- An attempt to claim force majeure to get out of their gas contract with Germany so that Germany can't seize their frozen Russian funds for non delivery.
Also, one shouldn't assume that an apparatus which blundered its way into this costly Ukraine quagmire for no benefit is acting 100% rationally.
A commonly missed detail is that only one of the two Nordstream 2 pipes was blown up. After the event, Putin reiterated that he was "ready" to resume gas deliveries, if only the EU would play ball:
Blowing up one of the Nordstream 2 pipes was the remaining way to put even more pressure on Germany ahead of the heating season. Germany had already decided not to certify Nordstream 2, so from Russia's point of view there was only economic upside to whacking it: a finite chance of Germany caving vs both pipelines remaining unused for the foreseeable future.
On top of that, there was an obvious security-related upside. By demonstrating the vulnerability of Western energy and communications infrastructure, the event delivered a not-so-subtle threat. The choice of locations was also "interesting": in the economic zone of NATO candidate Sweden, close to its electric cable to Poland, and in the economic zone of Denmark, close to the new pipeline from Norway to Poland.
As far as I know, they never figured out who did that. Could have been Russia although the reasoning seems absurd, with excuses like, Putin is so crazy he would blow up his own pipeline.
Anyway, the fact that they just threw an accusation like that, widely in the media, and never bothered to definitively conclude an investigation into the cause puts all "pipeline" news into boy-who-cried-wolf territory for me. (Enjoy that sentence.)
Der Spiegel[1][2] and Washington Post would like a word with you ...
I can't speak for the rest of "the media," but what I remember was a different narrative, more along the lines of, "This sounds like something that Russia would do, but it really only hurts Russia, so maybe they didn't. Hey look at that new shiny story over there ..."[3]
Der Spiegel stuck with the story and is convinced it was "Ukraine," but it isn't clear to me if they mean Ukraine the state or Ukrainian citizens with a bunch of explosives and a yacht.
Which, I'm sorry, I know natural gas is important, but what fun I want to see the movie.
