No, Ukrainians bombed it for their own reasons and not on behalf of the US.
The exact reasons aren't entirely clear, originally they hated NS because it allowed Europe to ignore Ukraine in the gas trade which left them more exposed. By the time of the full scale war I would bet the reason was more "fuck Russia" than anything more carefully reasoned.
Nord Stream 1 started operations in 2011. For 11 years money was flowing and the Russian army was in terrible shape in 2022. Now, without the Nord Stream money, it is in better shape.
When the pipeline was sabotaged, no gas and no money were flowing anyway, which makes it even more absurd. There is a very high likelihood that the front lines would be in the exact same place if Nord Stream had not been sabotaged.
Except of course, the EU would have had more leverage in negotiating LNG deals with the US and Qatar rather than making emergency deals.
EDIT: Downvoted while the Ukrainian transit pipelines were open from 2014-2025 and yielded Russian transit fees. And while Nord Stream was built partly because Ukraine stole Russian transit gas in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...
On the other hand: there's a global superpower doing horrific war crimes to Ukraine. I think they're justified in doing whatever it takes even if you don't like it.
The devil is in the details. The conditions that China wants aren't very lucrative to Russians, and the second pipeline, if it is even built, will take about a decade to build, so not "now".
Russian negotiating position is weak and Beijing knows that.
Russia selling gas to China is completely orthogonal to Nord Stream issue.
The strategic win in bombing Nord Stream was that Ukraine finally got Europe on their side. Before NS was blown up many countries, especially Germany were sitting on the fence, reluctant to give Ukraine any help. They were hoping for Ukraine to lose the war quickly, then they would give Putin some slap on the wrist punishment, and return to "business as usual" with Russia. Nord Stream being destroyed removed the biggest incentive for doing that.
It seems at least as plausible that they did it because wanted to hurt Russia as it does that Washington ordered them to do it, to put it mildly. Washington has been supporting Ukraine during the war but has been rather reticent to support attacking Russian assets that are outside the territory of Ukraine.
The wonders of propaganda make it so that "Ukrainians bombed it" is given as an irrefutable fact, and not something that needs a lot of evidence.
Nobody remembers anymore that Pres. Biden himself said, “If Russia invades ... there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” [°] Nor that the very next day, a EU parliament member, and now Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski thanked the US for the sabotage [^]. Nor that the same day, a competing natural gas pipeline has opened, the Baltic Pipe [_].
None of this matters, because "Ukrainians bombed it". Because WaPo and WSJ said so. In a waterway that is heavily controlled by all kinds of NATO vessels. Where NATO had an exercise 3 months before that, called BALTOPS. Come on.
My, admittedly layman, understanding is that it was a very difficult thing to do from a technical perspective. And that there are very few countries that have technical capabilities to accomplish this. Ukraine is not one of them.
I have no basis to conclude anything in this matter. I saw multiple news reports/interviews to that effect. True/not - you get to decide based on news you hear.
Do you have a basis to conclude that "every intelligence and law enforcement agency that has looked into it and published a report has found the opposite"? You exhaustively went through all Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies and read their reports? So you are quoting other news articles/interviews. Apparently their views differed. Ok.
If, after Russia attacked Georgia and Ukraine in Crimea and Donbas, Germany has decided to team up and provide Russia with a steady stream of cash in exchange for gas, it's on Germany. It can't go all surprised Pickachu when the pipeline suddenly blows up.
Blowing up a pipeline in a war isn't violence, it's warfare, and thus IMHO Ukraine had every right to destroy a piece of infrastructure that could be used as political leverage and source of income for its invaders.
The funnier / biggest irony is that US and Russia are working together to fix the pipeline, buy distilleries in Germany to sell to the Germans Russian gas at US prices.
No. This was alleged to be taken out by Ukrainian special forces in order to twist Europe's arm, which is a good thing in the end, but so far as anyone knows it had nothing to to with the US. Until I hear anything proving otherwise I will take what we know as all we know for now.
The US were not thrilled about it when it was being constructed, obviously, but this was normal tensions towards Russia, prescient in the end but here we are.
If you have some more actual evidence outside of assumptions I am absolutely willing to hear it out. I just won't sit here and say "Must have been the US" without any insight.
> President Joe Biden said on Monday that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would be halted if Russia invades Ukraine and stressed unity with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as the West rallies to avert a war in Europe.
