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nord stream sabotage
Denmark Finds 'Deliberate Sabotage' of Nord Stream—But Ends Probe With No Charges
The country is the second U.S. ally in the past month to end an investigation into the pipeline explosions.
Feb 26, 2024
Denmark became the latest country to close its investigation into the underwater explosions that caused leaks in two pipelines that were built to carry gas from Russia to Germany, with authorities saying they had found that "there was deliberate sabotage" of the infrastructure but would not go further in their probe to confirm who was behind the blasts.
"The assessment is that there are not sufficient grounds to pursue a criminal case," said the Danish police, prompting criticism from Russian officials and other critics.
Since the gas leaks were discovered in September 2022, seven months after Russia invaded Ukraine, various observers have accused the two countries as well as the United States of being at fault.
The leaks—which experts said led to the single largest release of methane gas due to human activity—were discovered beneath the Baltic Sea, off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm. Seismic institutes found that two explosions had occurred underwater just before the leaks were recorded.
Russian energy giant Gazprom owns a majority stake in the pipelines, with German, Dutch, and French companies also owning interests. Weeks before the leaks were discovered, Russia had intensified tensions in Europe by cutting gas supplies in suspected retaliation for sanctions against Moscow.
The U.S. was a longtime critic of the Nord Stream pipelines, arguing they would increase European dependence on Russia for energy.
Just before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that a Russia offensive would push the U.S. to "bring an end to" the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
But the U.S. has denied involvement in the explosions, saying in February 2023 that one report alleging U.S. sabotage published by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh was "false and complete fiction."
Hersh reported, based on a single anonymous source who had "direct knowledge of the operational planning," that Biden had authorized U.S. Navy divers to plant remotely triggered explosives that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, enlisting the help of the Norwegian Navy and secret service.
In March 2023, weeks after Hersh's report was released, the U.S. and several Western allies opposed a United Nations Security Council resolution that aimed to launch an international probe into the Nord Stream explosions.
Earlier this month, Sweden concluded its own investigation, saying the case did not fall under its jurisdiction and noting that they had given "material that can be used as evidence" to German authorities for their probe. Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said that the "primary assumption is that a state is behind it."
The German federal prosecutor's investigation is ongoing.
Journalist Thomas Fazi suggested U.S. allies have dropped their probes because they are "terrified of actually finding the culprit."
The question of who caused the Nord Stream gas leaks, said author Tony Norfield, "has troubled Swedish and Danish investigators so much, they have closed their inquiries. Just in case they uncover something embarrassing."
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Who's Winning and Losing the Economic War Over Ukraine?
After a year of slaughter and destruction in Ukraine, we can declare that the economic winners of this war are: Saudi Arabia, ExxonMobil and its fellow oil giants, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.
Feb 21, 2023
With the Ukraine war now reaching its one-year mark on February 24, the Russians have not achieved a military victory but neither has the West achieved its goals on the economic front. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its European allies vowed to impose crippling sanctions that would bring Russia to its knees and force it to withdraw.
Western sanctions would erect a new Iron Curtain, hundreds of miles to the east of the old one, separating an isolated, defeated, bankrupt Russia from a reunited, triumphant and prosperous West. Not only has Russia withstood the economic assault, but the sanctions have boomeranged–hitting the very countries that imposed them.
Western sanctions on Russia reduced the global supply of oil and natural gas, but also pushed up prices. So Russia profited from the higher prices, even as its export volume decreased. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that Russia’s economy only contracted by 2.2% in 2022, compared with the 8.5% contraction it had forecast, and it predicts that the Russian economy will actually grow by 0.3% in 2023.
On the other hand, Ukraine’s economy has shrunk by 35% or more, despite $46 billion in economic aid from generous U.S. taxpayers, on top of $67 billion in military aid.
European economies are also taking a hit. After growing by 3.5% in 2022, the Euro area economy is expected to stagnate and grow only 0.7% in 2023, while the British economy is projected to actually contract by 0.6%. Germany was more dependent on imported Russian energy than other large European countries so, after growing a meager 1.9% in 2022, it is predicted to have negligible 0.1% growth in 2023. German industry is set to pay about 40% more for energy in 2023 than it did in 2021.
The United States is less directly impacted than Europe, but its growth shrank from 5.9% in 2021 to 2% in 2022, and is projected to keep shrinking, to 1.4% in 2023 and 1% in 2024. Meanwhile India, which has remained neutral while buying oil from Russia at a discounted price, is projected to maintain its 2022 growth rate of over 6% per year all through 2023 and 2024. China has also benefited from buying discounted Russian oil and from an overall trade increase with Russia of 30% in 2022. China’s economy is expected to grow at 5% this year.
