We are expected to believe that a bunch of rogue Ukrainians blew up Nord Stream without any state support – do they also have a bridge to sell us?
By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
@tarikcyrilamartarikcyrilamar.substack.comtarikcyrilamar.com
FILE PHOTO: A man wearing a hard hat walks by the central facility where the Nord Stream Baltic Sea gas pipeline reaches western Europe following the pipeline’s official inauguration. © Sean Gallup / Getty Images
On September 26, 2022, infrastructure vital for both Germany and the EU as a whole was attacked as never before in post-World War II, peacetime (at least formally) history. In the vicinity of the island of Bornholm, at the midpoint between the Polish and Swedish coasts, four explosions sabotaged the massive Nord Stream I and II gas pipelines, which run along the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
The immediate consequences were enormous. In terms of environmental damage, all too often overlooked now, the pipelines were filled with methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes enormously to global warming. According to the UN, its heating effect is 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Also, methane “is the primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas, exposure to which causes one million premature deaths every year.”
The exact amount of this toxic gas that the Nord Stream saboteurs made bubble up into our shared atmosphere is hard to quantify, but there is no doubt that it was large, and we would all be much better off if it had stayed in the pipelines. Initial estimates pointed to five times the volume released in a 2015 methane disaster in California. That was “the largest known terrestrial release of methane in US history.” Its impact was compared with driving seven million cars per day, and it displaced thousands of people.
Put differently, the Nord Stream attack set a milestone not merely in European but also the global history of man-made ecological disasters. But the California leak was, at least, an accident – the Baltic one, so much larger again, was the result of a deliberate act of eco-terrorism. It’s no wonder that Rob Jackson, a Stanford climate scientist, quickly – and correctly – concluded that “whoever ordered this should be prosecuted for war crimes and go to jail.”
Yet apart from eco-terrorism, the Nord Stream attack was also, of course, an act of aggression against Germany as a state. And against the whole of the EU, too, as Mikhail Podoliak, the habitually dishonest top adviser to Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, underlined at the time of the sabotage. He was right, of course. Indeed, it was such a severe act of aggression that it should have led Germany and the EU to quickly identify the perpetrators and take drastic action against them. Moreover, if the terrorists had state backing, as is likely given the complexity of the attack, then those actions should have ranged from sanctions and severing diplomatic relations – as a minimum – to military retaliation. And since Germany is a NATO member, the alliance’s famed Article 5 – treating an attack on one member as an attack on all of them – could easily have been applied as well.
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At the time, Podoliak was, of course, brazenly lying about an important detail. Against rhyme and reason, he blamed the attacks on Russia, which had zero conceivable interest in destroying pipelines that it had heavily invested in to facilitate energy trade with the EU, that afforded some geopolitical influence (although propagandists in the West and especially Poland have always greatly exaggerated that factor), and that, while dormant at the time of the attack, could have been activated again.
In short, someone trying to make you believe that Russia blew up Nord Stream is – and has always been – the guy with a bridge to sell you. Like the comedian in Kiev who, with the help of Western impresarios, such as Tim Snyder and Anne Applebaum, has been hawking Ukrainian “democracy,” “civil society,” and the great cosmic struggle for “Western values.”
But, as with these other Zelensky regime lies, Podoliak’s fib about the big bad Russians shooting themselves in both feet at once, deliberately and just for fun, was special in that it combined being perfectly implausible with being widely believed, at least in the West and especially in Germany. Absurd as it is, two things followed the Nord Stream attack: It took ages for any Western officials to officially point to any perpetrators; and Western politicians, mainstream media, and so-called experts kept peddling the insultingly silly story about Russia as the culprit.
Since many of them will now try to cover their tracks, let’s recall two examples. By spring 2023, the American icon of investigative journalism Seymour Hersh had exposed Washington as a likely Nord Stream bomber, while other reports started suggesting that – somehow – Ukrainians had been involved. Yet even then Carlo Masala, an academic from the German Army’s very own university, who has made a media career out of opportunistically regurgitating Western infowar talking points, still tried to recast the emerging picture as a “false-flag” operation. In other words, according to Masala, while you may think you see Americans and Ukrainians right in front of your eyes, in reality, it’s – drumroll! – the Russians, again. So much for tin-foil hats and conspiracy theories being very welcome in the Western mainstream as long as they toe the line.
Similarly, Janis Kluge, a regional “expert” at a major Berlin think tank has just admitted on X – with astounding if unintentional self-discreditation – that his nonsensical initial assessment of blaming Russia was – wait for it! – wrong. He feels “new information” has just emerged. The fun fact is, of course, that information excluding Russia as a possible perpetrator was available from day one, and specific information about the US and Ukraine as much more plausible suspects emerged not much later. Yet, for Kluge, being so much slower in shedding an obvious piece of Western and Ukrainian information warfare than a decent reputation allows is, it seems, still a reason for pride.
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That is because he now relies on what, to his mind, seems to be an authoritative source, namely the Wall Street Journal and German prosecutors. This brings us to how and why the Nord Stream attack has made it back into the news. At very long last, German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant – yes, you read that right: one single warrant – for a suspect, namely a lowly Ukrainian diver called Volodymyr.