Halted.. Absolutely, political pressure on Europe to not sign or use it.
You've made the leap to blowing it up somewhere, that is the stretch I'm not buying until it's admitted to. Personally, as an Irish who knows the history of occupation during tense years, I'm not surprised what a well trained spec ops can do with some basic equipment, so my money is on Ukrainian people just doing something Impressive but I'll wait for the facts to say it's exactly what happened.
What's the part that's hard to imagine? It's literally just a boat ride to a publicly-known location that isn't monitored in any way, diving to a depth humans can dive to, placing some standard military / commercial explosives, and getting out.
There were several countries arguably interested in getting rid of that pipeline (Ukraine, Poland, the US), but Ukraine wanted it the most, had easy access, and there's no need to overcomplicate internet theories.
No, "normal" humans don't dive to 80m deep, where the explosion occurred. Any diver, whether professional or recreational (which is my case), will know about this. I don't have a (alternative) theory about this, I'm just stating facts. Well, the alternative theory, if we are speaking of divers, is that they had some very special equipment and were extremely skilled. It wasn't some random people, renting a random boat, renting random diving gear and buying random explosives ..
> No, "normal" humans don't dive to 80m deep, where the explosion occurred.
This simply isn't true, I myself after a technical advancement in my PADI to be certified on a rebreather went >80m many times. It's absolute more common than it was in the past.
Those who are trained with special forces as alleged would also be required to be qualified.
I want to clarify my answer here as I made it seem a bit more nonchalant than it is, there is definitely some technical training that needs to be done to dive deeper, as you say no recreational scuba enthusiast should just try it. There are different gasses that you need and a whole different approach to preparation and decomp.
My main point is that it's not as rare as some might think, it's becoming more and more recreational.
The people who did it definitely took on risk, but in my eyes, more so because if something did happen to go wrong, there's no support to help you out (that we know of). It's a flying with 1 engine scenario. The fact that it was pulled off is impressive. But for any rec divers, don't try without the right training, equipment and people with you.
You have no clue about the "facts". Diving to 80m+ is no big deal now. Hundreds of random amateur tech divers do that every weekend as a casual hobby. They typically own their own gear (not rental), which can purchased new for about $30K including training. The equipment such as a closed-circuit rebreather (CCR) and drysuit is somewhat specialized but widely available on the open market from numerous manufacturers. I know a number of divers living in that region who have done much more complex and challenging dives, although obtaining and using the explosives is a separate issue.
Right, Achim Schlöffel is legitimate. In terms of complex tech diving he has been there and done that, and has the pictures to prove it. When he says something can be done there's no reason to doubt him.
"The open-sea diving depth record was achieved in 1988 by a team of COMEX and French Navy divers who performed pipeline connection exercises at a depth of 534 metres (1,750 ft) in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the "Hydra 8" programme employing heliox and hydrox."
Sounds like 80 meters is cake walk for any modern naval institution.
An 80 meter bounce dive is a cake walk for anyone with advanced technical dive training. Any motivated middle-class person could acquire the necessary skills and equipment to do it safely in a few years of steady effort. It doesn't require anything like the complex saturation diving procedures and equipment used by COMEX or certain naval institutions.
>Advanced Mixed Gas Diver (80m)...The Advanced Mixed Gas Diver course is a great way to extend already considerable open-circuit mixed gas diving skills.
They actually dived pretty deep (most Scuba gear and divers are limited to 40 meters), the planning of the operation was meticulous in that pretty much nobody saw the divers, and the explosives had to be designed with a good knowledge of the pipeline and its concrete. Ukrainian operations during the war have demonstrated that their typical MO is a lot more "seat-of-the-pants" than this operation would suggest.
You're literally arguing that a government intelligence agency couldn't find a couple of experienced people, provide them with commercially-available equipment, and get them to coordinate a medium-complexity task.
Yes, it's an operation that requires coordination and planning, which is why it's reasonable to assume it was carried out by an intelligence agency and not a lone fisherman with a grudge. But once you're in the realm of intelligence activities, this isn't exactly the "let's blow up their pagers" level of complexity.
