Removing the incentive for your own power structure to knife you in the back to get the gas pipe turned back on.

I think they have special "camps" and unfortunate mundane accidents such as inopportune tripping hazards next to open 10th floor windows and landlubbers swimming in open ocean for that.

Show everybody that you can to it on other pipelines while doing it only on a currently useless one (I answer the question by giving one possible advantage, I have no opinion on the real cause at the moment)

There is little value in crazy showing crazy can do crazy things. We know crazy can do crazy. It like Kim, jung-un --it does not have to show us it is willing to lob a nuke, we know it would lob one if if needed to for self-preservation. These are rational actors, their reasoning might be foreign to us and operate differently, but they act within their own rational frameworks.

> There is little value in crazy showing crazy can do crazy things

There can be some strategical value in some situation to be perceived as crazy.

> These are rational actors

Probably but it's not 100% guaranteed

As a show of force I will destroy one of my own battalions. Watch out world: I could do the same to yours!

Exactly. Except for Intelligence agencies, we do not know who did it. However, the media consensus is that the enemy did self sabotage to show us they can do bad things? We know they very well can do bad things. They do not have to prove it.

Hell, GWBush was an inch away from approving tactical nuke use in Afghanistan but ultimately talked out of it and opted for the MOAB, but now a cornered rat thinking about it is now crazy? Does that mean GWB was crazy too?