Indeed this angle I think is the right direction. It's a bit like Cortez burning the boats. Removing me from power won't mean that you get to go back to business as usual and sell gas to Europe.

Also the aspect that it reminds the whole of NATO how fragile their infrastruture is for the upcoming winter. It doesn't matter how big your navy is I can get 4x deep dive special forces in a recreational boat and freeze everyone to death. I think the first explosions were actually when they opened the Poland-Norway gas line.

Same goes for intercontinental undersea communication cables. You would probably take out most of the world's finance/trading systems for weeks/months by destroying a handful of transcontinental cables.

It's a power display for fear abroad and for getting all the potential dissidents back in line.

I am very curious if this keeps escalating at what point is a NATO member gonna claim that article 5 has been breached.

> Indeed this angle I think is the right direction. It's a bit like Cortez burning the boats. Removing me from power won't mean that you get to go back to business as usual and sell gas to Europe.

I thought about it, too. But even this hypothesis has a weak point: the Yamal pipeline is still working well. So this is a moot point: if the generals or whoever decide to kill Putin and takeover, they will be able to resume sending the gas through Yamal immediately.

I thought about your scenario, and there's a couple of things to consider. One, is the shipping capacity has still been reduced. The total amount of NG Russia can ship has been reduced. The other is it would be much more difficult to camouflage the sabotage of the Yamal pipeline, unlike the NS1 and NS2 pipelines which has the cover of the sea.

There are still two more pipelines through Ukraine and Belarus with enough capacity.

Hmm, yes, that sounds plausible at least.