Their sabotage attempts of several bridges in Crimea did not go this well, suggesting that the Ukrainians alone aren't the best at understanding explosives, and their successes like "fly a bunch of FPV drones out of a shipping container" are quite a bit simpler than this. "Intelligence agency" is a spectrum of capability. Suggesting that an intelligence agency that tried and failed to blow up a bride twice was the same as the one that executed a flawless operation against an underwater pipeline is a bit far-fetched.
It's not at all obvious that e.g. the drone attack, which involved >100 drones assembled inside Russia by human operatives who were able to safely exfiltrate, and 5 different storage containers, in a coordinated strike on 5 different airfields hundreds/thousands of kilometers apart and away from the border, is a less complex operation than the destruction of NordStream
Snuggling and launching drones from deep within enemy territory is a much more complicated op than a couple of dudes diving in the middle of nowhere.
Bringing that bridge down is also much harder than blowing up the pipeline, because the bridge is covered by a lot of defenses, and naval drones will always have limited payload (if they want to be fast enough to evade defenses). Dudes performing a dive in the middle of the sea far from the battlefield are much less vulnerable.
Wait, NORD Stream was BEHIND enemy lines? And is as short a span as a bridge (so more easily monitored complicating things). How many people traveled across the Nord Stream pipeline a day that required the operators to be hidden from?
They have demonstrated capabilities like blowing up the Kerch Strait bridge or several Russian oil refineries without US help, what makes you think Nord Stream is too difficult for them?
The first Kerch Bridge attempt was only a partial success. Traffic continued almost the next day. The second attempt was a complete failure. For the refineries, Ukraine uses at least GPS.
The sail boat theory is plausible from diving standpoint, but they allegedly installed explosives on NS-1 and NS-2 sites that were at least 100km apart, within 10 hours, with no decompression equipment. If they can do that, why do they repeatedly fail at Kerch Bridge?
> If they can do that, why do they repeatedly fail at Kerch Bridge?
The bridge is approximately 3km long or so, which makes it relatively easy to maintain a continuous 24/7 armed presence to prevent sabotage. An underwater pipeline is a 1200km stretch mostly in other international territory that is hard to protect. Definitely much easier to blow up a pipeline than it is to blow up a bridge.
Why bring up "decompression equipment"? Have you ever even done any tech diving? We just deco in the water. No special equipment is needed beyond a rebreather or some stage tanks.
We can't prove that there wasn't some US assistance (i.e. can't prove a negative) but there's pretty strong evidence that it was primarily a Ukrainian operation.
I don’t think Ukraine would have risked an operation against a country they were actively trying to get military support from.
My money is actually on Polish special forces (or one of the Baltic states), in an effort to force Germany to be serious about weaning itself off Russian natural gas.
> I don’t think Ukraine would have risked an operation against a country they were actively trying to get military support from.
It didn't make much of a difference to Germany since the gas flow via NS1 was already switched off for a while and NS2 never had delivered any gas before the sabotage happened. In the end it was more of a symbolic gesture to freeze the status quo that was already in place anyway.
Russia warns Europe that it will freeze to death if help to Ukraine will continue -> Russia stops NS1 to demonstrate their economical superpower -> EU companies are looking for $18 billion compensation -> NS1 blows up to make an excuse.
There are about half a dozen actors with an interest in doing it. It's like an Agatha Christie murder mystery. My favourite as a Brit was Ukraine with tech assistance from the British navy, as alleged by Moscow.
Biden never announced that he would blow up Nord Stream 2. What he said in effect, in a press conference after Germany grudgingly agreed to prevent Nord Stream 2 from going online if Russia were to escalate its actions in Ukraine, was essentially "it's not going to go online" and giving a vague "it won't" answer when the questioner pointed out what if Germany disagreed, since it was Germany's call in the matter after all.
A month or so later, Russia launched the 2022 offensive against Ukraine, and there was no longer any question of NS2 entering service because it was clear to all that the preconditions for Germany's rescission of approval for the pipeline had been satisfied. With that context, Biden's answer is best understood as him being quite confident in the quality of US intelligence that Russia was planning an imminent invasion of Ukraine that Europe was assessing as faulty. So while Europe was interested in the question of "what if Russia doesn't invade Ukraine?" Biden's answer was (in not so many words) "I'm not contemplating that scenario."
No, Ukrainians bombed it for their own reasons and not on behalf of the US.
The exact reasons aren't entirely clear, originally they hated NS because it allowed Europe to ignore Ukraine in the gas trade which left them more exposed. By the time of the full scale war I would bet the reason was more "fuck Russia" than anything more carefully reasoned.
