by Dario Rivolta * –
Finally the mystery has been revealed: it wasn’t the American Navy Seals with the complicity of the Norwegian secret services who blew up the gas pipelines that united Russia and Germany and fed a large part of the German energy hunger: it was a handful of Ukrainians.
It is fortunate that neither in Oslo nor in Washington has anyone given credence to what any Pulitzer Prize winner had written in a wealth of imaginative detail. Letting it be thought that the US had been the real saboteurs was like admitting that the proxy war against Moscow had turned into a direct confrontation. If this had been the case, both sides would have been obliged to draw the necessary consequences and the question would not have been limited to a simple aggravation of the ongoing war. Furthermore, a “friendly” country, an ally, and moreover a partner in the Atlantic Alliance, was also heavily damaged, and this could have caused some minor discontent within NATO.
Even the Russians “understood” that it could not have been the Americans who attacked them, and to thank them for their “understanding”, the CIA (or someone for it) revealed that, with absolute certainty and definitively, it was not Moscow that ordered the destruction of its own pipeline.
Only one unknown remained: if Volodymyr Zelensky or his army were actively involved in the operation, it would have sounded like a Ukrainian hostility hitting anything Russian outside of Ukraine. Putin had already warned that such a fact would authorize him to use slightly more dangerous weapons than those used so far. The American clarification that the Ukrainian president was not aware of what was about to happen therefore came in handy and timely.
Now it is difficult to imagine that the various secret services of the West have the desire to invest more time and money in trying to understand who made up the “Ukrainian group” that carried out the attack. However, I think it can be inferred with relative reliability.
These were Ukrainian tourists who had been to the Baltic countries to stock up on various kinds of liqueurs (it is well known that spirits cost much less there than in Scandinavia) and then, by boat, they had headed for Norway. That sailing takes many hours and, when the sea is calm, becomes rather monotonous and boring. It is therefore not surprising that they have decided to uncork the bottles purchased above and to drink freely until they are all completely drunk. At that point they realized that they had inadvertently brought with them some bombs with timers that they didn’t even remember they had and they thought it best to get rid of them by throwing them into the water. Bad luck would have it that they fell right near the passage on the seabed of North Stream 1 and 2 and that the timer adequately carried out the work intended by those who designed it. The explosion, however incidental, was inevitable.
However, with the clarifications that have been given to us, we can safely say: all’s well that ends well”.
* Former deputy, he is a geopolitical analyst and expert in international relations and trade.