People need to stop thinking of 'Russia' (or any other country for that matter) as a single monolith. For example, a possible motive that may be bad for Russia but good for Putin is that maybe he wants to deter any would be assassination attempt coming from within the Kremlin by making it abundantly clear that there will be no going back to business as usual if he was to be eliminated. Blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines is a very good way to achieve that.

We as regular citizens have limited info, really we don't know what's going on. But don't assume it definitely isn't Russia because of whatever reason that happens to seem plausible to you.

This could be the same for the US or Ukraine. So considering that, all things being equal, it sounds pretty terrible for the main Russian goals, so I'm going to say no it wasn't Russia.

Nobody knows what the "main Russian goals" are. I mean, I'd hope that nobody is taking this whole "denazification" business seriously.

There's a very real possibility that the actual goal of this entire mess is/was for Putin to get into the history textbooks as one of the great Russian leaders before he dies from cancer (or whatever it is that he has).

This is exactly the same point the previous poster made. Sure we don't know the real hidden motives of Russia or Putin, but you could say the same for the US and Biden. So ignoring crazy random guesses, you can say that all things being as sane as you'd hope they are, Russia destroying their own ability to say "if you agree to this or that, we will turn back on the gas flow you need to provide affordable energy to your citizens" would be pretty foolish.

On the other side, Ukraine destroying the pipeline and making sure EU members don't give it to Russia in order to restore the flow of gas makes pretty good sense.. as long as you don't care about the EU citizens.

I was countering the idea that was being repeated throughout this thread which was "of course it couldn't be Russia who did this, it is they who stand to benefit if it is functioning". This conclusion is errorsome for all kinds of reasons as there are plenty of motivations for why Russia and more specifically Putin would do such a thing.

Russia benefits if the western powers fight over responsibility.

Argument in favor: It's obvious sabotage. If Ukraine, the USA, et al did it, it would have been in their interests to make it look less deliberate.

> This makes zero sense to me. What does Russia get by destroying their own pipeline?

1. To do the repair EU needs to lift sanctions

2. Gas prices spiked = short term monetary gain

3. Not so subtle message: hey Norway-Poland nice pipeline you opened here today, you should hope that nothing bad can happen to it.

4. Gazprom needs to pay financial penalties to companies that signed contracts with them because they have stopped supplying gas, now they can claim force major situation and extend this indefinitely due to lengthy trials

If they just turn a valve, they break contract. If they pipeline blows up, its force majeure. They can still pump gas using the other pipelines (yamal etc). But they will shut down all of them eventually. Why? Because they are past the point of no return.

A decent portion of EU citizens think going without Russian gas is a terrible idea. And that's this summer. Just wait until it gets cold. Going back is very easy. Most of the public wants to go back, and you can go back.

You keep asserting in this thread that most EU citizens want to get russian gas right now. This doesn't really correspond with what I perceive in my country or understand to be the case in the rest of the EU... Do you have any public polling to back this up and are you talking about any regions in the EU in particular?

Maybe I misspoke with most, if I said that. I meant Many. There were large protests in Germany just this week to get more energy flowing.

Yeah, on one hand "large protests", on the other, more than 70% of Germans are for continued help to Ukraine despite gas shortage.

What is it with all these comments that think contractual obligations have any weight in a geopolitical dispute like this?