The idea here is that the (NATO) drone on the second pipeline had the wires cut and so failed to detonate, and Sweden recovered it and defused it. Therefore Sweden has the physical evidence and immediately shut down the investigation. The same thing happened in 2015, a NATO explosive drone was found under NS1, Sweden recovered and defused it. Both Sweden and Germany have said they know who the culprit is, but they can't reveal the name for reasons of "national security". Germany said that even speculating about who might have done it in public is a threat to national security, so that public debates about this are also banned there.

That - plus basic cui bono logic - rules Russia out, and it certainly points to another NATO member. Primarily UK with assistance from Poland and coordination and tech gear provided by the US. But it's easy to sheep dip a soldier, you swear them in and they officially become members of the Polish army, they maneover the drone, and then they revert to being British. Then the UK can legally say none of their soldiers did anything, and Poland can say they don't have the technical means, etc. In this way, you can deny everything to the press while not technically lying, even though everyone knows who is responsible.

In a German poll, 95% of the public believed the US was responsible. It's shocking how uninformed Americans are about the actions of their own government, and how differently the US is perceived by the rest of the world vis-a-vis its own people. A similar principle applies to perceptions of NATO (which has only ever fought offensive wars) by people within NATO countries vis-a-vis those without.

In this battle of perceptions, there is a split between the 1 billion in the West and the 7 billion in the rest of the world, with the latter having positive views of Russia and negative views of NATO, while the former have it reversed. This is studied in a Cambridge report entitled "A World Divided" [pdf warning]: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

Page 12 and 13 have some striking graphs on how these two groups, which used to have approximately the same opinions about Russia and the US, are now moving very far apart, basically living in opposite realities. This is why people can say with a straight face that Russia chose to blow up its own pipeline, whereas the US, which threatened to stop the pipeline and has blown up pipelines twice in the past, and was caught planting explosives under the very same pipeline in 2015, is "ruled out" by some in the West. To anyone outside the West, it's absolutely clear who is responsible. And also to 95% of Germans.