Note that NS2 has also been destroyed, and that's even more recent than NS1. It was definitely sabotage, it can't be anything else given the timing, and it has to be state sponsored given that the pipelines are under the ocean. Berlin apparently thinks it would require submarines or special forces.
US / Ukraine are unfortunately the only states for which this makes sense (perhaps US with back-room permission from some people in the German government):
1. Biden stated flat out he would never allow NS2 to go live. "There will no longer be a NS2, we will end it" and when asked by a reporter "how will you do that exactly" he replied "i promise you we will be able to do it". This makes the USA the prime suspect by far, worryingly and alarmingly.
2. Ukraine wants to keep Europe from supporting Russia via gas purchases but if the attack is traced back to them it would immediately kill public support for them, this would be an insanely risky and counter-productive move.
3. Russia has no reason to blow up its own pipelines and every reason not to. They were hoping Europe goes back to buying their gas, maybe even ending sanctions to get it. This ends that possibility for a while.
We do really need to cut it out with the absurd "Putin is a 4D chess grandmaster" explanations, they make the west look collectively crazy.
Russia has an enormous reason to sabotage NordStream 1 and 2, because russia has contractualized massive amount of gas to sell to Germany and other for decades, it explains why Uniper has to be bailed out. If Gazprom fails to meet its expectations it is liable for a reimbursement so it wants to avoid going to international arbitration that would use all the russian money frozen, so it has organized plausible deniability with the turbine, and now with NS1/NS2, and is currently messing up with the one transiting in ukraine as it is menacing to ban Naftogaz.
> This makes the USA the prime suspect by far, worryingly and alarmingly.
I don't find that worrying or alarming. It would mean the administration knows what they're about and are taking proactive measures to take options off the table for Germany and Russia.
(Assuming it would not be beneath the US or proxies to do such a thing.) It would not make sense right now. Germany was nowhere reopening Nordstream 2 and if it came to that the US would have other effective means of blocking its use before reaching to outright sabotage.
That makes right now a great time to do this. Germany is currently very much resolved to keep NS2 closed and no one expects Russia to budge on NS1, so it's not like a viable option is taken off the table, deserting Ukraine over gas is (still?) beyond the pale as far as the mainstream is considered. But the German electorate may change their minds in the coming weeks and months, and Russia might start dangling NS1 carrots too, so blowing them up now is a great way to kill the domestic German political issue while it's still small and not devolved into paralysing trench warfare. I wouldn't be too surprised if the German government had secretly given their go-ahead to whoever is behind this.
> But the German electorate may change their minds in the coming weeks and months
The important thing is that many leaders in NATO and Ukraine fear that the electorate may change their minds. I think they're pretty likely wrong and that Germans aren't that fickle, for good or ill, but I'm probably an insane populist by western leadership's standard.
> I think they're pretty likely wrong and that Germans aren't that fickle
I hear Germans say that as well, but usually those who are pretty comfortable economically. A large part of the population is anything but, is struggling to keep up, failing to keep up or already living hand to mouth. Previous governments have cultivated a huge low-wage sector and made it really hard for large swathes of the population to keep up let alone advance economically, so a lot of people don't have substantial savings or anything else to fall back on.
Hence the social contract for those parts of the population kind of goes like this: Your net worth is pretty low and your economic mobility is non-existing, but it's fine since you get stability and security and the government-provided safety net will bail you out if you get sick or whatever. But that safety net, thinned and stretched as it is, isn't helping most people cope with the current surge in energy prices, and there's as yet no clear indication how the government will try to compensate for that, let alone keep afloat an economy built to a large part on the availability of lots of cheap natural gas.
If they don't do all of this really well, I guess a large portion of the electorate may prove to be very fickle indeed, and I couldn't really blame them for it. I'm sure most would very much prefer a free Ukraine, and there is a deep desire to be on the "right" side of history, but none of this is enough to lose one's livelihood over. Break the social contract and all bets are off. Screw Ukraine, bring in the cheap autocracy gas, I want my stability back.