Anything that makes it harder for Russia to make foreign currency and decrease the demand for Rubles is a strategic win for Ukraine.
If it significantly harms the people helping them or curries disfavour towards Ukraine then it could be strategically misguided.
(Not saying that's the case here, all considered)
Those are smaller second order effects. Gutting the income to the Russian war machine is the first order effect and a clear win for Ukraine.
Nord Stream 1 started operations in 2011. For 11 years money was flowing and the Russian army was in terrible shape in 2022. Now, without the Nord Stream money, it is in better shape.
When the pipeline was sabotaged, no gas and no money were flowing anyway, which makes it even more absurd. There is a very high likelihood that the front lines would be in the exact same place if Nord Stream had not been sabotaged.
Except of course, the EU would have had more leverage in negotiating LNG deals with the US and Qatar rather than making emergency deals.
EDIT: Downvoted while the Ukrainian transit pipelines were open from 2014-2025 and yielded Russian transit fees. And while Nord Stream was built partly because Ukraine stole Russian transit gas in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...
On the other hand: there's a global superpower doing horrific war crimes to Ukraine. I think they're justified in doing whatever it takes even if you don't like it.
Nord Stream money is being replaced by China in the new gas deal:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-china-bless-v...
So Russia can now export gas, get foreign currency, and buy weapons with the money. I do not see any strategic wins here.
Additionally, China gets an economic boost. That is a sublime strategy.
Three points there:
1. Power of Syberia 1 throughput is not fully utilized.
2. China pays half of the EU price.
3. Power of Syberia 2 not be build in the near future. It's not the deal to actually do something. It's too continue further discussion.
The devil is in the details. The conditions that China wants aren't very lucrative to Russians, and the second pipeline, if it is even built, will take about a decade to build, so not "now".
Russian negotiating position is weak and Beijing knows that.
Russia selling gas to China is completely orthogonal to Nord Stream issue.
The strategic win in bombing Nord Stream was that Ukraine finally got Europe on their side. Before NS was blown up many countries, especially Germany were sitting on the fence, reluctant to give Ukraine any help. They were hoping for Ukraine to lose the war quickly, then they would give Putin some slap on the wrist punishment, and return to "business as usual" with Russia. Nord Stream being destroyed removed the biggest incentive for doing that.
Is there some credible reason to actually believe this?
That Ukrainians did it?
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/ukrainian-man-ar...
That they did it for their own motivations?
It seems at least as plausible that they did it because wanted to hurt Russia as it does that Washington ordered them to do it, to put it mildly. Washington has been supporting Ukraine during the war but has been rather reticent to support attacking Russian assets that are outside the territory of Ukraine.
The wonders of propaganda make it so that "Ukrainians bombed it" is given as an irrefutable fact, and not something that needs a lot of evidence.
Nobody remembers anymore that Pres. Biden himself said, “If Russia invades ... there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” [°] Nor that the very next day, a EU parliament member, and now Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski thanked the US for the sabotage [^]. Nor that the same day, a competing natural gas pipeline has opened, the Baltic Pipe [_].
None of this matters, because "Ukrainians bombed it". Because WaPo and WSJ said so. In a waterway that is heavily controlled by all kinds of NATO vessels. Where NATO had an exercise 3 months before that, called BALTOPS. Come on.
[°] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4O8rGRLf8
[^] https://archive.ph/20220927190022/https://twitter.com/radeks...
[_] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Pipe
And let’s not forget the crazy analysis of Dr. Braun.[0]
0. https://hansbenjaminbraun.ch/nordstream.html
It's not only WaPo and WJS but investigations in Sweden and Germany. Read the reports.
"Nord Stream sabotage: Berlin issues arrest warrant for Ukrainian man"
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/08/14/n...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-is-known-about-nor...
My, admittedly layman, understanding is that it was a very difficult thing to do from a technical perspective. And that there are very few countries that have technical capabilities to accomplish this. Ukraine is not one of them.
> it was a very difficult thing to do from a technical perspective
Why would you conclude this where every intelligence and law enforcement agency that has looked into it and published a report has found the opposite?
I have no basis to conclude anything in this matter. I saw multiple news reports/interviews to that effect. True/not - you get to decide based on news you hear.
