That "evidence" is at best circumstantial. One counterfact is that Nordstream pipeline at the time of it's destruction was not transporting gas, i.e. it had already been shut down and abandoned by the Germans.
It's certainly better evidence than was ever offered for the supposed Russian role in the incident. If all your news is from English-language war media, you won't be convinced by Sachs. (Who is refreshingly frank with respect to a variety of issues now that he's been through that whole Lancet task force farce.) Outside Europe and North America, however, no one believes it was the Russians.
The pipeline was no longer transporting gas, but it certainly hadn't been "abandoned". That would have been monumentally stupid, especially in the context described by TFA.
There is no evidence as far as I know, but logic can give you some hints in this case.
Who would profit the most from physically cutting out Europe from Russian gas?
Consider the USA. They now plan to sell LNG to Europe for 4x the price it's sold domestically. This was still going to happen, but since the pipeline has been severed, it is now a certainty that the deal will go forward.
That is, the possibility of Europe getting scared of the crisis and backtracking on its distancing from Russia is now null. Now it's either rely on the US overpriced LNG or starve and suffer the cold. Isn't that convenient?
Given the low consideration the US have of Europe behind the curtains (who doesn't remember Victoria Nuland's famous "Fuck the EU"?), doesn't that make it even more evident?
> Who would profit the most from physically cutting out Europe from Russian gas?
Ooh, ooh, I know, I know! Australia! Unless you were going for Qatar? I think Qatar is making the most buck right now by diverting its sales of LNG from Asia to Europe instead, but I don't have the exact statistics in front of me.
Although actually the best answer is probably Russia. The fact that the pipeline is no longer operational means that Russia no longer has to pay contract penalties for failing to deliver the gas it was contractually obligated to deliver. (Natural gas is usually delivered via long-term fixed-price contracts).
> Yeah, let's save some cost on contract penalties by blowing up a pipeline which costed way more. Smart move, how could I not think of that.
Sunk cost fallacy. The pipeline was already not operating, and the political climate has definitively shifted to the point that Europe finds it desirable to reduce its reliance on that pipeline. However much the pipeline cost to build has no bearing on the future balance sheet of profit/loss on the pipeline, and if Russian policy is to permanently set the income of the pipeline to 0, an action to reduce the cost of the pipeline to 0 as well makes a great deal of fiscal sense.
> the USA has plenty, through the UK.
Curious why you call out the UK here, given that the pipeline does not go anywhere near UK territory. Why not Denmark, which is where the pipeline explosion took place? Or any other country with access to the Baltic, like Poland, the single loudest critic of Nord Stream?
Because the UK is the closest to the US in terms of geopolitical alignment, especially after brexit. Together with the US they've been the strongest supporters of NATO co-belligerence in the Ukraine/Russia war, even within NATO itself, let alone Europe. I might also cite the Liz Truss phone hack, but it hasn't really been confirmed.
So you say it for exactly the reasons I thought you would. (Although I think Poland is, again, more vocal in NATO support for Ukraine than UK.)
Of course, circling back to the topic at hand, the problem with blaming the US for the pipeline explosion is that it makes no fucking sense for the US to blow it up.
Germany had already committed to weaning itself off of Russian gas and Nord Stream as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine. There has been no real political support for backsliding on this decision, so the best possible scenario for the US were it to blow up the pipeline would be... a continuation of current policy; there's no real gain to be had by blowing it up. The risk of blowing it up is an uptick in criticism against the US for being foreign interventionists, resulting in increased political pressure to force the EU to force Ukraine to accede to substantial losses to Russia. Even if the US were stupid enough to desire a complete cessation of gas, the way they would want to go about it would be something that minimizes the chance of political blowback--in other words, the operation would want to do stuff that keeps it out of headlines, and a pipeline explosion is a pretty dramatic affair that is completely at odds with how to achieve your political ends.
Another element to consider is that it's very well-known that there is a gas shortfall problem in 2023 without Nord Stream. There's not enough LNG import capacity to fully replace it until about 2024, which means if it's cut off entirely, there is going to have to be some form of politically painful rationing going on to make it through the winter of 2023-2024. If your goal is to sell more gas, creating a situation that forces people to use less gas is counterproductive. And, again, as popular appreciation of gas shortages come about, it's going to create more pressure against support for Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine war.
If you look at it instead from the perspective of Russia, it makes a lot more sense. Russia already decided to stop exporting gas through Nord Stream about a month before the explosions, so it isn't going to be losing any revenue if it blows it up. In lieu of achieving military success on the battlefield, its theory of victory seems to have shifted in the fall towards making Ukrainians' and Europeans' lives as miserable as possible to force Ukraine to the negotiating table just to make the war stop. A dramatic explosion pushes the gas shortage issue into the headlines, and has enough plausible deniability to avoid political blowback. Especially because there's a decent cadre of people who will blame everything on US interventionism (and that's more or less official Russian line anyways--the Russia-Ukrainian war is the fault of the US, not Russia), even without any real evidence. Really, the strongest evidence that it's not caused by Russia is that it makes more strategic sense than Russia has shown itself capable of in the war to date.
The only thing that makes sense to me is it was blown up to force the Russians to expend resources protecting their infrastructure inside Russia. So likely Ukrainians did it while the Baltic states just looked the other way.
