Sweden’s investigation of the Nord Stream pipelines have bolstered suspicions of “gross sabotage” involving detonations.
The recent ruptures in the pipeline were caused by detonations, the country’s security service has determined
Swedish and Danish authorities have been investigating four leaks from the pipelines in the countries’ economic zones in the Baltic Sea since they were first spotted at the beginning of last week.
“After completing the crime scene investigation, the Swedish Security Service can conclude that there have been detonations at Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the Swedish economic zone,” the Swedish Security Service said in a statement.
The security service revealed was extensive damage to the gas pipelines and that they had retrieved some material from the site that would now be analyzed.
Europe has been investigating what caused the damage as the Kremlin seeks to pin the blame on the West, suggesting the US would benefit from the explosions by boosting its LNG supplies.
The US has denied any involvement as a stand-off, with Russia continuing to squeeze gas supplies into Europe.
The Nord Stream operators, which are part of Kremlin-backed gas giant Gazprom, said this week they were unable to inspect the damaged sections because of restrictions imposed by Danish and Swedish authorities who had cordoned off the area.
Swedish investigators find evidence of ‘serious sabotage’ on Nord Stream pipelines
Swedish prosecutor says that “seizures have been made at the crime scene and these will now be investigated.”
Oct. 6, 2022
Courtesy Swedish navy/Twitter
Offshore staff
STOCKHOLM/OSLO – A Swedish agency on Thursday found that leaks from the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea were likely caused by “serious sabotage” and said that evidence from the site had been taken.
The Swedish Security Service confirmed that “detonations” were responsible for the extensive damage to the subsea pipelines last week. Seismologists in Denmark and Sweden have also said that the damage was not of natural origin, saying that blasts most likely were the cause.
“During the crime scene investigation … seizures have been made,” said the Security Service. “As part of the work,” it added in a statement, “the seizures will now be reviewed and analyzed.”
“The continued preliminary investigation must show whether someone can be served with suspicion and later prosecuted,” Sweden’s Security Service said in a statement, adding the blasts are a “very serious” development.
In a separate statement, Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said “seizures have been made at the crime scene and these will now be investigated.” Ljungqvist, who led the preliminary investigation, did not identify the seized evidence. Ljungqvist said he had given “directives to temporarily block (the area) and carry out a crime scene investigation.”
Now that the initial probe is completed, a blockade around the pipelines off Sweden will be lifted, Swedish officials also said Thursday.
The governments of Denmark and Sweden previously said they suspected that several hundred pounds of explosives were involved in carrying out a deliberate act of sabotage. The leaks from Nord Stream 1 and 2 discharged large amounts of methane into the air.
Danish authorities said the two methane leaks they were monitoring in international waters stopped over the weekend. One of the leaks off Sweden also appeared to have ended.
Officials in the European Union have publicly suspected sabotage, namely as the incident comes in the midst of an energy standoff between the EU, Germany, and Moscow. No nation-state or group has claimed responsibility for the blasts.
10.06.2022
Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage:
Why Was Europe Defenseless?
The EU needs to address subsea threats in its maritime security policy.
Whatever caused the damage to the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, it appears to be the first major attack on critical “subsea” (underwater) infrastructure in Europe. It’s now widely thought – not least by Nato – that the explosions that led to major leaks in the two pipelines were not caused by accidents. The alliance says they were a deliberate act of sabotage.
The attacks occurred in the exclusive economic zones of Denmark and Sweden and demonstrate the risks that Europe’s subsea infrastructures are facing. This raises the question of the vulnerabilities of European pipelines, electricity and internet cables, and other maritime infrastructure. Europe will have to revisit its policies for protecting them.
But it is still unclear how the attacks were carried out. The investigations will probably take months to complete, but there are two likely scenarios. A first option is that the attacks could have been carried out as an underwater operation using advanced submarine technology.
This implies that we are looking at a state and its navy. Although the attacks took place outside the territorial waters of the Nato members Denmark and Sweden, they could be interpreted as an act of war.
The second scenario is an operation launched from a privately owned surface vessel, such as a fishing boat being used as a platform for divers or submersibles to place explosives. In this case, the attack vessel was hiding in everyday maritime traffic.
