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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Sabotage makes sense, but by whom?

Surely Russia has no interest in sabotaging the pipelines that give them leverage over Europe. Without the pipelines, the whole "you lift the sanctions, we deliver natural gas" game is gone. Even if unlikely to happen, it would have been an important psychological and political factor over the winter.

Meanwhile European powers don't seem to have an incentive. They would benefit from having Russia as part of their gas supply once the war is over. Sure, having the option not to buy from them is nice, but why force that? Competition lowers prices after all.

Ukraine has a motive to hurt Russia and prevent Russian gas exports, but that would also bite the hand that feeds them weapons. Not to mention they don't have a presence in the Baltic and are occupied on other fronts.

That would leave Europe's non-Russian suppliers of natural gas: Norway and the US.

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Europe didn't need the gas [1] [2]. Russia has nothing to lose by sabotaging it. Don't forget that Russia had already slowed/slopped NS1 by this point.

[1] https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/15747542772681031... "Those shipments are enough to cover a complete halt in Russian pipeline flows from Oct. 1."

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-27/europe-is... (paywalled version of the original quote)

Why link to a tweet that quotes Bloomberg and not the Bloomberg article directly?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-27/europe-is...

The article is paywalled for me but I'll update my comment.

Europe needs the gas. Not enough LNG stations to import this amount. Also prices are absurdly high.

Saying Europe doesn't need Russian gas sounds almost like propoganda.

This sounds like politicians promising something, that they'll fail to deliver in a few weeks... as a european, i've heard this many, many times before. As someone from the balkans, i look at first signs of politicials lieing (they're moving their lips).

This!

Taking into account their long-term planning skills there is no reason to assume they know what they're doing.

I assume they're saying it to avoid a panic or increasing prices.

Yes and no.

Since the Russian invasion in February, Europe has been working out how to get by without Russian gas. For this winter, stocks are high enough that Europe can probably get by without gas rationing or a major hit to GDP (although this also depends on what the weather's like). There's also a variety of short-term (increasing gas flows from North Africa) and longer-term (increased renewables energy production, more LNG terminals) efforts to eliminate the need for any Russian gas. That goal is, the last I've seen, ready to be hit in 2024.

So the real question isn't what happens over the next 6 months, which I suspect will be rather anticlimactic for most observers, but what happens in the 12 following months, especially if Russian seems determined to deliver 0 gas to Europe in 2023.

Also, if Russia can easily repair this damage, it isn't really jeopardizing NS2. People here are assuming that this is the end of NS2. What a propaganda coup if the repairs are fairly cheap and they can sow this much distrust for that small financial cost.

The central long-term economic goal of the US in Europe has been to shift European energy consumption from Russia to the the US and allied producers. On the short term, sabotaging the pipelines prevents lifting the sanctions imposed on Europe (i.e. opening the pipelines) which would also tend to decrease profits on each LNG tanker.

> "The United States, the world's top natural gas producer, wants to send more liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe to help its allies break their dependence on Russian gas after Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24." (Jul 2022)

https://www.marinelink.com/news/us-ship-lng-europe-498028

In addition, disabling Nordstream 2 is a stated US agenda, right from Biden:

> " US officials have made clear that they would move to suspend Nord Stream 2 if Russian President Vladimir Putin orders an invasion of Ukraine. They’ve been much less specific on how that would be accomplished. “I promise you, we’ll be able to do it,” Biden said Monday when pressed for more details. "

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/08/business/nord-stream-2-german...

> Meanwhile European powers don't seem to have an incentive.

I don't think that's what happened, but I do see an incentive. If you can turn "we're going to increase the conflict by refusing trade" into "we'd buy, but you can't deliver", that's a potentially politically useful change. Also internally "we're taking a stance and sacrificing your comfort during the winter" is worse optics than "we need to deal with the situation where even if we wanted to buy from Russia, we can't; sorry for the inconvenience".

This removes a rallying call for increasingly extreme Russia-friendly parties in Europe.

These parties (Italy and Hungary to name just two) are angling for friendlier relations with Russia, and name gas as one of the reasons.

And over winter Russia will say "We want to help Europe. And we want to help their people. And we even have a pipelines full of gas waiting. But their political parties don't want us to help."

And then Europe is full of far-left and far-right Russia-friendly political parties, Ukraine is part of Russia, Russia counts its oil money and continues its military expansion.

EU/Germany is already at that point because Russia openly stopped honoring the existing contracts and ceased deliveries months ago. So even this constructed incentive does not exist.

I think it actually was Russia because Russia has really reliably misjudged its position and resources. I see no reason to think they wouldn’t do this self-destructive thing when they’ve done so many other self-destructive things.

