“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

All: Whether he is right or not or one likes him or not, Hersh reporting on this counts as significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), so I've turned off the flags on this submission.

If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidlelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We don't want political or nationalistic flamewar here, and any substantive point can be made without it.

If anyone else had written this, would it be significant?

Wouldn't it just be written off as a conspiracy theory that provides little to no evidence for its claims?

If the only thing that gets this on HN is Seymour Hersh's reputation (which has lately become somewhat questionable) then you might want to reconsider. Plus, the quality of the comments has not been very good so far.

If you could you humor me: if he came out saying Russians blew up the pipeline, would you have the same stance?

These tensions have been brewing between NATO (mostly America) and Russia for at least a decade. It's unfortunate that the situation escalated in Ukraine though, which AFAIK is the victim in the scheming and plotting of those two powers.

I don't support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it seems like that's the only thing people are focusing on because it makes the situation simple for them, and it's easiest to have a single villain and the rest are the good guys.

I assume most people offended by this submission here are American (or at least heavily support America) and want to think of their current government/country as the good guys.

I don't think there's any good guys in this situation.

> These tensions have been brewing between NATO (mostly America) and Russia for at least a decade. It's unfortunate that the situation escalated in Ukraine though, which AFAIK is the victim in the scheming and plotting of those two powers.

As a person from Eastern Europe this is literal Russian propaganda or in simple words - dogshit. You know why somebody like Baltic countries wanted to get in NATO? Because Russia was/is a genuine threat after these countries were deoccupied from the Soviet Union. Russia thinks that these former Soviet Union countries are still their own property, they can't imagine that these countries don't want to live "the Russian way".

Sorry to tell you, but the US think-tanks have been saying it for years that the Baltic states are there in their current configuration to only restrain Russia from forming closer ties with Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UcXiUYLgbo

They even have a term for it - "Cordon sanitaire": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(internationa...

Oh yes, the mighty Baltic states who are able to somehow lock down Russian ties to Germany. By that logic the NS2 should have never happened or German reliance to Russian gas in general. This sounds like the same stuff Russians were claiming at some point - that the Baltics are the main players in West geopolitics or what not. What that think tank is saying make no sense, as invading/controlling Ukraine is not making a buffer zone as you can't really call something a buffer zone when it is pretty much in Russias pocket. Something like Belarus today is not a buffer zone.

To be frank, they don't mention a thing about the Baltics' might or political prowess, they only enumerate a preferred political alignment in foreing policies of such states so that it becomes instrumental to the US in their own foreign relations with both Germany and Russia.