I never said it was a rational action just that it’s a reason.
There’s more evidence to support that this wasn’t someone like the US or Ukraine as well.
One of the pipes of Nord Stream 2 remains intact and there’s only one country that benefits from forcing the certification and opening of Nord Stream 2 and that’s Russia.
Who said invading was not a big deal? Nobody said that.
If they plan to ever sell gas to Europe again, they'd have to pay the fines most likely. This does avoid the fine issue by sabotaging their own pipelines in a way that can be fixed later, at a relatively trivial cost, and it adds confusion into the situation for the allies.
Russia can now say: we can't turn the gas on even if we wanted to, we're not to blame, and we don't have to pay any breach of contract fines for it being off.