There is good hope that it won't come to this, but it's a possibility, and the far right is set to profit from any unleashed German angst, as they have during the refugee crisis and (to a lesser degree, due to their own incompetence) the pandemic. If I were Chancellor Scholz or President Biden, I'd be quite worried about that, and yesterday's strike on the pipelines makes perfect sense in that light. Now there is no "easy" cop-out anymore for Germany.
Why not? Ever heard of Baltops 2022? Its last remains just passed by there a few days ago. Some divers, some mines, some timer or remote detonator, done.
What other effective means? The USA already imposed direct sanctions on Germany to try and stop Nord Stream 2 from being built, a very hostile move that supposedly resulted in 'incomprehension' in the German Foreign Office. It didn't work.
Nowhere near (re-)opening: we don't really know this. The Greens are loud and extreme (saying they don't care how much pain Germans suffer) but we don't know what's going on behind the scenes. USA spies on all the European countries all the time and obviously Russia too, so they presumably have better insight into the true state of German decision making than we do here on HN. It's possible they got some intel that was interpreted as meaning that they were getting close to re-opening NS1 or open NS2 and decided to act before that was possible.
There's also some evidence that this may have been planned for a long time, in which case it would again make no sense to be Russia.
Way back in 2015 an underwater robot laden with explosives was found next to the NS pipelines by Swedish special forces:
Who was opposed to NS in 2015? Only the USA. But it gets worse :( In August the US Navy entered the area right next to where the explosions happened and then switched off their identification transponders:
(auto translation) "A total of 4,000 US soldiers, helicopter pilots, marines, doctors and strategists are on their way east. At around 6 a.m. on Wednesday morning, the association had already passed the Danish island of Bornholm, when the Americans switched off their automatic ship identification systems (AIS) and could no longer be located without further ado."
It seems to me like this is going to immediately turn into another COVID lab leak problem where the media and governments go into overdrive to bury the most obvious and straightforward explanation. Give it 24 hours and linking to the articles I just showed you will be banned on Twitter/Facebook and anyone saying "the USA is the most obvious suspect" will be banned from YouTube. Then maybe in three years suddenly it'll become acceptable to talk about.
USA being the obvious suspect would only be a problem if people believed this to be a bad thing. I’m from Poland, Europe, and I’m really happy about those pipelines exploding, because it clears a major strategic problem, and I suspect there are more people who feel this way.
It's reasonable to believe that if the USA has done this, the political destabilization that could occur from people realizing that America had engaged in an unprovoked act of war directly against supposed "allies", knowing full well the consequences might conceivably be people freezing to death and/or rolling blackouts that destroy their economy, would be far more important. If you want to see the rise of explicitly anti-American politicians in Europe then that would be an excellent way to do it.
Look at it this way - how do you think Biden would react if Germany mined a US LNG port?
Also, you're aware that the current situation threatens supply in the UK too, right?
Nobody is going to freeze - even before war Russia was at most about 30% of gas imports; now it’s much less (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-27/europe-is...), and those two pipelines were unused anyway. The only risk is the raising gas prices will make the industry less competitive over the winter - but it’s small fries compared to COVID.
What it does is fixing a major strategic problem of Germany being blackmailed by Russia - a problem which endangered entire Europe. It also makes it impossible for Russia to route gas around Ukraine - which differently to EU countries could then freeze.
Whatever US president a says to reporters doesn't change the fact that US government doesn't care much about pollution when it comes to national security.
US / Ukraine are unfortunately the only states for which this makes sense (perhaps US with back-room permission from some people in the German government):
1. Biden stated flat out he would never allow NS2 to go live. "There will no longer be a NS2, we will end it" and when asked by a reporter "how will you do that exactly" he replied "i promise you we will be able to do it". This makes the USA the prime suspect by far, worryingly and alarmingly.
https://twitter.com/ah114088/status/1574435558675316737
2. Ukraine wants to keep Europe from supporting Russia via gas purchases but if the attack is traced back to them it would immediately kill public support for them, this would be an insanely risky and counter-productive move.
3. Russia has no reason to blow up its own pipelines and every reason not to. They were hoping Europe goes back to buying their gas, maybe even ending sanctions to get it. This ends that possibility for a while.
We do really need to cut it out with the absurd "Putin is a 4D chess grandmaster" explanations, they make the west look collectively crazy.