While the war in Ukraine certainly does include a rather obvious element of traditional warfare, the conflict has spilled over into a plethora of different nooks and crannies of our society, as the world finds itself suddenly fixated on eastern Europe.
Some of the clandestine combat has come to us from diplomatic and economic channels as well, with Russia-backed OPEC declining to raise oil production in what appears to be an underhanded slight against the United States.
And then, in some sort of amalgam of these two avenues of aggression, lies an incident involving Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline that is looking more and more like intentional sabotage of late.
An investigative team examining multiple explosions that rocked the Nord Stream pipeline network found Thursday that “detonations” damaged the lines as suspicions of sabotage remain high.
In what could have been the largest methane leak in history, four sites along the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipeline have been examined by Danish and Swedish authorities after first being discovered last week in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Denmark.
“There have been detonations near Nord Stream 1 and 2, within the Swedish economic zone, resulting in extensive damage to the gas pipelines,” Swedish security police said in a statement reported by Reuters.
There has been a raging debate as to who is responsible.
Both Moscow and Western nations have pointed fingers at one another over what some have described as intentional “sabotage.”
Nations like the U.K. and the Netherlands have responded to the leaks by increasing their maritime security presence in the North Sea “to reassure those working near the gas pipelines,” the U.K. Ministry of Defense said Monday.
NATO — which Sweden is in the midst of becoming a member of — over the weekend accused Russia of targeting the pipelines in “deliberate, reckless and irresponsible acts of sabotage.”
Russia surely isn’t opposed to using false flag attacks to get what they want, particularly when the Kremlin finds itself is the sort of desperate situations that they’ve found themselves in today.