Do you have a basis to conclude that "every intelligence and law enforcement agency that has looked into it and published a report has found the opposite"? You exhaustively went through all Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies and read their reports? So you are quoting other news articles/interviews. Apparently their views differed. Ok.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FVbEoZXhCrM
"There will be no longer a NordStream 2, we will bring an end to it"
Shocking, there is no longer a NordStream 2. =D
Good. It should’ve never existed. I hope whoever is responsible for its untimely demise gets a medal.
With allies like this, who really needs Russia as an enemy.
If, after Russia attacked Georgia and Ukraine in Crimea and Donbas, Germany has decided to team up and provide Russia with a steady stream of cash in exchange for gas, it's on Germany. It can't go all surprised Pickachu when the pipeline suddenly blows up.
> It should’ve never existed.
You shouldn't be calling for violence in response to a political disagreement.
Blowing up a pipeline in a war isn't violence, it's warfare, and thus IMHO Ukraine had every right to destroy a piece of infrastructure that could be used as political leverage and source of income for its invaders.
Nice reversing of victim and offender
It's a popular page in the playbook these days.
(I'm not entirely sincere with the original snipe.)
Of course :-)
The funnier / biggest irony is that US and Russia are working together to fix the pipeline, buy distilleries in Germany to sell to the Germans Russian gas at US prices.
Haha hilarious, and in character, if true
Source?
Here:
- https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-united-states-nord-st...
- https://www.dw.com/en/germany-cdu-nord-stream-russia-gas-afd...
- https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/03/03/russia-and-us-held...
[go to "www.google.com" ....]
I would not describe this as "US and Russia are working together to fix the pipeline", but more like "some people think about it".
agreed. The caveat being that the people thinking about it have the power to make it happen, without needing to ask anyone else.
well, at least everyone can work on reducing their own personal dependence on natural gas
No. This was alleged to be taken out by Ukrainian special forces in order to twist Europe's arm, which is a good thing in the end, but so far as anyone knows it had nothing to to with the US. Until I hear anything proving otherwise I will take what we know as all we know for now.
The US were not thrilled about it when it was being constructed, obviously, but this was normal tensions towards Russia, prescient in the end but here we are.
> [...] as anyone knows it had nothing to to with the US
ROLF - that must up there with "we want the hostages back and we're actively working towards that goal".
If you have some more actual evidence outside of assumptions I am absolutely willing to hear it out. I just won't sit here and say "Must have been the US" without any insight.
> If you have some more actual evidence outside of assumptions I am absolutely willing to hear it out.
https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-germanys-scholz-stress-u...
> President Joe Biden said on Monday that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would be halted if Russia invades Ukraine and stressed unity with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as the West rallies to avert a war in Europe.
Halted.. Absolutely, political pressure on Europe to not sign or use it.
You've made the leap to blowing it up somewhere, that is the stretch I'm not buying until it's admitted to. Personally, as an Irish who knows the history of occupation during tense years, I'm not surprised what a well trained spec ops can do with some basic equipment, so my money is on Ukrainian people just doing something Impressive but I'll wait for the facts to say it's exactly what happened.
Are we sure that Ukrainian special forces have the capability to blow up nord stream without heavy US help?
What's the part that's hard to imagine? It's literally just a boat ride to a publicly-known location that isn't monitored in any way, diving to a depth humans can dive to, placing some standard military / commercial explosives, and getting out.
There were several countries arguably interested in getting rid of that pipeline (Ukraine, Poland, the US), but Ukraine wanted it the most, had easy access, and there's no need to overcomplicate internet theories.
> diving to a depth humans can dive to
No, "normal" humans don't dive to 80m deep, where the explosion occurred. Any diver, whether professional or recreational (which is my case), will know about this. I don't have a (alternative) theory about this, I'm just stating facts. Well, the alternative theory, if we are speaking of divers, is that they had some very special equipment and were extremely skilled. It wasn't some random people, renting a random boat, renting random diving gear and buying random explosives ..
> No, "normal" humans don't dive to 80m deep, where the explosion occurred.
This simply isn't true, I myself after a technical advancement in my PADI to be certified on a rebreather went >80m many times. It's absolute more common than it was in the past.
Those who are trained with special forces as alleged would also be required to be qualified.
