Everyone is talking about sabotage. But nobody knows at this point in time who really blew up the Nord Stream tubes. Many experts consider Russia to be the likely culprit. But there are also voices that say: The USA is behind it.
Who blows up their own pipelines? Exactly! And because that can’t be the case and, on top of that, would be completely insane, Russia is definitely not behind the gas leaks off Bornholm. This is roughly the line of thought of all those who now want to blame the United States for the acts of sabotage on the two Nord Stream tubes. The accusations come, unsurprisingly, from circles that are not entirely averse to the conspiracy milieu.
Even if those who understand Russia do not want to see it at all: Russian gas is not on any sanctions list. If Putin wanted, Gazprom could send natural gas to Central Europe until the attack. In fact, even before the leak in the Baltic Sea, not a cubic meter came through Nord Stream 1. Allegedly due to technical problems.
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The fact is: Gazprom keeps coming up with new reasons why it is no longer delivering the contractually agreed gas volumes. But if the tube suddenly breaks, that’s something like force majeure. In addition, there would still be this second tube. Its second line, also known to insiders as line B, remained intact in all the explosions around it. A rogue who thinks evil of it. As a result, the Gazprom friends are yelling louder and louder: Open the second tube! But it stays with the pipe burst.
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Another train of thought goes like this: The Russians would screw up such a precise underwater operation anyway. So it can only have been the USA. But what motive would the USA have? We’ll take your fracking gas anyway as soon as the LNG terminals are up and running. Besides, Putin’s army isn’t just made up of amateurs.
“I think it is extremely unlikely that the United States could have sabotaged the Nord Stream tubes,” says security expert Joachim Weber to FOCUS online. And further: “The USA has positioned itself against Nord Stream 2 in particular from the beginning, but such an act at this time would not benefit them or the West as a whole. If the USA were identified as the originator, this would be apt to break up the western alliance. Those responsible in Washington are not taking this extreme risk. What for?
The not-so-crazy assumption that Putin himself could be behind the attacks on our own pipelines and thus wants to stir up panic on the markets and stir up fear among us seems much more sensible.
His spokesman Peskow nonetheless points a finger to the west and announces that there have recently been far more NATO ships and planes off Bornholm than Russian ones. Subtext again: The US is to blame.
This USA thesis was originally created by the Russian “think tank” Vatfor. He had claimed that a US Sikorsky MH-60S helicopter with the callsign FFAB123 flew on September 2 “along the Nord Stream 2 route or even between the points where the accident occurred”. Putin’s compliant trolls in the West then circulated the absurd theory en masse on social media. According to a fact check by “Deutsche Welle (DW)”, this is not even remotely true.
Because “FFAB123 did not fly along the pipeline and did not even come close to the positions of the gas leaks that have occurred in the meantime,” writes “DW”. The northern gas leaks in particular would be far from FFAB123’s flight path. “According to our measurements, the flight path of FFAB123 was nine or 30 kilometers away from the localized gas leaks.”
Everything else is pure propaganda.
