“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".

Maybe you're right. I honestly don't know. But I only have so much time in a day to veryfy everything. I'm talking from memory of course, but this Ukraine invasion didn't "come out of the blue" AFAIK.

Here's a collection of sources compiled by someone on Quora. I dont know how biased or accurate this person is. However, there were other instances that made me think this isn't so black-and-white or "clean" as I'd like it to be.

https://www.quora.com/If-Putin-is-indeed-the-real-aggressor-...

A lot of the sources he used are from Ukranian websites so you might need to run them through Google Translate. Some are from reputable (for at least some definition of reputable) western media outlets like CNN, BBC, NYT, etc.

The embedded vidoes don't seem to work in Chrome (they just disappear when I click them) so I've extracted the link for one of them here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 - Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer, uploaded by The University of Chicago

Other videos are shorter clips to prove a point, but if anyone's interested they can see the video ID in the embedded image URL when inspecting the element.

Again, maybe this is all dogshit like you say, but I find that too dismissive of the facts presented.

Just by peaking over the Quora article it is enough to say it is a Russian propaganda piece, things like some UA nazis (Russians also have some nazi admirers), the "referendums" and so on. Even if these referendums were legit, does it really trump a nations sovereignty (I am talking from my own experience as a lot of Russians were imported and locals deported in my country during the Soviet occupation and these people never integrated and probably even today there are regions where the population is mainly these Russian imports who would gladly be part of Russia). The main issue is that Russia has the view of "either you are with us or against us" so if you don't play ball we will going to "fuck you". Personally, i think that nobody understand Russia better than Eastern Europeans and the West is pretty much failing (at least the EU West who thought that playing ball with Russia will get them to back off) - https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-that-warned-about-... The Baltics have pretty much lived all their freedom years under Russian propaganda, let it be claims that we are nazis, russophobes and any other type of oppressors of the Russian people or even a threat of Russia itself. So seeing how many in the West are falling for Russian bullshit is just sad.