the point is that weird events happening in russia and to russians are always touted as “bad for putin” and/or “planned by the collective west” by pro-russian propaganda. like it’s the same defense narrative as MH-17, and murders of witnesses and politicians (total number is several dozen if you recall), and far-right european parties propped up by “internet research agencies”. Even atrocities in bucha were explained like that by soloviev and simonyan.
and yet a mountain of evidence piles up how fsb/gru were behind it, and then went into disinformation mode to cover it up, and yet we learn nothing in terms of expecting this sort of behavior from a bad actor. then a new incident occurs and we are back itt discussing how gee, maybe the tankie ia going to turn out to be correct this time.
it’s common sense, you don’t go to war with the army you have, or wish you had. you keep the army you have in reserve until about a year in, and work on ridding your jails, prisons, and universities of undesirable persons. then you can totally surprise everyone with the most powerful mobilized force the world has ever seen.
Pick any sufficiently powerful person, group, or state you want, you can come up with a motive. Putin had a motive. That he was actually harmed by the bombing is questionable and doesn’t matter as long as he believed he would benefit. (I could say Putin was harmed by invading Ukraine, but at this point, that’s obviously not good evidence he didn’t do it.)
The pipeline was a conduit for corrupt payments and his geopolitical agenda. Gazprom had already been looted by the construction and if they already had sufficient capacity to move product, wasn’t going to profit from operating it. Since it had no real value anyway, Putin might blow it up hoping to spike prices or at least keep them high, while intimidating European countries, keeping them from supporting Ukraine out of fear of not being able to get NG. At least to some extent, that matches what happened. Germany has certainly been a drag on support. Prices stayed high through the end of the year.
yesterday milov was asked on a stream who blew up nord stream, and without hesitation he goes “russia. of course it’s russia. there is absolutely no doubt.”
if this truly was their most prized and valuable asset, and the collective west destroyed it, there would be unprecedented amounts of grievances that lavrov and zakharova would be talking about it immediately afterwards and since. but they pretty much ignored it instead having to defend bombing of heating stations. the RU ”officials” position was first very weakly accusing the UK and now leaking out USA conspiracy theories. yeah okay
I’m sorry. The only question here is ‘who benefits?’ as viewed by a person with their finger so much on the pulse of Russia that they were sure Russia would never invade Ukraine.
I’ll be charitable and say he just can’t let go of his precious worldview. If he was about to be run over by Putin driving a tank, he’d just stand there because there was no evidence of Putin in a tank.