Other oil and gas producers reaped windfall profits from the effects of the sanctions. Saudi Arabia’s GDP grew by 8.7%, the fastest of all large economies, while Western oil companies laughed all the way to the bank to deposit $200 billion in profits: ExxonMobil made $56 billion, an all-time record for an oil company, while Shell made $40 billion and Chevron and Total gained $36 billion each. BP made “only” $28 billion, as it closed down its operations in Russia, but it still doubled its 2021 profits.
As for natural gas, U.S. LNG (liquefied natural gas) suppliers like Cheniere and companies like Total that distribute the gas in Europe are replacing Europe’s supply of Russian natural gas with fracked gas from the United States, at about four times the prices U.S. customers pay, and with the dreadful climate impacts of fracking. A mild winter in Europe and a whopping $850 billion in European government subsidies to households and companies brought retail energy prices back down to 2021 levels, but only after they spiked five times higher over the summer of 2022.
While the war restored Europe’s subservience to U.S. hegemony in the short term, these real-world impacts of the war could have quite different results in the long term. French President Emmanuel Macron remarked, “In today’s geopolitical context, among countries that support Ukraine, there are two categories being created in the gas market: those who are paying dearly and those who are selling at very high prices… The United States is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling at a high price… I don’t think that’s friendly.”
An even more unfriendly act was the sabotage of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines that brought Russian gas to Germany. Seymour Hersh reported that the pipelines were blown up by the United States, with the help of Norway—the two countries that have displaced Russia as Europe’s two largest natural gas suppliers. Coupled with the high price of U.S. fracked gas, this has fueled anger among the European public. In the long term, European leaders may well conclude that the region’s future lies in political and economic independence from countries that launch military attacks on it, and that would include the United States as well as Russia.
"The losers are, first and foremost, the sacrificed people of Ukraine, on both sides of the front lines, all the soldiers who have lost their lives and families who have lost their loved ones."
The other big winners of the war in Ukraine will of course be the weapons makers, dominated globally by the U.S. “big five”: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics. Most of the weapons so far sent to Ukraine have come from existing stockpiles in the United States and NATO countries. Authorization to build even bigger new stockpiles flew through Congress in December, but the resulting contracts have not yet shown up in the arms firms’ sales figures or profit statements.
The Reed-Inhofe substitute amendment to the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act authorized “wartime” multi-year, no-bid contracts to “replenish” stocks of weapons sent to Ukraine, but the quantities of weapons to be procured outstrip the amounts shipped to Ukraine by up to 500 to one. Former senior OMB official Marc Cancian commented, “This isn't replacing what we've given [Ukraine]. It's building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future.”
Since weapons have only just started rolling off production lines to build these stockpiles, the scale of war profits anticipated by the arms industry is best reflected, for now, in the 2022 increases in their stock prices: Lockheed Martin, up 37%; Northrop Grumman, up 41%; Raytheon, up 17%; and General Dynamics, up 19%.
While a few countries and companies have profited from the war, countries far from the scene of the conflict have been reeling from the economic fallout. Russia and Ukraine have been critical suppliers of wheat, corn, cooking oil and fertilizers to much of the world. The war and sanctions have caused shortages in all these commodities, as well as fuel to transport them, pushing global food prices to all-time highs.
So the other big losers in this war are people in the Global South who depend on imports of food and fertilizers from Russia and Ukraine simply to feed their families. Egypt and Turkey are the largest importers of Russian and Ukrainian wheat, while a dozen other highly vulnerable countries depend almost entirely on Russia and Ukraine for their wheat supply, from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Laos to Benin, Rwanda and Somalia. Fifteen African countries imported more than half their supply of wheat from Russia and Ukraine in 2020.
The Black Sea Grain Initiative brokered by the UN and Turkey has eased the food crisis for some countries, but the agreement remains precarious. It must be renewed by the UN Security Council before it expires on March 18, 2023, but Western sanctions are still blocking Russian fertilizer exports, which are supposed to be exempt from sanctions under the grain initiative. UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told Agence France-Presse on February 15 that freeing up Russian fertilizer exports is “of the highest priority.”
After a year of slaughter and destruction in Ukraine, we can declare that the economic winners of this war are: Saudi Arabia, ExxonMobil and its fellow oil giants, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.
