Russia turned the taps off in order to raise pressure for European concessions in order to turn them back on again. Germany has been tepid in its Ukrainian support because they want to have their cake and eat it, too. Now they can't no matter what.

With the pipes permanently broken (at least for this winter), Russia has lost that leverage.

> Russia turned the taps off in order to raise pressure for European concessions in order to turn them back on again.

I don't want to sound dismissive, but that's a characteristically western take on things.

Nord Stream 2 was largely redundant and Russia missed the window to use those pipelines against Germany by allowing it to fill it's storage.

Russia is no stranger to causing damage to itself just to ensure that their enemies also suffer.

Case in point: back in 2015, as retaliation to sanctions they banned some imports of food from the EU deeming it "unsafe for consumption"(a particularly funny reason for someone familiar with the respective food standards). Contraband was publicly destroyed, upsetting a considerable chunk of the Russian public.

Little reminder that our (German) gas storage was only filled at 25% when the war started. On an unrelated note, we had sold big parts of that infrastructure to Russian companies.

North Stream 1 was also hit.

Putin treats Russians as his property, but money from gas goes directly into his and his friend's pockets. His friends he listens to.

He also uses these money to arm police to keep population at bay.

There's also some weird pride he takes in having gas.

May be something else is in play here, but I don't think how this can be benefitial to his cause.

Especially since gas prices have gone up so I don't think Russia suffered the price of rationing delivery

Not sure that is correct, the companies contractually responsible for the nordstream 1 turbine maintenance/repair were European and Canadian, that were refusing to repair them because of the sanctions on Russia

https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-nordstream-si...

https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/oil-gas/germany...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ukrainian-group-sue-...

Strangely, gas turbines supplying Hungary which showed a more friendly posture towards Russia didn't break all of a sudden... I obviously can't prove that the Russia controlled companies that operated this equipment deliberately broke anything but in the past outages like this were relatively rare.

The thing is that it was a scheduled maintenance. So presumably it was expected

But you can theorize that Russians were being too picky with the repairs which normally possible wouldn't

But even if they did, EU and Canada withholding the turbine is playing to their game, don't see the purpose

Still, anything is possible... cloak and daggers