> Hard to imagine what would be their point in doing that.

Precisely because it is hard to imagine? It looks like a clandestine operation by one NATO country to limit the options of another or perhaps even the German government doing it to limit the options of its own people.

Like you I have no idea, but this is one of those areas where Occam's razor doesn't do as well as it usually does.

> A very hard winter is predicted

If you are implying that weather forecast is accurate months ahead - nobody knows what the temperatures will be this winter. Everything further ahead than 7 days is pretty much rolling the dice.

https://scijinks.gov/forecast-reliability/

You don't need a weather forecast to know that winters are cold in northern part of europe, but that doesn't matter, because with cheap energy we can heat or houses, workplaces, the industry continiues running, and then comes the spring.

With energy prices rising, people won't have money to heat their houses, industry won't be able to produce stuff, people will be left jobless, etc... meaning, a hard winter for europe.

> If you are implying that weather forecast is accurate months ahead

Nop. Hard as in a winter full of hardship, stress and problems.

> Everything further ahead than 7 days is pretty much rolling the dice.

And yet every winter it is cold here and every summer it is hot. Nobody can say which day will be sunny and which day will be stormy that far ahead, but clearly there are trends.

Cold combined with high energy prices will mean that a lot of people will go either cold, or poor or most likely both. Not so cold and so poor that everyone dies instantly, this is not a prequel to snowpiercer, but you know having a bad time.

Winter in Europe has huge variations in severity. The difference between a cold and a mild winter can make an annual 15% difference in gas consumption in Germany, for example [1]. The difference between running out of gas and not running out of gas falls right between those two weather scenarios.

Winter being generally colder than summer - that's climate, which is different from weather.

[1] https://www.focus.de/finanzen/boerse/konjunktur/studie-skizz...

That's a very Putin-esque thing to do. They know that Germany is off Russian gas and they want to give them as much pain as possible so they come begging back.

The question is whether they trigger article 5 here -- I suspect not, however.

> They know that Germany is off Russian gas and they want to give them as much pain as possible so they come begging back.

Okay, but how would this particular act accomplish that? Those pipes are the means Russia would be serving the german market after "they come begging back". If Russia wants to starve Germany of gas they can just simply not pump it in the pipe. That simple. No need to blow up their own infra for that.

Pipes can be repaired. Russia has been slowing down supplies through the NS1 pipe -- down to 1/10th of Germany's normal supply before halting. [1] [2]

Blowing up a pipe that can be repaired to cause friction between allies? That's priceless. The fact that it's cause for speculation on Facebook, Reddit, HN, Twitter, etc shows exactly how disruptive of a move it was.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/a-winter-of-pr...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/mystery-gas-leaks-hi... "Neither pipeline was pumping gas to Europe at the time the leaks were found..."

The begging back theory doesn't make sense. Sowing discontent and suspicion between allies right when some of them are electing Russia-frendly government has more merit.

It would be interesting to watch this evolving, if it wasn't fucking scary.

> when some of them are electing Russia-frendly government

What's wrong with that? I mean... we're either a democracy, and people choose their own government, or we're being governed by some other external force not obeying the wishes of the people.... if italy choses to be friendly with the russians, their people wanted that, so why not?

You can't really state that without bringing up the proven fact that the Russians have been running pro-Russian, as well as divisive campaigns all across the world.

You have a same bunch of politicians in and out of parliament, while people are going through locdowns, massive rinting of money, with scraps going to the people, lockdowns, record inflation and energy crisis, while those same politicians get paid more and more plus they steal even more, so people want some kind of change, any change, just to get rid of the current ones...

but no, it's the russians and their facebook posts, sure.

so... russia runs a few ad campaigns and we abolish democracy... that is, if the wrong side wins?

That's... not even close to what I was saying at all.