I want to clarify my answer here as I made it seem a bit more nonchalant than it is, there is definitely some technical training that needs to be done to dive deeper, as you say no recreational scuba enthusiast should just try it. There are different gasses that you need and a whole different approach to preparation and decomp.
My main point is that it's not as rare as some might think, it's becoming more and more recreational.
The people who did it definitely took on risk, but in my eyes, more so because if something did happen to go wrong, there's no support to help you out (that we know of). It's a flying with 1 engine scenario. The fact that it was pulled off is impressive. But for any rec divers, don't try without the right training, equipment and people with you.
You have no clue about the "facts". Diving to 80m+ is no big deal now. Hundreds of random amateur tech divers do that every weekend as a casual hobby. They typically own their own gear (not rental), which can purchased new for about $30K including training. The equipment such as a closed-circuit rebreather (CCR) and drysuit is somewhat specialized but widely available on the open market from numerous manufacturers. I know a number of divers living in that region who have done much more complex and challenging dives, although obtaining and using the explosives is a separate issue.
Hard, but doable. Here is the analysis by an experience diver.
https://www-ostsee--zeitung-de.translate.goog/panorama/exper...
Right, Achim Schlöffel is legitimate. In terms of complex tech diving he has been there and done that, and has the pictures to prove it. When he says something can be done there's no reason to doubt him.
https://is-expl.com/about/instructors/wgZMC8Y7
You can look this up on wikipedia you know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_diving
"The open-sea diving depth record was achieved in 1988 by a team of COMEX and French Navy divers who performed pipeline connection exercises at a depth of 534 metres (1,750 ft) in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the "Hydra 8" programme employing heliox and hydrox."
Sounds like 80 meters is cake walk for any modern naval institution.
An 80 meter bounce dive is a cake walk for anyone with advanced technical dive training. Any motivated middle-class person could acquire the necessary skills and equipment to do it safely in a few years of steady effort. It doesn't require anything like the complex saturation diving procedures and equipment used by COMEX or certain naval institutions.
Googling for 10 seconds comes up with
>Advanced Mixed Gas Diver (80m)...The Advanced Mixed Gas Diver course is a great way to extend already considerable open-circuit mixed gas diving skills.
They actually dived pretty deep (most Scuba gear and divers are limited to 40 meters), the planning of the operation was meticulous in that pretty much nobody saw the divers, and the explosives had to be designed with a good knowledge of the pipeline and its concrete. Ukrainian operations during the war have demonstrated that their typical MO is a lot more "seat-of-the-pants" than this operation would suggest.
You're literally arguing that a government intelligence agency couldn't find a couple of experienced people, provide them with commercially-available equipment, and get them to coordinate a medium-complexity task.
Yes, it's an operation that requires coordination and planning, which is why it's reasonable to assume it was carried out by an intelligence agency and not a lone fisherman with a grudge. But once you're in the realm of intelligence activities, this isn't exactly the "let's blow up their pagers" level of complexity.
Their sabotage attempts of several bridges in Crimea did not go this well, suggesting that the Ukrainians alone aren't the best at understanding explosives, and their successes like "fly a bunch of FPV drones out of a shipping container" are quite a bit simpler than this. "Intelligence agency" is a spectrum of capability. Suggesting that an intelligence agency that tried and failed to blow up a bride twice was the same as the one that executed a flawless operation against an underwater pipeline is a bit far-fetched.
It's not at all obvious that e.g. the drone attack, which involved >100 drones assembled inside Russia by human operatives who were able to safely exfiltrate, and 5 different storage containers, in a coordinated strike on 5 different airfields hundreds/thousands of kilometers apart and away from the border, is a less complex operation than the destruction of NordStream
Snuggling and launching drones from deep within enemy territory is a much more complicated op than a couple of dudes diving in the middle of nowhere.
Bringing that bridge down is also much harder than blowing up the pipeline, because the bridge is covered by a lot of defenses, and naval drones will always have limited payload (if they want to be fast enough to evade defenses). Dudes performing a dive in the middle of the sea far from the battlefield are much less vulnerable.
Wait, NORD Stream was BEHIND enemy lines? And is as short a span as a bridge (so more easily monitored complicating things). How many people traveled across the Nord Stream pipeline a day that required the operators to be hidden from?
They have demonstrated capabilities like blowing up the Kerch Strait bridge or several Russian oil refineries without US help, what makes you think Nord Stream is too difficult for them?