The videos coming out of the conscription paint a fairly incredible picture.

Exactly. Russian policy frequently follows this philosophy of "a sinking tide lowers all boats, so long as ours is lowered a little bit less, we win." They're happy to burn the world down as long as they end up a little less burnt than everybody else. Does it make sense? Probably not. But that's how they've been acting.

It could be an independent ideological rogue actor —although honestly I don’t know if small private organizations have the necessary tools to sabotage this thing.

If this were the ‘70s it would be plausible. But this seems unnecessary and hamfisted. We have Germany in our pocket policywise, so it’s really unnecessary.

But there could be an ideological angle or an insurance angle.

> That would leave Europe's non-Russian suppliers of natural gas: Norway and the US.

The Baltic Sea is relatively shallow[1], so commercial ROVs can easily get down to the pipe[2].

If you hedged a massive bet that say Norway will continue to deliver gas to the EU and Russia will still be cut off, then I guess it's possible a non-state actor could pull it off.

Sounds more like something out of a movie than anything realistic, but yeah...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea#/media/File:Ostseet...

[2]: https://www.deeptrekker.com/products/underwater-rov (random example)

> Sabotage makes sense, but by whom?

President Biden on Nord Stream 2 Pipeline if Russia Invades Ukraine: "We will bring an end to it."

Initially I thought it's a mistake. Russian company took over the German one after the sanctions on NS2, so they could screw something up, but there are too many leaks. It's 100% sabotage.

> Meanwhile European powers don't seem to have an incentive

Poland, Belarus have. Yamal is becoming critical as well as Brotherhood (Ukraine).

> That would leave Europe's non-Russian suppliers of natural gas: Norway and the US.

Algeria, Azerbaijan, Canada, UEA, Qatar etc.

>> Without the pipelines, the whole "you lift the sanctions, we deliver natural gas" game is gone.

I think that game has been completely gone for a while. Russia just doesn't care(well, Putin doesn't), so blowing up those pipelines is like the final fuck you to Europe, now you can't have our gas even if you change your minds.

> Meanwhile European powers don't seem to have an incentive

Depends who. I could very well imagine a few countries (my own, France, for example) forcing a situation where energy-driven complacency isn't on the table. But it does make more sense for this being something that comes from the US.

The US doesn't need to do this, nor does France. Interested parties would include the Baltics, Poland, the UK and even Russian factions. Although the UK might put unecessary pressure on its own gas acquisitions by doing this. Ukraine is excluded because Germany would refrain from giving them any more weapons then.

Russia don't want Uniper to sue Gazprom on international arbitrage for the missing gas volume and using the frozen russian asset to pay the penalties, so is creating those force majeure using plausible deniability like leaking turbine and now NS1/2

Frozen Russian assets won’t ever return to Russia, and I suspect even Russians are aware of this.

> Surely Russia has no interest in sabotaging the pipelines that give them leverage over Europe. Without the pipelines, the whole "you lift the sanctions, we deliver natural gas" game is gone. Even if unlikely to happen, it would have been an important psychological and political factor over the winter.

Could be a simple matter of burning bridges. Or something we haven't thought of yet, but will probably figure out in the next week or so.

> Surely Russia has no interest in sabotaging the pipelines that give them leverage over Europe.

Does this not give them even more leverage over Europe? There's no longer simply a switch that Russia can flip to resume the flow of gas into Europe and previously only Nordstream 1 was shut down (please correct me if I'm wrong).

It's not so hard to imagine tactics to compel Russia to flip a switch, but repairing these pipelines now will be a massive effort. You could not coerce another country into repairing these, you would have to really work with them.

Additionally this is essentially a real attack on Europe. Winter was looking bad enough as it was, now, depending on the damage, Europe may be forced to go through their hardest winter ever with no option of negotiation.

At the same time by not declaring that this is being done Russia avoids direct retaliation.

I think the message here is that window for "you lift the sanctions, we deliver natural gas" is over. Russia is becoming more desperate, Western powers are used to it being the case that when an adversary become desperate you slowly start getting what you want. I believe the message here is that as Russia gets more desperate, it also gets more dangerous, so be careful your next move.

Nah, it's quite the opposite.

It's getting cold now, there are internal pressures in many EU countries to fuck this war and sit down with putin and make an agreement so russia can reopen the gas lines. Putin knows that, and probably has a list of conditions ready to reopen them.

If the pipes are destroyed, even if people protest, there's no way to get russian gas again (atleast not fast and cheaply), and no incentive for EU to talk with putin... and the only ones profiteering from this are americans, selling overpriced gas to europe, even worsening the EU-Russia relations and destroying the european economy.