The losers are, first and foremost, the sacrificed people of Ukraine, on both sides of the front lines, all the soldiers who have lost their lives and families who have lost their loved ones. But also in the losing column are working and poor people everywhere, especially in the countries in the Global South that are most dependent on imported food and energy. Last but not least is the Earth, its atmosphere and its climate—all sacrificed to the God of War.
That is why, as the war enters its second year, there is a mounting global outcry for the parties to the conflict to find solutions. The words of Brazil’s President Lula reflect that growing sentiment. When pressured by President Biden to send weapons to Ukraine, he said, “I don’t want to join this war, I want to end it.”
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Ukraine: Look to Afghanistan for Lessons About US Proxy Wars
"Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster."
Feb 18, 2023
The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight.
The world’s biggest economic loser in 2022 was Ukraine, where the economy collapsed by 35% according to the International Monetary Fund. The war in Ukraine could end soon, and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its predicament as victim of a U.S.-Russia proxy war that broke out in 2014.
The U.S. has been heavily arming and funding Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding NATO and weakening Russia. America’s proxy wars typically rage for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries like Ukraine in rubble.
Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. It could also look to the U.S. proxy wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the U.S. wasted more than $2-trillion of U.S. military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person!
Starting in 1979, the U.S. armed the mujahideen (Islamist fighters) to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. As president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later explained, the U.S. objective was to provoke the Soviet Union to intervene, in order to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war. The fact that Afghanistan would be collateral damage was of no concern to U.S. leaders.
The Soviet military entered Afghanistan in 1979 as the U.S. hoped, and fought through the 1980s. Meanwhile, the US-backed fighters established al-Qaeda in the 1980s, and the Taliban in the early 1990s. The U.S. “trick” on the Soviet Union had boomeranged.
In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The U.S. war continued for another 20 years until the U.S. finally left in 2021. Sporadic U.S. military operations in Afghanistan continue.
Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the U.S. wasted more than $2-trillion of U.S. military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person! As a parting “gift” to Afghanistan in 2021, the U.S. government seized Afghanistan’s tiny foreign exchange holdings, paralyzing the banking system.
The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the U.S. government backed the overthrow of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s sin from the US viewpoint was his attempt to maintain Ukraine’s neutrality despite the U.S. desire to expand NATO to include Ukraine (and Georgia). America’s objective was for NATO countries to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region. To achieve this goal, the U.S. has been massively arming and funding Ukraine since 2014.
The American protagonists then and now are the same. The U.S. government’s point person on Ukraine in 2014 was Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who today is Undersecretary of State. Back in 2014, Nuland worked closely with Jake Sullivan, president Joe Biden’s national security adviser, who played the same role for Vice President Biden in 2014.
The U.S. overlooked two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
The second is that NATO enlargement to Ukraine crosses a Russian redline. Russia will fight to the end, and escalate as necessary, to prevent the U.S. from incorporating Ukraine into NATO.
The U.S. repeatedly asserts that NATO is a defensive alliance. Yet NATO bombed Russia’s ally Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in order to break Kosovo away from Serbia, after which the U.S. established a giant military base in Kosovo. NATO forces similarly toppled Russian ally Moammar Qaddafi in 2011, setting off a decade of chaos in Libya. Russia certainly will never accept NATO in Ukraine.
At the end of 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin put forward three demands to the U.S.: Ukraine should remain neutral and out of NATO; Crimea should remain part of Russia; and the Donbas should become autonomous in accord with the Minsk II Agreement.
The Biden-Sullivan-Nuland team rejected negotiations over NATO enlargement, eight years after the same group backed Yanukovych’s overthrow. With Putin’s negotiating demands flatly rejected by the U.S., Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
In March 2022, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to understand Ukraine’s dire predicament as victim of a U.S.-Russia proxy war. He declared publicly that Ukraine would become a neutral country, and asked for security guarantees. He also publicly recognised that Crimea and Donbas would need some kind of special treatment.
Israel’s prime minister at that time, Naftali Bennett, became involved as a mediator, along with Turkey. Russia and Ukraine came close to reaching an agreement. Yet, as Bennett has recently explained, the U.S. “blocked” the peace process.
Since then, the war has escalated. According to U.S. investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, U.S. agents blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September, a claim denied by the White House. More recently, the U.S. and its allies have committed to sending tanks, longer-range missiles, and possibly fighter jets to Ukraine.
The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral non-NATO country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line.
Most importantly, the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and Ukraine’s sovereignty would be guaranteed by the U.N. Security Council and other nations. Such an agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022.