This scenario points us to so called “grey-zone” tactics: an attack by a group acting indirectly on behalf of state interests. The involvement of any government will then be very difficult to verify. This scenario implies that the Nord Stream attack was likely to have been the first ever recorded grey-zone activity in the European subsea.
Grey-zone tactics are increasingly common at sea, and have been associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards seizing ships, or the Chinese fishing fleet advancing territorial claims.
Grey-zone tactics at sea have not been extensively studied, but similar tactics are well understood in the cyber domain. In that domain it is usually a hacker group operating formally “independent” from governmental agencies that carry out an attack.
The comparison to the cyber world is useful as it gives us insights into why the maritime domain is very vulnerable. The sea is more similar to cyberspace than first meets the eye.
Like cyberspace, the sea is crowded with a highly complex set of state and non-state actors and multiple overlapping jurisdictions. That makes it easier to hide, and more difficult to trace and identify responsible actors. The legal ambiguities also raise the question of how to prosecute any perpetrators.
Unregulated space
As our research shows, the subsea is an ocean space that is often forgotten, yet increasingly vital. Pipelines ensure the flow of gas and oil. Electricity cables across Europe and the Mediterranean are key to the green energy revolution. Underwater data cables transport 95 percent of data and ensure digital connectivity.
Yet Europe has no policy in place that would provide for the surveillance and protection of this underwater infrastructure. Europe is effectively subsea blind.
Three European Union agencies – the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), the European Fishery Control Agency (EFCA) and the European Border and Coastguard Agency (Frontex) – address ocean surfaces. But none of them has a mandate to look underwater.
These three agencies, however, run a tight surveillance scheme to monitor maritime activities, known as the Common Information Sharing Environment.
A first step to increase the protection of subsea infrastructure is to draw upon this platform to systematically provide surveillance of suspicious activities on the surface in vicinity to infrastructures and to coordinate patrols. This will help to deter perpetrators and prevent a future grey-zone scenario.
Eye in the sea
Monitoring underwater activities is a more difficult and costly affair. The seabed is a vast space – and cables and pipelines cover thousands of kilometers. The European Defence Agency runs a number of projects to improve under water surveillance.
However, as we have shown in a recent report to the European Parliament, not only technological advancement is the route to better resilience. Navies and coast guards need to develop better collaboration with the private industry that operates and maintains underwater infrastructure.
Industry holds important data, and is needed to ensure swift responses for any future attack. The EU has a major role to play in enabling this collaboration through its agencies. It must also ensure that industry holds sufficient repair capabilities for cables and pipelines.
All of this calls for an explicit underwater policy for the EU and mandating its agencies to contribute to critical maritime infrastructure protection. The ongoing drafting of the new European Union Maritime Security Strategy is a window of opportunity.
Initiated in 2022, the purpose of the strategy is to provide direction and ensure coordination between EU institutions and the member state agencies that deal with the maritime. The strategy is expected for 2023. It must address the subsea and outline how underwater infrastructure can be better protected.
Christian Bueger is a Professor of International Relations at University of Copenhagen.
This article appears courtesy of The Conversation and may be found in its original form here.
Sweden Begins "Crime Scene Investigation" Into Nord Stream Leaks
Sweden's Prosecution Authority has ordered a cordon area around the Nord Stream pipeline leaks "to block off the area in order to do a crime scene investigation."
Gas releases from the damaged pipelines have largely tapered off, except for one of the breaches in the Nord Stream 2 line, which has inexplicably begun to release more gas. That leak is still creating a bubble pool of about 30 meters in diameter at the surface, the Swedish Coast Guard said in a statement, and the service "currently has no explanation" as to why leakage has tailed off more quickly elsewhere.
The end of the leakage at the other breaches will allow dive support vessels to approach and deploy inspection assets. Two of the leaks are located in the Swedish EEZ and fall under Sweden's jurisdiction, but most of the details of the government inquiry are being kept quiet for now.
"I understand the considerable public interest, but we are in the early stages of a preliminary investigation and I can therefore not comment on details about which investigatory measures we are taking," public prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said in a statement.