Exactly. Throwing away the lever doesn’t give you leverage.

Russia has a motivation to kill the pipelines now, to increase gas prices now, as NS1 & NS2 are NOT the only paths to get gas to the EU. Since they are already down for "maintenance" (and we actually know some maintenance is needed), it would be a good tactical move to kill the possibility of NS1 & NS2 delivering gas, increase focus on the crisis now, and hope that this scares the EU into stopping supporting Ukraine.

Norway also reported drone sightings on their oil & gas fields. It would be very tactical for Putin to start taking out all EU supplies as much as practical, since he obviously cannot win on the battlefield.

My feeling is that this will backfire in the current information environment, in the short term only enraging the victims by making clear who is the enemy creating the misery, and in the long term giving politicians justification to say that Russia is an unreliable supplier. It can only work as long as there is a mystery about who is taking out supplies, and if any other facility than Russia's own are taken out, everyone knows that the culprit is Russia.

Also, Russia is so good at this that they have a word for it: "provokatsiya" or "provocation", 'A political event staged by an intelligence service on behalf of its government in order to accomplish some political goal. '.[1]

Russia also has extensive submarine capabilities and ports on the Baltic Sea. [2]

Means, motive, opportunity. That's my bet right now, given limited open source information.

[0] https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Norway-In...

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/provokatsiya

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Russian-Ports-in-the-Bal...

> and hope that this scares the EU into stopping supporting Ukraine

This absolutely doesn’t make sense. If the pipeline is gone, EU does not have any incentive to settle with Russia. Like, “whatever”, no pipe, we send tanks to Ukraine because you have nothing to offer to us anymore.

You are massively missing the facts that:

1) there are multiple OTHER pipelines from Russia to the EU, and NatGas can be shipped by sea (as is now being done from the US); NS1 was not the only route, and NS2 was barely online, and already Germany was heavily dependent on Russian supplies. So it would still be easy to make a settlement with Russia to get more NatGas and oil if the EU wanted.

2) Russia has a LONG history of creating non-military disruption in target countries to gain advantage. Simple disruption of the political situation in the EU is very advantageous to Russia, they would hope it causes at the very least a diversion of funds and attention from supporting Ukraine to dealing with domestic unrest.

3) A new pipeline from Norway was opened literally the same day. This sends a message: "Nice pipeline you have there, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it.". This further creates uncertainty and stress in the EU.

All of these benefit Russia and it's Ukraine genocide efforts directly and significantly.

That said, there is definitely the possibility that it could also backfire, and strengthen the will of the EU to avoid Russia as a completely unreliable and exploitative supplier, and as you say, reply with "FU, we're sending more tanks to Ukraine". I sincerely hope so.

another key hint:

The gas is apparently still flowing out of the pipes at pressure - this can happen only if Russia is still pumping, for which the only purpose would be to spend money to create an environmental disaster - another distraction/disruption.

No, the gas is flowing out of the pipeline because the pipeline wasn't empty. Apparently, it will take until Sunday for the pipeline to empty.

Azerbaijan also stands to gain. And Qatar etc

Russia may have done it simply out of spite

(The earthquake theory might also, ahem, hold some water but I'd say it's less likely)

The pipelines were down already. Spite actions would be like (I believe Stephen Kotkin mentioned this possibility) cutting all undersea Internet cables to ruin the U.S. economy. But nothing like that has happened.

> Surely Russia has no interest in sabotaging the pipelines that give them leverage over Europe.

Apart from a false-flag operation by Putin to have a casus belli to start a war with NATO?

Normally, that would be suicide. But Putin has already proven that he, to put it diplomatically, does not see the world the way most sane people see it.

Ukraine invasion showed that Russia really doesn’t need much in a way of excuse to start a war.

I don’t understand why people talk about “casus beli” as if life today was Europa Universalis game. When power want to start a war, they do.

A couple of years of ukranians shelling the prorussian regions were a good enough reason.... considering that nato used the same one to bomb serbia in 1999.

Any evidence for genocides of pro-Russian populations in Donbas similar to Serbia's of Albanians?

What genocide? It was a fight against KLA, a group even americans marked as terrorists.

KLA was actually funded by the US

2021 only had 18 civilian deaths in that region, of which 11 were caused by mines. 79% of casualties were in separatist areas and 21% in Ukrainian controlled territory. That is a good enough reason to kill thousands and thousand, make millions of Ukrainian children flee their homes? Level entire cities?

You can make up a "casus beli" in EU4.

Putin made up a "casus beli" before going into the special-operation. He made a speech how this territory belongs to the Russia empire.

So life is not really that different from EU4.

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