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Comment by tlear | Hacker News Reader

He is right that sonar buoy detonation thing sounds like absolute bullshit. Incredibly risky and 17 hours.. I mean you want to do this, send a submarine, it fires few torpedoes. No more pipeline. Fast, simple, reliable.

Let's say I am a Ukranian patriot, with few million in the bank. I bet given few month I could put together a team of divers to plant some C4 with a simple timer and blow this thing to hell. Or Polish patriot, or Polish government or any of the Baltic states. It is an existential struggle for all of them, and russkie understand one thing and one thing only, this was a very clear communication straight to Putin.

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I think it’s the Polish. Apparently their relationship with Russia is similar to a very angry pitbull has with steak. They were mass rapes by the Soviets at the end of World War II and horrible conditions for the Polish during the Soviet empire.

Polish friends say there’s no shortage of young men who want the glory of blowing up something owned by the people who gang raped Grandma.

I can totally see it being the Polish, but I don't think there is a clear finger that points to anyone (including the US and Russia.) This does sound more plausible than the US. If the US did it, it would literally be done with support of other NATO allies (including Germany itself, and in secret.) It's simply too risky for them to end up destroying the entire NATO relationship, which they would not risk at this juncture...so it doesn't really make sense. Poland on the other hand, would still be a buffer between the rest of Europe and Russia even if Ukraine falls...so they have a lot less to lose, because no one is going to really punish them. I still feel it as -probably- Russia, but I don't think there is enough evidence, and it's very likely we'll just never know. The US theory to me is just logically bunk.

> It's simply too risky for them to end up destroying the entire NATO relationship

and also the pipelines area already denied being approved by germany at the time.

The risk of blowing it up to make it irreversible seems to lack any real gains vs the risk it entails.

Is there any plausible scenario where Ukraine did it, with or without help?

Yeah, Poles hate Russians, and the polling numbers back it up. Pew found 94% of Poles think Russia is a "major threat", and 91% have "very unfavorable views of Russia".

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/22/spotlight-on-p...

I said this in another comment, but the Polish would be very stupid to do something like that, which jeopardises the German economy.

I think it's moderately unlikely. This is obviously something that many Polish people would cheer for, but would their actual government really be that stupid?

I find it hard to imagine.

Yeah right, and you would be picked up by a Russian patrol boat pretty quickly. The article doesn't insinuate that the operation itself is difficult, but to do it without anyone detecting it and not leaving enough of a trace that things can be tracked back to you.

Given the state of the Russian Navy, I wouldn't trust them to patrol a pond, let alone the Baltic Sea.

I immediately told my friends that it could have been the danish submarine guy who killed tournalist and was supposedly in prison, when actually an intelligence agency got him out to do this task. It was fun how far we could speculate this random fake story. It was at least as plausible as this story.

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