The pipelines here have nothing to do with Germany, they go between Finland and Estonia, and aren't particularly critical. Finland just joined NATO, so there's your motivation - harassment.

Before Finland joined NATO Russian military planes would regularly violate our airspace, just to show that they can. Of course now under NATO they will try to annoy us even more. China is anti-NATO, so they are fine with this.

If you believe that China would like to turn Russia into a puppet state, or that they would like to prolong Russia’s war in Ukraine for as long as possible (to bleed the West before China invades Taiwan later in the decade), then reducing Russia’s income from the West while also making energy more expensive for the West seems like maybe a good plan?

I dunno, it feels a bit beyond what China has done before.

But if this was an American ship having damaged a pipeline between Chinese allies in East Asia, we would say, sure, I can imagine the Americans wanting to harm China’s allies, I’m just surprised they used an American ship to do it.

So yeah, why not?

Cheap gas from Russia maybe?

For the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines I absolutely support your reasoning. The Russians lost the strategic option of blackmailing Germany into political submission in case of a harsh winter. Strategically they are on the losing side of that incident.

Here I'm not so sure. But it smacks a bit of scape goating the most popular scape goat.

This isn't Nordstream, this is Balticconnector. Different pipeline in a different place and it was damaged a couple months ago this year, whereas Nordstream was blown up in 2022.