If by "the russians" you mean russian defence, I can guarantee they would use something as inconspicuous as a trawler for the job rather than a combat vehicle
For the curious - google “tanker Minerva Julie Nord Stream”. While officially the tanker is Greek, it is tightly connected to Russia.
I’d be looking for the key places in international waters and the likes needed to be cut simultaneously to say paralyze Europe banking and other infrastructure and would be checking whether there are Russian (and affiliated like that Minerva company) “trawlers” with a habit of hanging around those places.
"NRK has previously reported how a Russian trawler crossed the Svalbad cable more than 140 times, and more than a dozen times before the damage occurred in January 2022. The shipowners have denied having anything to do with the damage."
The norwegians seem to think it was a russian trawler and that trawler doesn't exclude the possiblity that russians did it.
Wow, the Russians shot down another plane. I never heard of KAL007 and thought MH17 was the first time this happened. Did any other nation states ever shoot down passenger airplanes?
Because West is week and easily manipulated. Its just a travler guys lol, we are just testing our radio transmitter in Królewiec lol, oh we didnt know those buoys were yours Estonia oops. Shoot someone in broad daylight and there is no doubt you did it, take off military insignia before sending little green men and paid off morons in the West will call it a separatists revolution.
russia wont openly invade Baltics/NATO, they will send little green men under the cover of some self manufactured crisis. A big forest fire, chemical spill, maybe an aircraft crash or terrorist attack. Then it will be "touch our guys and we Nuke you" like they keep saying in Ukraine, with West trembling to cross magical imaginary red lines.
Because they still want to keep a good relationship with Norway.
There's trade and collaboration on fish. Russian fishing and transport vessels are using 3 major harbors in Norway.
Maybe, the USA's governance system seems to be malfunctioning. The 6 month gap in supply to Ukraine has made all of the USA's defense partners around the world, (eg. asia pacific) go "what the fuck!?! The USA doesnt actually honor it's defence pacts!?"
It's an open war with Ukraine only so far. And many are not aware of the wider geopolitics of it, they don't know their countries are at war with Russia. Open attacks would scare many of those people and make them more hostile towards the Russian side. As it stands many are more neutral and Putin even has a significant number of fans in the West.
The argument I remember goes something like this (and I could be remembering it wrong).
They claimed technical problems prevented them from fulfilling the amount of gas required by their contract for NS1 and NS2. Due to sanctions they essentially had to provide gas for free - or at least in exchange for money they were unable to spend or access.
The pipe blowing up potentially saved them from having to pay a penalty fee in the contract once the gas hadn’t been moving for X number of days.
Why would Russia be concerned about a contract? Reminds me of a story on something like Unsolved Mysteries....lady had her husband killed because she was a christian, and thus, didn't believe in getting a divorce, and wanted to be with another man (his best friend.) And his friend went through with it...
They left one pipe of NS2. It would have been a political victory for Putin with humiliation of the German government if they had switched to this instead of stopping gas imports via NS1&2 completely.
The Ukrainians are flying drones filled with explosives into Russian refineries and we still don't think it was just the Ukrainians taking out the Russian gas pipeline?
The pipeline had the additional complication that it was supplying heating fuel to Europe. Bragging about it to the Germans would have probably been a bad idea.
That's the thing though, at the time it wasn't supplying gas. Gazprom said it was having 'technical difficulties' (that the German equipment manufacturer denied) and had reduced the flows over time to zero to put pressure on the Europeans through high winter gas prices and low supplies.
Your broader point is correct though, admitting to blowing it up would be bad press to any party.