Above all, the government and people of Ukraine would tell Russia and the U.S. that Ukraine refuses any longer to be the battleground of a proxy war. In the face of deep internal divisions, Ukrainians on both sides of the ethnic divide would strive for peace, rather than believing that an outside power will spare them the need to compromise.
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How Spin and Lies Fuel a Bloody War of Attrition in Ukraine
The American people must demand that U.S. political and military leaders tell the truth about this horrific war and our country's role in it. And we must also demand that the media transmit the truth to the public.
Feb 13, 2023
In a recent column, military analyst William Astore wrote, "[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: a lack of honor, a lack of shame, in America. Honor, truth, integrity, simply don't seem to matter, or matter much, in America today… But how do you have a democracy where there is no truth?"
Astore went on to compare America's political and military leaders to the disgraced Congressman Santos. "U.S. military leaders appeared before Congress to testify the Iraq War was being won," Astore wrote. "They appeared before Congress to testify the Afghan War was being won. They talked of "progress," of corners being turned, of Iraqi and Afghan forces being successfully trained and ready to assume their duties as U.S. forces withdrew. As events showed, it was all spin. All lies."
Now America is at war again, in Ukraine, and the spin continues. This war involves Russia, Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies. No party to this conflict has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it. All sides claim to be fighting for noble causes and insist that it is the other side that refuses to negotiate a peacefual resolution. They are all manipulating and lying, and compliant media (on all sides) trumpet their lies.
It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth. But spinning and lying has real-world impacts in a war in which hundreds of thousands of real people are fighting and dying, while their homes, on both sides of the front lines, are reduced to rubble by hundreds of thousands of howitzer shells.
Yves Smith, the editor of Naked Capitalism, explored this insidious linkage between the information war and the real one in an article titled, "What if Russia won the Ukraine War, but the Western press didn't notice?" He observed that Ukraine's total dependence on the supply of weapons and money from its Western allies has given a life of its own to a triumphalist narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia, and will keep scoring victories as long as the West keeps sending it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons.
But the need to keep recreating the illusion that Ukraine is winning by hyping limited gains on the battlefield has forced Ukraine to keep sacrificing its forces in extremely bloody battles, like its counter-offensive around Kherson and the Russian sieges of Bakhmut and Soledar. Lt. Col. Alexander Vershinin, a retired U.S. tank commander, wrote on Harvard's Russia Matters website, "In some ways, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost."
No party to this conflict has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it.
Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda. But we should pay attention when a series of senior Western military leaders, active and retired, make urgent calls for diplomacy to reopen peace negotiations, and warn that prolonging and escalating the war is risking a full-scale war between Russia and the United States that could escalate into nuclear war.
General Erich Vad, who was German Chancellor Angela Merkel's senior military adviser for seven years, recently spoke to Emma, a German news website. He called the war in Ukraine a "war of attrition," and compared it to the First World War, and to the Battle of Verdun in particular, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers were killed with no major gain for either side.
Vad asked the same persistent unanswered question that the New York Times editorial board asked of President Biden last May. What are the U.S. and NATO's real war aims?
"Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely?" asked General Vad. He concluded, "There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism. We have a militarily operational stalemate, which we cannot solve militarily. Incidentally, this is also the opinion of the American Chief of Staff Mark Milley. He said that Ukraine's military victory is not to be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Anything else is a senseless waste of human life."
Whenever Western officials are put on the spot by these unanswered questions, they are forced to reply, as Biden did to the Times eight months ago, that they are sending weapons to help Ukraine defend itself and to put it in a stronger position at the negotiating table. But what would this "stronger position" look like? When Ukrainian forces were advancing toward Kherson in November, NATO officials agreed that the fall of Kherson would give Ukraine an opportunity to reopen negotiations from a position of strength. But when Russia withdrew from Kherson, no negotiations ensued, and both sides are now planning new offensives.
The U.S. media keep repeating the narrative that Russia will never negotiate in good faith, and it has hidden from the public the fruitful negotiations that began soon after the Russian invasion but were quashed by the United States and United Kingdom. Few outlets reported the recent revelations by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about the ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey that he helped to mediate in March 2022. Bennett said explicitly that the West "blocked" or "stopped" (depending on the translation) the negotiations.
Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told CNN Turk after a NATO foreign ministers' meeting, "There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue… They want Russia to become weaker."
Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda.
Advisers to Prime Minister Zelenskyy provided the details of Boris Johnson's April 9 visit to Kyiv that were published in Ukrayinska Pravda on May 5th. They said Johnson delivered two messages. The first was that Putin and Russia "should be pressured, not negotiated with." The second was that, even if Ukraine completed an agreement with Russia, the "collective West," who Johnson claimed to represent, would take no part in it.
