I don’t know the truth of the matter and Seymour could be right. We just can’t tell from the evidence provided.
I disagree.
The most logical explanation is tha Russia did it as a capacity demonstration and threat against Baltic Pipe to pressure contries in the region regarding Ukraine, but that, like all their threats against the West over Ukraine policy so far, the threat was hollow.
It was their biggest leverage over the EU. Now it’s gone and there’s no possibility of restoring Russian gas flows to the EU.
If they were gonna destroy critical international infrastructure wouldn’t it make more sense to blow up something else?
No, if they were going to make a threat and capacity demonstration against other, active natural gas pipelines in the region, destroying an idle natural gas pipeline makes a lot more sense than “something else”.
(There’s a certain extent to which it doesn’t make sense to make idle threats without the will to carry them out, but that clearly hasn’t factored into Russian action related to pressuring European countries over Ukraine policy.)
Uh, yeah, Russia already describes the current war in Ukraine as against “the collective West”.
> they don't need to threaten that at all,
Whether or not you think Russia needs to issue war threats to Western states, rhey’ve been doing it a lot inn last year.
> if it got to that point they might as well just nuke Berli
The point of a threat is to dissaude an opponent before it becomes necessary to execute on. Yhe threat. So other attacks that they might do if the threat fails don’t really effect whether the threT might be seen as useful. Also, Russia has made implicit nuclear thrrats to Germany, most, recently over the decisions to send MBTs to Ukraine.