The Swedish Coast Guard has implemented a five nautical mile exclusion zone around the pipeline area, which mandates a full ban on "driving ships, anchoring, diving, fishing, driving underwater vehicles or carrying out geophysical mapping."
The dive vessel dispatched to the scene is reportedly the HSwMS Belos, with unnamed escorts.
The cause of the four separate ruptures is believed to be a series of explosions in the range of 100-500 kilos of TNT, based on seismic records analyzed by academic researchers in Sweden and intelligence estimates leaked by the German government. The extent of the simultaneous damage has prompted EU nations to suspect sabotage, and many European leaders have accused the Russian government, which also happens to be the pipelines' majority owner.
Supply impact
The rupture of Nord Stream 1 and 2 has substantial impact on Europe's future possibilities for sourcing energy. Both have been shut down for political reasons, but before the war in Ukraine, Nord Stream 1 carried fully half of Russian gas exports to Europe - roughly 18 percent of the Eurozone's total. That will not be possible to resume on a short-term timetable, even if the political will were in place, according to pipeline-industry experts.
"The good news for supply to Europe is that its other sources of pipeline gas – Norway, North Africa and Azerbaijan – are all flowing normally. Winter storage is over 80 percent full, which is well ahead of the EU’s deadline to hit this milestone by the end of October," commented Michael Bradshaw, Professor of Global Energy at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. "Otherwise, Europe needs to attract flexible LNG cargoes to Europe (that is, supplies that are not tied into long-term contracts which dominate in Asia)."
Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines with Germany were sabotaged mere hours before the EU opened its own Baltic Sea pipeline from Norway to Poland. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken gloated that the attacks were a “tremendous opportunity” to weaken Moscow.
By Benjamin Norton
A pair of natural gas pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, which were built to transport natural gas underwater through the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, were sabotaged in a series of explosions on September 26.
These suspicious attacks came mere hours before NATO members Norway, Denmark, and Poland officially opened their own natural gas pipeline, called the Baltic Pipe, which was built with European Union funding in order to compete with Nord Stream.
The Nord Stream pipelines are operated by company that is majority owned by Russia’s state gas giant Gazprom. Authorities in Norway and Denmark have blocked that company from inspecting the damage done to its own pipelines. That is to say, NATO member states have prevented the Switzerland-based company Nord Stream AG from conducting an investigation into the attacks on its property.
Meanwhile, top officials in Washington have been positively giddy. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken enthusiastically called the attacks on Nord Stream a “tremendous opportunity” to weaken Moscow.
The US fossil fuel industry has made a killing off of the proxy war in Ukraine. Western sanctions on Russia in response to its February 24, 2022 invasion of its neighbor have propelled the United States into becoming the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG). Much of that LNG has gone to Europe to make up for the drastic decline in Russian exports.
NATO member Norway has also greatly benefited. It replaced Russia as the largest oil and gas producer in Europe, even before inaugurating the Baltic Pipe, just one day after Nord Stream was sabotaged.
The fact that an attack on Nord Stream was being planned was known in advance. By whom? None other than the CIA. The notorious US spy agency warned Germany weeks before the explosions.
An expert in information warfare, former CIA Director John Brennan crafted an elaborate conspiracy to explain the sabotage of Nord Stream. He was joined by the ex chief of Germany’s spy agency the BND in accusing Russia of intentionally damaging its own pipelines.
Although there is not a scintilla of evidence for this CIA-concocted conspiracy, it was enthusiastically repeated by Western governments and corporate media outlets.
Moscow, for its part, said the US and its Western allies were responsible for the sabotage, which Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned as a grave act of “international terrorism.”
The head of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, pointed out that the CIA has a documented history of carrying out attacks like these. He recalled that the spy agency bombed pipelines in Nicaragua in 1983, as part of the US terrorist war on the Central American nation’s revolutionary Sandinista government.
Months before the attacks on Nord Stream, top officials in Washington made foreboding comments threatening the pipelines.
In February, President Joe Biden pledged that, if Russia invaded Ukraine, “We will bring an end to [Nord Stream].”
