i view it as yet another “crazy ivan” move from putin, which has caught the west unprepared in the past (georgia invasion, crimea annexation, kyiv blitzkringe). that’s not to say such moves always work for putin in the immediate aftermath, it’s not that simple. they do change the game, and europe/usa are notoriously slow at ramping up their response. but that’s not the case now. the response is already underway.
germany has said the pipeline isn’t fixable. i don’t know obviously, but that’s a very tall statement. for sure russia and germany have already shut off the pipelines from both ends, otherwise they’d be damaging the terminals. basic precaution states there are emergency valves along the pipe for this sort of failure.
Re the pipeline (and the whole Ukraine situation, really)
Preet recently did a podcast with Julia Ioffe who said something like the Russians show strength by fucking themselves up and them screaming, ‘if this is what we do to ourselves, just imagine what we’ll do to you.’
In a separate meeting, Henry claimed to have “looked into volunteering to join the Russian Army after the conflict in Ukraine began,” but didn’t have the necessary combat experience, according to the indictment. Henry has a “Secret” level security clearance, the indictment says.
In another meeting, Gabrielian allegedly told the undercover agent that her husband was a “coward” and was worried about violating HIPAA - the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
She also recommended Henry read a book from the 1980s about how Russian spies were trained and recruited during the Soviet Union in order to prepare, according to the indictment.
“Because it’s the mentality of sacrificing everything,” Gabrielian allegedly told the undercover agent about recommending the book, “and loyalty in you from day one. That’s not something you walked away from.”
Henry told the undercover agent that if the US were to declare war against Russia, “at that point, I’ll have some ethical issues I have to work through,” according to the indictment.
That’s a pretty neat trick. If it doesn’t make sense for Russia to have done something, that is proof they did it. Russians are just genetically different that way.
If it were infinite gas, I’d think it would be infinite cars.
I just… I mean, it would really be something to have infinite gas in a pipeline. I feel like we would have heard about that. Like it would have been on Extra or some shit.
Given how Russia seems to like false flag operations, I could see them doing something to provide justification if they wanted to use a nuke. I’m not sure this is big enough. Maybe fake sabotage of a refinery? Establish a pattern of attacks on the Russian petroleum industry, culminating in an attack on Russian soil, and they could use that as a reason to drop a bomb.
The Nordstream is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your gas in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of cars, enormous amounts of cars.
I enjoyed reading this, but I question its relevance. Putin is an absolute dictator like Saddam, not an in-betweener like the leaders of Wilhelmine Germany. There’s a deal that both side can trust to be upheld where Russia leaves the Donbas and Ukraine joins NATO. The scenario where Putin uses nuclear weapons as a ploy to lose the war in a face-saving way was basically deranged.
I think the right explanation is basically the economist one they scoffed at in the beginning of the article—there’s a failure of bargaining because Putin had an exaggerated view of what his army can accomplish. If he understood reality, he’d make peace in exchange for Crimea and that would work fine.