Never mind, they’ll probably never get hold of him, because Poland has shielded the attackers and helped them escape. Warsaw, by the way, is proud of its sponsorship, literally, of terrorism against Germany, as a breathtakingly arrogant X post by Polish PM Donald Tusk has rubbed in. In essence, he blamed the victims, that is the Germans, and told them to shut up, if not just apologize for being there in the first place. Congrats… Clearly German-Polish relations will flourish, again.
At the same time, the Wall Street Journal has published a sensational and sensationally unpersuasive article explaining two things: How it was, after all, Kiev that did it; and – how convenient – it was not Washington. Indeed, according to this touching tale of American righteousness, the CIA – well-known for never ever supporting or staging underhanded, insane, and violent schemes – tried to prevent the Ukrainians from going ahead with one of their very own. And that is, the WSJ tells us, the “real story.” This is the moment where you may feel free to cry in view of so much goodness and honesty.
Let’s put it like this: Remember the guy trying to sell you the bridge? He now admits that he doesn’t really own it, but he has a new offer: He is about to inherit it soon and if you believe this one, he’s ready to sell you a first-dibs option on bidding for it when the time comes. In other words, we are now invited to move on from believing a lie so moronic that even telling it should have made people sink into the ground with shame to one that has been fine-tuned with a few tiny fragments of truth. And yet, it’s still a lie.
Let’s take a closer look. The first thing that makes the WSJ story highly suspect is that it’s packed with politically convenient details. Readers learn that Zelensky initially okayed the scheme but then was against it, when the saintly Americans told him to stop being so naughty. But the then commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s forces, Valery Zaluzhny – a man Zelensky has always hated and who has been relegated to the status of another inept Ukrainian diplomat in London – was, of course, in on the attack all the way. Another Ukrainian officer mentioned by name – one of the very few – in the WSJ piece is already on trial anyway. Oops, no great loss either, it turns out. Need we continue? This is a parade of fall-guys, carefully tailored to exempt Zelensky, for now, and, of course, the US and everyone else in the West who may very well have been involved (Hi, MI6 and, of course, Poland again, we see you).
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Then there is the manner in which both the German prosecutors’ move and the WSJ article are being reinforced and exploited rapidly by other mainstream outlets, trying to make sure that everyone gets the new infowar memo. German Spiegel, for instance, is blunt about getting the correct – and rather imbecilic – propaganda message across. Readers are in effect admonished that, with the naming of one Ukrainian suspect, “all speculation about Russian or US participation” in the attack can now be “curbed.”
What can one even say? Let’s try: First, a Russian participation never made any sense to any reasonable and unbiased observer. Shame on self-censoring and war-mobilizing media like Spiegel to have ever treated it as an even remotely possible explanation. Second, therefore, pretending that suspecting Moscow and Washington has been equally plausible or implausible is ludicrous. Third, because the US actually has always made perfect sense as suspect number one. And it still does.
Here is the real upshot of this combined political-media information war circus: Yes, it’s nice that someone finally, officially acknowledges that it was not Russia and that, to one extent or the other, it was, actually, sacrosanct-can-do-whatever-it-wants-and-tell-any-lie Ukraine. But trying to sell us the new idiocy that therefore it was not the US – indeed that Washington tried to stop this attack – is about as believable as Hunter Biden’s laptop not mattering to his dad’s Ukraine policy, or the Epstein operation not being about entrapping and blackmailing the US elite. It’s yet another piece of nonsense we are invited to swallow. No, thank you. Enough already.
What is more interesting, however, is what this all implies and why it is happening now. Regarding the implications, even if, for the sake of argument, you pretend to believe the whole WSJ/German prosecutor story, Germany’s, the EU’s, and NATO’s positions emerge as untenable and discredited. As an anonymous German official noted, “an attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country” – that is, Ukraine, not Russia – “that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash.” That is, Berlin’s policy has been so perverse as to qualify as treasonous. It has literally fought the wrong country. Thereby, it has failed to defend Germany from a massive attack and instead has bent over backwards to reward the aggressor, Ukraine. In a normal country, the government would have fallen already, and not just faced questions like ‘What about Germany’s intelligence services and military? Where have they been napping? Under a rock on a Baltic beach?’
And things don’t look much better for the EU and NATO as a whole. Many who refuse to be fed moronic propaganda anymore will conclude that these organizations are, in essence, conspiracies, systematically acting against the interests of the countries and populations they pretend to protect. Regarding the US, what’s even left to say? It was, of course, involved in the attack, as President Biden had openly threatened in advance. Putting about a silly tale now blaming it all on Kiev and Kiev alone just makes it look stupid and callous.
This brings us to the question of why all of this is happening now. Callous is the key term here. The best explanation of the timing of these new revelations is that they are part of dropping the Ukrainian proxy. What better way to introduce a policy of abandoning Kiev than by making it the sole scapegoat for an attack on the West? This operation may take a while, but it has clearly started. No, it is not a coincidence that Berlin has just announced that it will greatly reduce its military support for Ukraine. As others before, Kiev is about to learn about American and Western gratitude, the very hard way.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
