The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines - the giant elephant in the room that our media refuses to notice
On September 27 2022 - coincidentally the same day that the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions concluded their referendums on joining Russia - massive leaks were detected on the Nord Stream pipelines, which were built to allow Russia to export gas directly to Germany, without that gas needing to go via Ukraine. Nord Stream 1 had been in operation since 2011 (but was at the time not in use, although it contained gas) and Nord Stream 2 was constructed, full of Russian gas and waiting to be put into operation. The pipelines were the result of then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s engagement with Russia in 2005.
It was immediately apparent that the catastrophic leaks had been caused by explosions, making them targeted attacks on German/Russian civilian infrastructure. The attacks resulted in the release of hundreds of thousands of tons of methane, making them an ecological disaster as well as an economic disaster for Germany.
The BBC’s original slant on the story was to report on Ukraine’s accusations of Russian responsibility for the explosions. Politico tried really hard to make Russia sound like the guilty party. So Russia were being accused of destroying their own pipelines, containing their own gas. And why would they want to do that, exactly?
The reasoning goes thus: Nord Stream 1 was not in operation at the time because at the start of September 2022 Russia decided to halt its flow in response to EU sanctions on them, some of which had been in place since February 2022. This led to accusations that they were using threats of these reductions as an “economic weapon” - pretty rich considering that the US and its allies ‘froze’ up to $300B in Russian foreign reserves and cut Russian banks off from the SWIFT payment messaging system within weeks of the start of the SMO. No longer having the pipelines or the gas that was in them actually only served to deny the Russians the use of this economic weapon, since they lost the leverage of being able to turn them back on, but that didn’t matter. Blame Russia anyway.
Nord Stream 2 was a direct threat to US LNG sales to Europe, and the US placed sanctions on pipe-laying operations in the Baltic Sea to delay it. It was also going to cut Ukraine out of transit fees for crossing its territory, and deny it the opportunity to siphon from the supply, as Putin accused them of doing in the past.
Inconveniently, Joe Biden stated in February 2022 that if Russia invades Ukraine, “we will put an end to Nord Stream 2”. Asked how exactly they would do that, he ominously said that “I promise you we will be able to do it”. He said that with Olaf Scholz standing right next to him! That is, he claimed that in order to hurt Russia, they would somehow unilaterally turn off the supply of cheap Russian gas on which German manufacturing was reliant. Damn Olaf, that’s gotta hurt.
On September 30, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that "It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs." Yes, an ‘opportunity’ - one of those things that just happens, and that you should take advantage of. Especially if your country can supply LNG to Europe, but your LNG is more expensive and less convenient than Russian pipeline gas.
To anyone paying any attention to this at all, the US is obviously the prime suspect. Polish MEP and former Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski even said the quiet part out loud in a hastily-deleted tweet on September 28:
Whoops! To even the most casual observer this looks like an open and shut case, albeit one that implicates the USA in a terrorist attack on its supposed ally. The mainstream media made no mention of the Sikorski tweet, and a Swedish investigation that concluded that the explosions were the result of ‘gross sabotage’ went to great lengths to avoid placing blame on any particular party. Then the western media just kinda forgot about them, even if those of us who were watching closely didn’t. TASS didn’t either, but many western observers dismiss TASS as nothing but ‘Russian propaganda’.
On February 8 2023 veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, known for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, released an incendiary article on his Substack, titled How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. It alleges that the attack was planned as far back as 2021, by the US State Dept trifecta of Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, with the help of Norway, and avoided getting approval from Congress. The explosives that destroyed the pipelines were laid during a military exercise in June 2022.
The article is worth reading not only because it’s breathtaking, but also to see an example of some real journalism that our news is avoiding telling us when it doesn’t fit their rapidly-unravelling narrative. The mainstream media either studiously ignored it or attacked Hersh’s credibility; in the immediate aftermath, a Google search for “seymour hersh nord stream” yielded mostly articles questioning Hersh as a reporter or reporting on apparent debunkings of his claims. It is at least encouraging to see that since then, more objective reports are rating higher in Google’s results. [Update: various media sources published a load of alternative theories in March]
So it looks like the US blew up the pipelines to hurt Russia, with the collateral ‘damage’ of deindustrialising Germany by making it uncompetitive, and thereby destroying Europe’s economy - guess those jobs will have to go to workers somewhere else, the USA for instance. What was it that NATO was for again, according to its first secretary-general Hastings Ismay? “To keep the Russians out [of Europe], the Americans in [Europe] and the Germans down”. It certainly seems to be doing a decent job of it.