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price and the third in command of the department, Victoria Nuland, likewise promised in January 2022 that “Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
In 2020, the Donald Trump’s administration secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, declared that the United States would “do everything we can” to stop Nord Stream.
Washington has officially denied responsibility for the sabotage, instead pointing the finger Moscow. But these deeply provocative remarks by senior US officials have raised eyebrows around the world.
A map of gas pipelines from Russia to Europe
US Secretary of State Blinken boasts Nord Stream sabotage is ‘tremendous opportunity to remove dependence on Russian energy’
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken gloated that the attacks on Nord Stream offered a “tremendous opportunity” to weaken Russia.
“Ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity. It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy,” Blinken said. “That’s very significant, and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come.”
US fossil fuel corporations in particular are reaping the rewards of this “tremendous opportunity.”
The top US diplomat noted that “we’ve significantly increased our production as well as making available to Europe liquefied natural gas. And we’re now the leading supplier of LNG to Europe to help compensate for any gas or oil that it’s losing.”
Blinken made these comments in a September 30 press conference with Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly. She echoed, “we have increased our production, and, therefore, by increasing our production, we have exported to the U.S. for it to be eventually sent to Europe.”
The top Canadian diplomat advertised a new liquified natural gas facility, Kitimat, that Ottawa plans to use to increase supply of LNG to Europe.
It is not just the North American energy industry that stands to heavily profit from the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. Ukraine benefits as well.
By using Nord Stream to send Germany natural gas through the Baltic Sea, Russia could cut out the intermediary of Ukraine, which was making billions of dollars in transit fees.
While Western governments have pinned the blame on Russia, without a shred of proof, it makes no strategic sense that Moscow would sabotage its own pipelines, after investing billions of dollars in the project.
Russia has even floated the possibility of investing more money to repair the pipelines. This would be a very strange move after bombing your own energy infrastructure.
Yet the German government publicly rejected Russia’s offer to repair the pipelines. A spokesperson said Berlin would not accept Russian gas via Nord Stream 2, even if it is fixed.
Top Polish official thanks US for Nord Stream sabotage
One day after the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, a prominent right-wing politician from Poland, who previously served as foreign minister and defense minister of the NATO and EU member, Radek Sikorski, all but openly stated that the United States was responsible.
“Thank you, USA,” Sikorski tweeted, alongside a photo of the underwater gas leak in the Baltic Sea.
Sikorski is an infamous anti-Russia hawk, and the husband of influential US neoconservative Anne Applebaum. Today he sits as an influential member of the European Parliament, and chairs its delegation for relations with the United States.
Sikorski later deleted the tweet, but not before it was archived.
Among pro-US politicians in Europe, Nord Stream had long been unpopular, and the pipelines had faced many threats before.
Independent researchers pointed out on social media that, back in 2015, Swedish authorities discovered a drone rigged with explosives near Nord Stream 1.
The country of origin of the drone was never disclosed.
As intrepid investigators showed on Twitter, the US Navy conducted military exercises near the Danish island of Bornholm – precisely where Nord Stream was attacked on September 26.
The US and British armed forces have also been training Ukraine’s military to hunt for mines with underwater drones, and held exercises as recently as August 26.
US government pledged to ‘do everything’ to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream
The September 26 attacks on Nord Stream took place right at the moment when Russia was overseeing referenda to incorporate the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson into the Russian Federation.
Russia had invaded Ukraine on February 24. But in the months leading up to what Moscow called its special military operation, senior US government officials publicly threatened Nord Stream.
“If Russia invades,” Joe Biden said on February 7, “then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
The US president made this pledge in a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
When a journalist asked Biden, “How will you do that exactly, since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?”, the US leader responded cryptically, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.”
The former CIA director and secretary of state in the Donald Trump administration, Mike Pompeo, made similar remarks in 2020. He reassured lawmakers, “We will do everything we can to make sure that that pipeline doesn’t threaten Europe.”
Threatening to sanction parties involved in Nord Stream 2, not just in Russia but even in ostensible US ally Germany, Pompeo insisted, “We want Europe to have real, secure, stable, safe energy resources that cannot be turned off in the event Russia wants to.”
