TLDR; it probably wasn't the russians, most likely a trawler.
I’d be looking for the key places in international waters and the likes needed to be cut simultaneously to say paralyze Europe banking and other infrastructure and would be checking whether there are Russian (and affiliated like that Minerva company) “trawlers” with a habit of hanging around those places.
The norwegians seem to think it was a russian trawler and that trawler doesn't exclude the possiblity that russians did it.
Trawler does not mean unintentional or not state related.
Siberia Airlines Flight 1812
But yeah it's not unique. In this case it's really tough though because the Soviets knew it was a civilian airliner running with full lights.
...and then the same trawlers were in the vicinity of this cable in Svalbard when another trawler criss-crossed over it until it broke
(In Norwegian but hopefully Google Translate will do an OK job and mainly graphics)
https://www.nrk.no/nordland/xl/russiske-tralere-krysset-kabl...
It's an open war with Ukraine only so far. And many are not aware of the wider geopolitics of it, they don't know their countries are at war with Russia. Open attacks would scare many of those people and make them more hostile towards the Russian side. As it stands many are more neutral and Putin even has a significant number of fans in the West.
russia wont openly invade Baltics/NATO, they will send little green men under the cover of some self manufactured crisis. A big forest fire, chemical spill, maybe an aircraft crash or terrorist attack. Then it will be "touch our guys and we Nuke you" like they keep saying in Ukraine, with West trembling to cross magical imaginary red lines.
They claimed technical problems prevented them from fulfilling the amount of gas required by their contract for NS1 and NS2. Due to sanctions they essentially had to provide gas for free - or at least in exchange for money they were unable to spend or access.
The pipe blowing up potentially saved them from having to pay a penalty fee in the contract once the gas hadn’t been moving for X number of days.