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Operator of Nord Stream 2 confirmed that a leak in the pipeline has been detected southeast of the Danish island Bornholm in the Baltic Sea
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- Title
- Denmark reports leak in gas pipeline in Baltic Sea
- Published
- Sep 26 2022
- Word count
- 491 words
The EU is now officially describing this as sabotage, although they haven’t said who they believe is to blame. Ukraine says it’s Russia.
Both Nord Stream 2 and Nord Stream 1 have leaks. Apparently Germany presumes sabotage.
Apparently three leaks occured in NS1 and NS2 within a very brief window. Not exactly a natural occurence.
A bit of second-hand fearmongering maybe, but tagesschau reports the following:
Which state actor though? Russia crippling any sort of prospect of economic recovery even further? When they could control flow through the pipe to begin with? A western ally? That would be very spicy.
Building on top of this, this is apparently quite close to the new polish-norwegian "Baltic Pipe" pipeline. Which was opened today. So close in fact, I've read speculation that it might be a small oopsie from construction on that pipe. Not that that theory holds water (or gas) upon closer inspection.
Not hard to imagine this as a threatening move by Putin akin to "we could cut that one too if we wanted".
Edit to not noise up the thread too much:
It is now the official german (and danish and swedish) govt position that this was an attack.
Also the CIA warned of this threat.
There was some confusion about multiple earthquakes in the area yesterday, but after looking over the seismic data, it's consistent with explosions registering as quakes, not actual earthquakes. There aren't many ways for an underwater gas pipeline to explode without some help, and for it to happen in multiple places within a day by anything other than sabotage beggars belief. Sabotage is the only reasonable explanation.
Depending on whodunit it's either closely related to this, or it's completely irrelevant:
Deutsche Bahn, the Germany's biggest railway company, has suffered a sabotage attack crippling long-distance train service in large swaths of northern Germany. At first it wasn't clear what was going on, only that their radio communications (GSM-R) were down. By now, it's reported that essential cables were cut in an act of sabotage, resulting in a 3 hour long stop of service, as well as resulting knock-on delays for likely the rest of the day.
Related because this is the second high-profile act of sabotage on german infrastructure in 2 weeks. Possibly unrelated, because it might have been entirely different perpretrators
Here's something damn interesting. Monkeywerx lays out the case for US sabotage of the pipeline, and even identifies the weapons systems and the flight responsible for dropping the torpedoes.
I'm not exactly willing to play the gish gallop game with that dude's argument, but there's a few things I found conspicuous:
That's an ASW torpedo he supposes was dropped. How/whether that thing can be used against seafloor infrastructure is anybody's guess, but my intuition tells me that seafloor infrastructure is undetectable on passive sensors and classed as background noise on active sonar. You don't want your ASW torp to go for a pipeline when there's a perfectly alright Russian sub 300ft above it.
He doesn't say outright what his source for the trace is, but he praises ADS-B for making such things public.
Bullshit. ADS-B is an active transponder on the aircraft. They turn it off, it goes dark. Why was this not dark? How was this recorded? Is he suggesting this is primary radar data? How is that consistent with knowing what aircraft it is? Where does the data come from?
He assumes one weapons release. He leaves the second group of leaks, 10s of miles away completely unaccounted for. HAAWC is as far as I can tell a glide bomb adapter for a Mk 54 torp. I don't have a direct point of comparison, but the SDB is half as heavy and when dropped by a fast-high-flying jet can reach out to 100km. This is neither a fast, nor a high-flying jet. A glide bomb from this aircraft can't account for the second cluster of leaks.
Also the typical argument of "Biden said we'd do it". Not sure why, but that argument is whispering "Russian payroll" into my ear. (I assume I've reached the end of useful commentary of his here at 19:19, I'll go back to before your timestamp to check for a source on the trace he uses)
HOLY FUCKING SHIT, he talks about US BIOWEAPON LABS in Ukraine. FUCK THAT GUY! If that guy isn't being paid by russian intelligence, he's being scammed. .....aaaaaanyway.....
No further info about where that trace comes from. No source in the description.
So.... there's really big holes (not unpatchable holes, necessarily, but unpatched) in his speculation. Yet he speaks with a high degree of confidence. Not a fan.
It's not what they say, it's what they don't.
(Edit: Oh and I forgot to mention that this is an anti-submarine-warfare aircraft. It has an excuse to be there - hunting for Russian subs that want to sabotage seafloor infrastructure. Considerung the CIA warned of gestures broadly at everything this, not completely unusual.)
No arguments from me, especially on the conspiracy nonsense he gets caught up in. I just thought the flight and the timing was interesting enough to share, especially considering the aircraft went from the US to the Baltic and then back to the US again without landing. That seems unnecessarily expensive with so many friendly bases in the region.