Nord Stream was also targeted by the third in command of the US State Department, Victoria Nuland, a bellicose neoconservative and hard-line anti-Russia hawk who oversaw the 2014 coup in Ukraine, in which the country’s democratically elected, geopolitically neutral President Viktor Yanukovich was violently overthrown and replaced with a compliant pro-Western, vehemently anti-Russian regime.
In a press conference on January 27, Nuland pledged, “With regard to Nord Stream 2, we continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies, and I want to be clear with you today: If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
These exact comments had been echoed the day before by US State Department spokesperson Ned Price, a former CIA analyst.
Price told NPR, “I want to be very clear: if Russia invades Ukraine one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
“I’m not going to get into the specifics,” Price added. “We will work with Germany to ensure it does not move forward.”
Germany threatened Nord Stream before the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Nord Stream 1 was officially opened in 2011. The pipeline provided Germany with natural gas for years, until it was temporarily shut down in 2022 due to the proxy war in Ukraine.
At the time of the September 26, 2022 attacks, Nord Stream 1 was not in use. In response to strict Western sanctions on Russia, Moscow shut off gas deliveries.
After years of construction, Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021. But the pipeline never became operational, as German authorities repeatedly delayed certification of it.
Top German officials made it clear that Berlin’s unwillingness to give a green light to the completed pipeline was politically motivated.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, of Germany’s avowedly pro-NATO and anti-Russia Green Party, was deeply opposed to Nord Stream. And in a speech at the NATO-backed Munich Security Conference on February 18, a week before Russia invaded Ukraine, she threatened to stop the pipeline.
Baerbock warned that, if “Russia takes action against Ukraine,” the “sanctions would be without precedent and would be coordinated and prepared with all partners.”
“For me, for us, all options are on the table, including Nord Stream 2,” Baerbock.
She added, “We, as Germany, are prepared to pay a high economic price for this ourselves.”
This context is what led even some prominent figures like Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs to suspect that the United States is responsible.
Sachs is a mainstream US economist who helped Washington design the program of neoliberal capitalist shock therapy that it imposed on the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. He has since become a critic of the US government’s extremely belligerent foreign policy.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Sachs argued “the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline” was likely “a US action, perhaps US and Poland.”
EU-backed Baltic Pipe seeks to replace Russia’s Nord Stream
Another country that stands to gain a lot from the sabotage of Nord Stream is NATO member Norway.
The day after the suspicious explosions damaged Nord Stream, European authorities celebrated the opening of the Baltic Pipe, which will deliver gas from the North Sea off the Norwegian coast to Denmark and then to Poland.
Since the NATO proxy war in Ukraine escalated in February 2022, following the Russian invasion, Norway became the largest oil and gas producer in Europe.
This pipeline was partially funded by the European Union and developed by Danish state-owned company Energinet and Polish state-owned company Gaz-System.
The Baltic Pipe was envisioned as a direct competitor with Nord Stream. Germany’s state media outlet DW trumpeted, “Baltic Pipe speeds up exit from Russian gas.”
Norway’s Energy Minister, Terje Aasland, hailed the Baltic Pipe as “an important step on the important road to Europe’s independence from Russian energy.”
Norway’s gas production is now at its highest ever level, and Aasland told Reuters that the country expects to “maintain the high gas volumes going forward” until at least 2030, benefiting from the decrease in Russian exports to Europe.
Meanwhile, Norway and Denmark, which have a vested financial interest in seeing Nord Stream go permanently offline, have denied access to Nord Stream AG, the majority Russian state-owned company that manages the pipelines.
Nord Stream AG complained that it “is unable to inspect the damaged sections of the gas pipeline due to the lack of earlier requested necessary permits” from Norwegian and Danish authorities.
At the opening ceremony of the Baltic Pipe on September 27, numerous Polish government officials emphasized how important the EU-backed pipeline would be to weaken Moscow. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki gloated, “The era of Russian domination in the field of gas is coming to an end.”
“For the past years, we have been preparing to gain independence from an unreliable partner – the Russian Federation,” echoed Poland’s minister of climate and environment, Anna Moskwa. “In these uncertain times, our situation is stable.”
