You can easily imagine any of the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine (with some local help) or even Finland, Swede or Norway doing the deed.
Or, since the pipelines are well known and not difficult to reach, basically everyone with access to explosives, a boat a divers with explosives skills. None of which is particularly hard to come by.
At that moment in the war, even Putin had a lot of strong motivations -- lock out the option of bringing Nord Stream back online and close to door on de-escalation. As a side-benefit, the possibility of driving a wedge into NATO. I also found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713402 interesting. Who knows.
Putin was already effectively doing that, by demanding payment in rubles and making weird terms. If Putin wanted to shut down Nordstream, he'd just stop sending gas. What was Europe going to do, sanction him more?
I can see the US doing it as they've been vocal opponents to nordstream since its inception, I can see Ukraine wanting to do it although I doubt they'd have the resources, might also have been some other rogue European faction wanting out from under Putin's thumb.
The "Putin did it" hypothesis was that he did it to prevent internal replacement. Suppose that some Russian rival wanted to replace him. They could kill or imprison Putin, end the war in Ukraine, restart the gas pipelines, and have a lot of gas money from Europe to distribute to supporters.
Destroying the pipelines removed the potential reward for an internal rival to replace him.
Nah, that's too simple an explanation. Someone in China obviously wanted cheap gas, so they had to force the Russians to stop selling to Europe and turn eastward. But it can't be Xi because he was enforcing the lockdown, so must've been someone else. My money's on Jack Ma - rich, powerful, directly interested in getting the economy running at full speed again.
If Russia levels Kiev and starts moving in to the rest of the country, a) Ukraine will almost certainly not surrender, leading to prolonged insurgency, and b) I expect ground troops from neighbors, EU, and possibly NATO will come into play.
Meanwhile, all the rhetoric of Russia “saving” a brotherly nation goes flying out the window.
I'm afraid something as drastic as the annihilation of Kiev will lead to actions that are beyond the usual risk assessment levels. Countries will be compelled to act, (repeated...) threats of nukes be damned. Europe will not tolerate another Nazi Germany on its borders, period.
Put another way, a massive, discontinuous step in escalation will inevitably lead to a similar step from the other side. There is no world in which Germany and Poland go "OK then" and withdraw all aid.
Of course there is. Mass mobilization and a war economy would do the trick. Many of Putin's rivals are calling for exactly that.
Ukraine's military barely held on against 90k professional soldiers and 140k mobilised. It would not stand a single chance against 3 million soldiers and a fully militarized Russian economy. Russia hasn't even called up a tenth of its trained reserves.
The Russians had been claiming in the months before the explosion that sanctions were keeping them from delivering gas, and that Europe needed to back off sanctions if they wanted gas to flow. Europe called them out and said this was obviously a falsehood.
Then the explosions happened, which prevented gas from being transported through the pipelines - except for one Nordstream 2 pipeline, which actually would require Germany to budge for it to be operational. Russia even stated that they'd be happy to send gas through the remaining pipeline as soon as Germany backtracked.
Whether or not you think Russia did it, the explosion had the effect of turning something the Russians had been trying and failing to convince other countries of into a reality.
> If Putin wanted to shut down Nordstream, he'd just stop sending gas.
Indeed, Nordstream hadn't been running gas for about a month at the time of the explosions. (Indeed, Nordstream 2 also never ran gas). That is critically useful information for assessing who had motive to blow up the pipeline, yet everyone speculating on the matter seems to assume that it was being used at the time of explosion.
Well, someone did it. If somebody knows who, they are not telling.
Without sources, everything is specilation at best, consiracy theory BS or propaganda at worst. Personally, I don't even believe half of what is reported with connection to the war in Ukraine.
Agreed. One of those situations where everyone wants to blame everyone else for a "terrible" thing that happened, but at the same time don't really GAF because all sides were okay with finalizing a clean break between Europe and Russia for a variety of domestic and IR reasons anyways.
Now I picture a virtual waiting line of covert divers and motivated activists in front of the pipelines waiting for their turn to try it. And being pissed someone else was first! Maybe they have a class reunion of sorts ten years from now!
A dozen divers of the joint US-Russia-Ukraine-Germany “diplomacy simplification strike force” show up only to find the wreckage of the pipeline. Floating nearby, the telltale calling-card, a globe emblazoned on a white flag… Greenpeace!
Why do you think Putin is against de-escalation? The post you links to proposes a not very sensible argument: We are talking about _nation states_. The law isn't as black and white, Gazprom would not pay any fines put on it by a court of the enemy. Even if they were to pay fines put on them, why would this in any way reduce fines? Even if it were to reduce the fines, why would that be worth more than two pipelines there were full of methane? It sounds very implausible.
International contract arbitration wouldn't be handled by 'a court of the enemy', but by a neutral venue mutually agreed to in the contract signing, perhaps hosted by the World Bank, International Chamber of Commerce, or similar.
Gazprom would have to abide by it once relations are normalised, or find other countries unwilling to trust it when signing future contracts.
The Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden and so on, all understand that they have duties to Germany due to their EU membership and further understand that they are dependent on the German economy and that any action of this kind, which jeopardises the German economy, jeopardises also them.
Thus you cannot easily imagine any of the Baltic states, Finland or Sweden doing the deed.
Norway is conceivable-- but they're not really all that active in the Baltic sea, Ukraine is conceivable-- but it isn't actually super easy to do what was done. Blowing up the pipeline would have been easy, but there were several bombs, and they were, as I understand it, quite big, and this would be removal of resources from things closer to the fighting.
Norway is difficult for political reasons though-- would they really screw over their neighbouring countries in the EU?
Thus all these countries are all unlikely choices.
Or, since the pipelines are well known and not difficult to reach, basically everyone with access to explosives, a boat a divers with explosives skills. None of which is particularly hard to come by.