Everything I've seen since the day of the sabotage has reinforced my suspicions that Russia is behind it.
Maybe I'm wrong; maybe it's the US. But everyone who has claimed the US is behind it, I've had strong reasons to doubt in the first place (eg. affiliations with far right groups and similar).
Fog of war is dense on this right now. I don't think it really matters to know who exactly is behind it. The pipelines are irrelevant anyway.
I think it's absolutely relevant. From a German perspective: Either it was a so-called ally trying to strong-arm us into a position we were already in voluntarily. Or it was an enemy attacking our infrastructure. Neither is very appealing, and I'd sleep better knowing which "ally" I can't trust. If that's the US (which... Biden, what did you smoke that night?) then oh well. Completely unacceptable. If we know it's Russia, at least we know where we stand.
That said, I don't think it was the US. I'm willing to be proven wrong though.
Could this be a risky move from Ukraine to force Europe away from further dependency on Russia?
A lot of states have incentive to force Europe's hand: Gas-exporting countries like the gulf states or the US; Ukraine for the reasons you mentioned.
But I would be highly surprised. The risk when caught are enormous for these countries. I'd think Ukraine would immediately lose all European support. Gas exporting countries would at the very least have their gas boycotted. The US would entirely blow up NATO. And I also think this was entirely unnecessary as Europe has quite strongly committed to removing this dependency. Right now I think Germany would accept gas transfers through NS1, though we're not dependent on it, but after the winter that ship has sailed. The reward is minimal, the risk enormous. One way to minimize the risk is with the consent of Germany, Denmark and Sweden, but that's very tinfoil-hatty.
Ukraine in particular is already winning this war, but that's contingent in continued support. Personally, I don't think that support will waver enough to jeopardize the war effort, even if the winter gets harsh. Getting caught doing this would be a different matter. The move doesn't make any sense.
It's also pretty close to an act of war.
The only country that has nothing to lose if there's 95% evidence that they did it is Russia. They're already sanctioned, what are we gonna do? March on Moscow on 95% evidence? Meanwhile, if it's even 50% evidence that it was Ukraine, it's entirely reasonable we're going to drop them like a hot potato. Economic sanctions or just withdrawing support need a much lower bar of evidence than Article 5'ing Moscow.
I'd love to hear more expert testimony as to whether it could've been a non-state actor. I've heard it would have to be a state actor, but I'm not convinced. If it could be a non-state actor, that shuffles the deck.
Given how hard Russia is claiming that the US is behind this, I’m now convinced Russia is behind this.
“Follow the bullshit” is a good approach with them.
That too. Who knew a Biden gaffe would be used as ammo in geopolitics? Ahhh, who am I kidding, it was only a matter of time.
I thought the same when I saw their response to the EU’s comments yesterday (despite the EU not blaming them directly):
Oh, ok then, you do also believe/know it was sabotaged and have reason to deflect from that. Must’ve been Russia then!
Given their lack of credibility, I don't think a Russian denial moves the needle either way on how likely it is that they did it.
Perhaps you're right, it was pretty much an offhand thought, but it puts me in mind of this. Rather than "we're doing our own investigation" or "the EU spoke too early" or "if it was indeed sabotage, then X has the most to gain" or even just silence, they choose to immediately and categorically yell "nope, definitely no sabotage here". Just seems weird for them to loudly and immediately contradict everyone else if they didn't actually feel the need to do so in order to hide their guilt.
Doing those things would be pretending to have non-zero credibility. Automatically denying everything is very easy to do. It's just bullshitting. They don't even need to check with headquarters to see if it was one of theirs.
So you're saying that they're trying to achieve P(statement = reality|reality) = 0.5, which maximizes entropy H(statement). Good bullshitters try to achieve this.
Thing is, things they have been saying regarding the war had P(statement = reality|reality) far below 0.5, which kills their entropy H(statement) (i.e. we can make clear what happened by what they say).
In general, I don't believe this probability is stable enough to reliably assume that reality is the opposite of what the Russians say. They're not so bad at poker that you can assume they always bluff.
Certain patterns can be noticed, though. (Such as claiming to take the same village more than once.)
Why commit sabotage if they could just turn it off from their side, though? I don't think they expect hardly anyone to believe whatever they claim, here, so doing it to frame someone doesn't really line up either.
To make credible the implied threat against undersea infrastructure in Europe. if they can blow this one up, they can blow others up.
Sow general discord.
Slightly outlandish, but to make sure economic recovery won't happen by normalizing relations with EU, thus disincentivizing a coup against Putin.
Their communication is pretty much in line with 1 and 2: It was sabotage, but pinky promise, it wasn't us. They don't need to admit to doing it to threaten people, just as they don't need to admit to poisoning ex-KGB people with Novichok. (though that one is a lot clearer than this.)