The Polish government’s top diplomat for strategic energy infrastructure, Mateusz Berger, added at the ceremony, “The opening of Baltic Pipe, a new corridor for natural gas supply from the Norwegian Shelf to Poland, will go down in history as a symbol of breaking away from our country’s long-standing energy dependence on Russia.”
US Energy Information Administration boasts record gas exports to Europe amid proxy war on Russia
Along with Norway, the US fossil fuel industry has substantially benefited from the proxy war in Ukraine.
Washington’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has spent months boasting in its regular press releases of the rapid growth of US exports.
In September the EIA trumpeted, “The United States exported record amounts of petroleum products in the first half of 2022.”
In the six months from January to June 2022, US exports of petroleum products hit their highest ever recorded level, at almost 6 million barrels per day, the EIA reported.
US exports of petroleum products increased in the first half of 2022 by 11% compared with the same period in 2021.
The EIA noted that EU sanctions that were adopted in June to ban imports of Russian energy do not take effect until December 2022 for crude oil and February 2023 for petroleum products. Washington expects to see a further increase in US energy exports to Europe after then.
Although the blanket prohibition on Russia’s energy has not yet been implemented, the EIA gloated in August, “Russia’s natural gas pipeline exports to Europe decline to almost 40-year lows.”
The US government agency noted that Russian natural gas exports by pipeline to the European Union and Britain decreased by nearly 40% in the first seven months of 2022 compared with the same period in 2021, and by nearly 50% compared with the five-year average from 2017 to 2021.
Russia’s energy exports to Europe initially decreased in 2020 due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they continued to drop throughout 2021, as political tensions between NATO and Moscow grew.
Nord Stream 1 had been the largest source of Russian pipeline gas exports to Europe. The sabotage of the project will cut it off completely.
While Russia’s energy exports to Europe have plummeted, the EIA boasted in July, “The United States became the world’s largest LNG exporter in the first half of 2022.”
US liquified natural gas exports increased by 12% in the first half of 2022, compared with the second half of 2021.
The EIA explained that this was partially because of “increased global demand, particularly in Europe.”
In the first four months of 2022, the US exported 74% of its LNG to Europe, compared to an average of just 34% in 2021.
Asia had been the top customer for US LNG in 2020 and 2021, but now Europe has become the main destination, as Russian exports have dwindled.
“Europe imported record amounts of liquefied natural gas in 2022,” the EIA reported.
It noted that LNG imports to the EU and UK “set an all-time historical record high in April 2022.”
While Europe is importing more and more US LNG, natural gas production inside the United States is steadily increasing.
The EIA reported in September that “U.S. natural gas producers are operating more drilling rigs now than at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.”
The EIA boasted that same month, “As of July 2022, the United States has more LNG export capacity than any other country and has exported more LNG than any other country.”
And the US is further expanding its LNG production by developing three new export projects.
During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden correctly observed that “climate change poses an existential threat – not just to our environment, but to our health, our communities, our national security, and our economic well-being.”
The Biden campaign vowed to pursue “a Clean Energy Revolution,” and pledged to cut back on drilling and implement environmental protections.
But since entering office, Biden has been even more conciliatory to the fossil fuel industry than his Republican predecessor Donald Trump.
The Washington Post reported in December that the “Biden administration has approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands per month than the Trump administration did during the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency.”
The Center for Biological Diversity reported in January, before the drastic escalation in the NATO proxy war on Russia, that the Biden administration had “approved 3,557 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first year, far outpacing the Trump administration’s first-year total of 2,658.”
US fossil fuel extraction has only increased further since then, as Washington takes advantage of the sanctions on Russia and turns Europe into a captive market for its gas.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines will only further help the United States and Norway replace Russia as the top energy suppliers to Europe.
Can Europe afford to turn a blind eye to evidence of a US role in pipeline blasts?
If Washington was involved, it would mark a dangerous new stage not only in the Ukraine war but in Europe’s acceptance of vassal status
Mint Press – 6 October 2022
The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.
This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime – and most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.
Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines overwhelmingly suggests a state actor, or actors, was behind it.
Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that this hostile assault on the globe’s energy infrastructure is unprecedented – overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.
The reason why there appears to be so little enthusiasm to explore this catastrophic event in detail – beyond pointing a finger in Russia’s direction – is not difficult to deduce.
It is hard to think of a single reason why Moscow would wish to destroy its own energy pipelines, valued at $20 billion, or allow in seawater, possibly corroding them irreversibly.
The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe – and with it, vital future revenues – while leaving the field open to competitors.
Moscow loses its only significant leverage over Germany, its main buyer in Europe and at the heart of the European project, when it needs such leverage most, as it faces down concerted efforts by the United States and Europe to drive Russian soldiers out of Ukraine.
Even any possible temporary advantage Moscow might have gained by demonstrating its ruthlessness and might to Europe could have been achieved just as effectively by simply turning off the spigot to stop supplies.
Media taboo
This week, distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited on Bloomberg TV to talk about the pipeline attacks. He broke a taboo among Western elites by citing evidence suggesting that the US, rather than Russia, was the prime suspect.
Western media like the Associated Press have tried to foreclose such a line of thinking by calling it a “baseless conspiracy theory” and Russian “disinformation”. But, as Sachs pointed out, there are good reasons to suspect the US above Russia.
There is, for example, the threat to Russia made by US president Joe Biden back in early February, that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2” were Ukraine to be invaded. Questioned by a reporter about how that would be possible, Biden asserted: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
Biden was not speaking out of turn or off the cuff. At the same time, Victoria Nuland, a senior diplomat in the Biden administration, issued Russia much the same warning, telling reporters: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
That is the same Nuland who was intimately involved back in 2014 in behind-the-scenes maneuvers by the US to help overthrow an elected Ukrainian government that led to the installation of one hostile to Moscow. It was that coup that triggered a combustible mix of outcomes – Kyiv’s increasing flirtation with NATO, as well as a civil war in the east between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities – that provided the chief rationale for President Vladimir Putin’s later invasion.
And for those still puzzled by what motive the US might have for perpetrating such an outrage, Nuland’s boss helpfully offered an answer last Friday. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the consequent environmental catastrophe, as offering “tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come”.
Blinken set out a little too clearly the “cui bono” – “who profits?” – argument, suggesting that Biden and Nuland’s earlier remarks were not just empty, pre-invasion posturing by the White House.
Blinken celebrated the fact that Europe would be deprived of Russian gas for the foreseeable future and, with it, Putin’s leverage over Germany and other European states. Before the blasts, the danger for Washington had been that Moscow might be able to advance favorable negotiations over Ukraine rather than perpetuate a war Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has already stated is designed to “weaken” Russia at least as much as liberate Ukraine.
Or, as Blinken phrased it, the attacks were “a tremendous opportunity once and for all to 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.”
Though Blinken did not mention it, it was also a “tremendous opportunity” to make Europe far more dependent on the US for its gas supplies, shipped by sea at much greater cost to Europe than through Russia’s pipelines. American energy firms may well be the biggest beneficiaries from the explosions.
Meddling in Ukraine
US hostility towards Russian economic ties with Europe is not new. Long before Russia’s invasion, Washington had been quite openly seeking ways to block the Nord Stream pipelines.
One of Blinken’s recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, expressed the Washington consensus way back in 2014 – at the same time as Nuland was recorded secretly meddling in Ukraine, discussing who should be installed as president in place of the elected Ukrainian government that was about to be ousted in a coup.
Speaking to German TV, Rice said the Russian economy was vulnerable to sanctions because 80% of its exports were energy-related. Proving how wrong-headed American foreign policy predictions often are, she asserted confidently: “People say the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy.”
Breaking Europe’s reliance on Russian energy was, in Rice’s words, “one of the few instruments we have… Over the long term, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.”
She added: “You [Germany] want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia.”
Now, the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 has achieved a major US foreign-policy goal overnight.
It has also preempted the pressure building in Germany, through mass protests and mounting business opposition, that might have seen Berlin reverse course on European sanctions on Russia and revive gas supplies – a shift that would have undermined Washington’s goal of “weakening” Putin. Now, the protests are redundant. German politicians cannot cave in to popular demands when there is no pipeline through which they can supply their population with Russian gas.