According to the New York Times, Ukraine receives major help from the US on all fronts:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-...
The first Kerch Bridge attempt was only a partial success. Traffic continued almost the next day. The second attempt was a complete failure. For the refineries, Ukraine uses at least GPS.
The sail boat theory is plausible from diving standpoint, but they allegedly installed explosives on NS-1 and NS-2 sites that were at least 100km apart, within 10 hours, with no decompression equipment. If they can do that, why do they repeatedly fail at Kerch Bridge?
> If they can do that, why do they repeatedly fail at Kerch Bridge?
The bridge is approximately 3km long or so, which makes it relatively easy to maintain a continuous 24/7 armed presence to prevent sabotage. An underwater pipeline is a 1200km stretch mostly in other international territory that is hard to protect. Definitely much easier to blow up a pipeline than it is to blow up a bridge.
Why bring up "decompression equipment"? Have you ever even done any tech diving? We just deco in the water. No special equipment is needed beyond a rebreather or some stage tanks.
They sent their A team for the pipeline and B team for the bridge?
We can't prove that there wasn't some US assistance (i.e. can't prove a negative) but there's pretty strong evidence that it was primarily a Ukrainian operation.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
Yeah it didn't seem very difficult
physically it wasn't that hard - ship, explosives, scuba divers
it's the clusterfuck of EU police inactivity afterwards that needs to be paid more attention to
Yes.
I don’t think Ukraine would have risked an operation against a country they were actively trying to get military support from.
My money is actually on Polish special forces (or one of the Baltic states), in an effort to force Germany to be serious about weaning itself off Russian natural gas.
> I don’t think Ukraine would have risked an operation against a country they were actively trying to get military support from.
It didn't make much of a difference to Germany since the gas flow via NS1 was already switched off for a while and NS2 never had delivered any gas before the sabotage happened. In the end it was more of a symbolic gesture to freeze the status quo that was already in place anyway.
Follow the money.
Russia warns Europe that it will freeze to death if help to Ukraine will continue -> Russia stops NS1 to demonstrate their economical superpower -> EU companies are looking for $18 billion compensation -> NS1 blows up to make an excuse.
argument doesn't make sense, but +1 for polish involvement. Third time lucky eh?
Yes, Ukraine wanted to control gas deliveries to the EU, which merrily proceeded via a Ukrainian transit pipeline until 2025.
The EU is screwed by all energy oligarchies, including transit nations.
Then POTUS himself publicly announced he'd blow up NS. After it was blown up, we suddenly don't know who did it ;(
I didn't know dementia is so contagious.
There are about half a dozen actors with an interest in doing it. It's like an Agatha Christie murder mystery. My favourite as a Brit was Ukraine with tech assistance from the British navy, as alleged by Moscow.
tbf if frost damages a crop Moscow will blame the British, they're obsessed with you lol.
Biden never announced that he would blow up Nord Stream 2. What he said in effect, in a press conference after Germany grudgingly agreed to prevent Nord Stream 2 from going online if Russia were to escalate its actions in Ukraine, was essentially "it's not going to go online" and giving a vague "it won't" answer when the questioner pointed out what if Germany disagreed, since it was Germany's call in the matter after all.
A month or so later, Russia launched the 2022 offensive against Ukraine, and there was no longer any question of NS2 entering service because it was clear to all that the preconditions for Germany's rescission of approval for the pipeline had been satisfied. With that context, Biden's answer is best understood as him being quite confident in the quality of US intelligence that Russia was planning an imminent invasion of Ukraine that Europe was assessing as faulty. So while Europe was interested in the question of "what if Russia doesn't invade Ukraine?" Biden's answer was (in not so many words) "I'm not contemplating that scenario."
That's a very self-limiting viewpoint when a significant portion of warfare is deception, so by definition you're not going to get "all we know".
For example, Seymour Hersh (renowned wartime investigative journalist), published a brief on US involvement: https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the...
That article has been thoroughly debunked. Seymour Hersh just made things up with no fact checking or hard evidence.
What's your counter evidence?
No counter evidence is needed because Hersh hasn't actually presented any legitimate evidence in the first place.
If 'no counter-evidence is needed' were valid, we could dismiss anything we don't like without argument.
AKA: Argument from ignorance
yes, follow the money, almost always.