry is fucked, people are paying a lot for heat (or being cold), and there's putin with "just lessen the sanctions, stop sending stuff to ukraine, and you get the cheap gas back". And the only one standing between the (relatively strong) industry and cold people are Scholz (...and Ursula) and a lot of "alternatives" who could take their place.
Germany and russia being friendly? American biggest nightmare... as they've said before, literally, on camera, they'll stop the nordstreams, and they did. Now, even if people of germany get fed up and replace the current politicians, they won't get the cheap gas again.
So, russia has less money, germany has less industry, usa gets stronger and can sell overpriced gas... so only one winner in this outcome, and it's not russia.
Also, are you deliberately changing what Biden said about ending (specifically) Nordstream 2 to “the Nordstreams” to make it seem more believable that he was referring to physical destruction rather than stopping the non-operational Nordstream from progressing to operational status?
Meaning what exactly? Very expensive gas, and in turn heat, and local factories closing down?
Politicians can shit around all day, factories need cheap gas to work, people need jobs in those factories to be able to eat and heat their homes and heat is more expensive than ever.
Talking about jobs and factories one shouldn't forget about safety.
But yes, overinflated politicians are bragging about europe being civilization and everywhere else being a jungle... so yeah, maybe it's time for yankee/European to go home and keep for them/ourselves. If we don't, we have no moral superiority to blame putin for anything while our own soldiers are occupying foreign sovereign countries this very moment.
Fun facts:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5th_Mechanized_Brigade_(Ukrain...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6th_Mechanized_Brigade_(Ukrain...
However, pretty much all countries have unjust conflicts in their history, where they were on the wrong side. That doesn't mean it should continue.
I'll refrain from commenting on Syria topic - I feel it justifies better facts on the table and longer discussion than this place allows. You may think what you want.
Maybe it's time for many countries to keep to themselves - that would roughly correspond to Westfall sovereignty, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty . Or maybe we should be of the opinion that certain things, like human rights, aren't the matter of countries, and have some ways of supporting them too.
> If we don't, we have no moral superiority to blame putin for anything while our own soldiers are occupying foreign sovereign countries this very moment.
Why?
We're not talking about far away history... we're talking about our soldiers occupying foreign sovereign countries right now, today. This is not a germany WW2 situation, where they got fucked, repaid some of the damage, said that they won't repeat history and two generations went by... this is literally today. If we wanted to be better than putin, there's 1 year (minus 11 days) gone by, with us pointing a finger, while we're doing the same... 1 year (almost) that we had the time to "be better", and leave the occupied countriey... but we didn't.
> Or maybe we should be of the opinion that certain things, like human rights, aren't the matter of countries, and have some ways of supporting them too.
Lets be real... noone cares about human rights. At least not enough to start a war. Do people have a right for police not to steal their stuff? Not in america (civil asset forfeiture). The british have arrested more people for "wronghink" (on social media) than the "bad bad putin" did. Guantanamo bay is still there. And zelensky is banning political parties, tv stations and a whole church now. Noone cares about all that. This is just a nice excuse to start a war where you need one... usually in places with either natural resources or strategic location. Find someone to testify about soldiers killing babies, bam war. Need a better story for the second time? Just use weapons of mass destruction excuse.. and then a few years later a "whoopsie, we fucked up". Where are the human rights of the people prince harry killed when he went on his killing tourism?
> Why?
Because we're the same. Counting the number of wars and dead people, even worse.
> Because we're the same.
I really doubt USA fights at the moment anything close to what's going on in Eastern Ukraine. I think you're biased.
Imagine if 'the rest of the world' was arming afghanis, giving them intelligence and satellite data, starlink, training their soldiers and sending mercenaries... plus of course hundreds of billions of dollars/euros... the afghanistan war would look even worse than vietnam did for americans.
Since we didn't help them, but helped the agressors, afghanistan fell relatively fast. ...and after 20 years and trillion of dollars, they managed to replace the taliban with the taliban.
By the time the pipeline was bombed, it was clear that the EU wasn’t going to cave into Russian demands to stop supporting Ukraine.
So the pipeline sitting there usable but with no gas flowing would both create legal problems for Russia and also be a symbol of European unity.
Regarding the US being able to sell LNG, the capabilities to transport and offload it in the quantities needed don’t exist yet.
I don’t know who blew it up, the most logical would be the Ukrainians but they probably couldn’t have. The next logical are Russia and the certainly have the capability. The USA may be the third logical option and they do have the capability but I’m not so sure they could have done it in this part of the world undetected by Russia.
What legal problems? Is russia going to get sued? ...while EU is literally stealing russian assets and sending weapons to kill russians?
The situation on tv is one thing, but the people are fed up with ever more expensive lives while sending billions to ukraine, and enough angry people means huge changes in politics. The last time germany was so fucked by outside forces as it is now, they elected that austrian painter guy, who actually made the country strong again... sadly it ended up in a war and another fuckup of germany.
I’m merely pointing out that there are some reasons for Russia to have bombed the pipeline.
The Hitler reference is just weird.
it is clear that the ruling class didnt want to, but there was increasing pressure from the people of germany and also other parts of EU to approve nord stream 2.
And the US simply couldnt accept that the possibility that they would cave to pressure from the people(the horror). Its probably entirely possible that the germany/EU regime asked the US to do it, just to remove the possibility of them having to be accountable to their own citizens.
you got me, putin secretly sends me bitcoin, and photos of him riding horses shirtless, as I so desperately crave that.
What a marvellous argumentative tool you have, anything you disagree with that can in some way be classified as "russia might think this way", and you have a magical out where you percieve yourself to have won the argument. And with moral superiority too!
I have heard that putin recommends you breathe oxygen regularly, I would strongly recommend you cease listening to russian propaganda, and do the right thing here
The sanctions aren't going away until Putin is replaced by someone sane. I don't expect that to happen anytime soon, do you?
EU was buying gas and oil from Russia for the last 40+ years, they were okay with pumping Russia with billions of euros even after Crimea annexation (and they still pump some moneys during 2022), also funding Russian military industrial complex, that is now blowing up Ukraine. So I’m pretty sure that when dusts settles, Russia will come back as part of international community, maybe with a slightly different leadership.
You have a vivid imagination, one that puts my own to shame.
Whatabout
Whatabout
If that's all you've got -- and that is, indeed, all you've got -- then just pipe down and save the bandwidth. We didn't try to take over and annex Iraq. We got rid of a dictator. Should we have done that? No, of course not. But it's hardly comparable to what Putin is doing, and your value system is horribly broken if you think otherwise.
I get that crying about whataboutism is the trendy way to deflect and be openly hypocritical. But at least do it when it makes sense, not when you get called out for downplaying warcrimes.
I think your value system is even more broken when you dismiss and downplay an entire region being destabilized for generations, a million lives lost and countless more ruined because your side did it "with good intentions", or because gasp someone said a hecking whataboutism.