‘Thank you, USA’
One can hardly be surprised that European leaders are publicly blaming Russia for the pipeline attacks. After all, Europe falls under the US security umbrella and Russia has been designated by Washington as Official Enemy No 1.
But almost certainly, major European capitals are drawing different conclusions in private. Like Sachs, their officials are examining the circumstantial evidence, considering the statements of self-incrimination from Biden and other officials, and weighing the “cui bono” arguments.
And like Sachs, they are most likely inferring that the prime suspect in this case is the US – or, at the very least, that Washington authorized an ally to act on its behalf. Just as no European leader would dare to publicly accuse the US of carrying out the attacks, none would dare stage such an attack without first getting the nod from Washington.
That was evidently the view of Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, who tweeted a “Thank you, USA” with an image of the bubbling seas where one pipeline was ruptured.
Sikorski, it should be noted, is as well-connected in Washington as he is in Poland, a European state bitterly hostile to Moscow as well as its pipelines. His wife, Anne Applebaum, is a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine and an influential figure in US policy circles who has long advocated for NATO and EU expansion into Eastern Europe and Ukraine.
Sikorski hurriedly took down the tweet after it went viral.
But if Washington is the chief suspect in blowing up the pipelines, how should Europe read its relations with the US in the light of that deduction? And what does such sabotage indicate to Europe’s leaders about how Washington might perceive the stakes in Europe? The answers are not pretty.
Demand for fealty
If the US was behind the attacks, it suggests not only that Washington is taking the Ukraine war into new, more dangerous territory, ready to risk drawing Moscow into a round of tit-for-tats that could quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation. It also suggests that ties between the US and Europe have entered a decisive new stage, too.
Or put another way, Washington would have done more than move out of the shadows, turning its proxy war in Ukraine into a more direct, hot war with Russia. It would indicate that the US is willing to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield, and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has traditionally treated weak allies in the Global South.
In that regard, the pipeline ruptures are most likely interpreted by European leaders as a signal: that they should not dare to consider formulating their own independent foreign policy, or contemplate defying Washington. The attacks indicate that the US requires absolute fealty, that Europe must prostrate itself before Washington and accept whatever dictates it imposes.
That would amount to a dramatic reversal of the Marshall Plan, Washington’s ambitious funding of the rebuilding of Western Europe after the Second World War, chiefly as a way to restore the market for rapidly expanding US industries.
By contrast, this act of sabotage strangles Europe economically, driving it into recession, deepening its debt and making it a slave to US energy supplies. Effectively, the Biden administration would have moved from offering European elites juicy carrots to now wielding a very large stick at them.
Pitiless aggression
For those reasons, European leaders may be unwilling to contemplate that their ally across the Atlantic could behave in such a cruel manner against them. The implications are more than unsettling.
The conclusion European leaders would be left to draw is that the only justification for such pitiless aggression is that the US is maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the end of its military and economic empire.
The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the American behemoth, and a ferocious blow against Europe to hammer home the message that it must not stray from the fold.
At the same time, it would shine a different, clearer light on the events that have been unfolding in and around Ukraine in recent years:
- NATO’s relentless expansion across Eastern Europe despite expert warnings that it would eventually provoke Russia.
- Biden and Nuland’s meddling to help oust an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow.
- The cultivation of a militarized Ukrainian ultra-nationalism pitted against Russia that led to bloody civil war against Ukraine’s own ethnic Russian communities.
- And NATO’s exclusive focus on escalating the war through arms supplies to Ukraine rather than pursuing and incentivizing diplomacy.
None of these developments can be stripped out of a realistic assessment of why Russia responded by invading Ukraine.
Europeans have been persuaded that they must give unflinching moral and military support to Ukraine because it is the last rampart defending their homeland from a merciless Russian imperialism.
But the attack on the pipelines hints at a more complex story, one in which European publics need to stop fixing their gaze exclusively at Russia, and turn round to understand what has been happening behind their backs.
Jonathan Cook: Commentary on media, politics and corporate power (jonathan-cook.net)