The Western corporate media has generally only weighed in on these early negotiations to cast doubt on this story or smear any who repeat it as Putin apologists, despite multiple-source confirmation by Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats and now the former Israeli prime minister.
The propaganda frame that Western establishment politicians and media use to explain the war in Ukraine to their own publics is a classic "white hats vs black hats" narrative, in which Russia's guilt for the invasion doubles as proof of the West's innocence and righteousness. The growing mountain of evidence that the U.S. and its allies share responsibility for many aspects of this crisis is swept under the proverbial carpet, which looks more and more like The Little Prince's drawing of a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant.
Western media and officials were even more ridiculous when they tried to blame Russia for blowing up its own pipelines, the Nord Stream underwater natural gas pipelines that channeled Russian gas to Germany. According to NATO, the explosions that released half a million tons of methane into the atmosphere were "deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage." The Washington Post, in what could be considered journalistic malpractice, quoted an anonymous "senior European environmental official" saying, "No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage."
It took former New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to break the silence. He published, in a blog post on his own Substack, a spectacular whistleblower's account of how U.S. Navy divers teamed up with the Norwegian navy to plant the explosives under cover of a NATO naval exercise, and how they were detonated by a sophisticated signal from a buoy dropped by a Norwegian surveillance plane. According to Hersh, President Biden took an active role in the plan, and amended it to include the use of the signaling buoy so that he could personally dictate the precise timing of the operation, three months after the explosives were planted.
The White House predictably dismissed Hersh's report as "utterly false and complete fiction", but has never offered any reasonable explanation for this historic act of environmental terrorism.
President Eisenhower famously said that only an "alert and knowledgeable citizenry" can "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
So what should an alert and knowledgeable American citizenry know about the role our government has played in fomenting the crisis in Ukraine, a role that the corporate media has swept under the rug? That is one of the main questions we have tried to answer in our book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. The answers include:
- The U.S. broke its promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, before Americans had ever heard of Vladimir Putin, 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academics wrote to President Clinton to oppose NATO expansion, calling it a policy error of "historic proportions." Elder statesman George Kennan condemned it as "the beginning of a new cold war."
- NATO provoked Russia by its open-ended promise to Ukraine in 2008 that it would become a member of NATO. William Burns, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow and is now the CIA Director, warned in a State Department memo, "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red-lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)."
- The U.S.backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that installed a government that only half its people recognized as legitimate, causing the disintegration of Ukraine and a civil war that killed 14,000 people.
- The 2015 Minsk II peace accord achieved a stable ceasefire line and steady reductions in casualties, but Ukraine failed to grant autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk as agreed. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande now admit that Western leaders only supported Minsk II to buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine's military to recover Donbas by force.
- During the week before the invasion, OSCE monitors in Donbas documented a huge escalation in explosions around the ceasefire line. Most of the 4,093 explosions in four days were in rebel-held territory, indicating incoming shell-fire by Ukrainian government forces. U.S. and U.K. officials claimed these were "false flag" attacks, as if Donetsk and Luhansk's forces were shelling themselves, just as they later suggested that Russia blew up its own pipelines.
- After the invasion, instead of supporting Ukraine's efforts to make peace, the United States and the United Kingdom blocked or stopped them in their tracks. The U.K.'s Boris Johnson said they saw a chance to "press" Russia and wanted to make the most of it, and U.S. Defense Secretary Austin said their goal was to "weaken" Russia.
What would an alert and knowledgeable citizenry make of all this? We would clearly condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. But then what? Surely we would also demand that U.S. political and military leaders tell us the truth about this horrific war and our country's role in it, and demand that the media transmit the truth to the public. An "alert and knowledgeable citizenry" would surely then demand that our government stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations.
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Seymour Hersh Report Alleges US Was Behind Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage
The Biden White House adamantly denied the veteran investigative journalist's reporting, calling it "complete fiction."
Feb 08, 2023
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a story Wednesday alleging that the United States was behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline system last year, citing a single unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning."
According to Hersh, who published the story on his new Substack, the September attack on the Russia-to-Germany gas pipelines was carried out by the U.S. Navy "under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22" and with the help of the Norwegian navy and secret service.
Last June, with the authorization of President Joe Biden, U.S. Navy divers planted "remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines," Hersh reported.
Adrienne Watson, a White House National Security Council spokesperson, told the Russian state-owned outlet TASS that Hersh's reporting is "false and complete fiction." The White House gave the same statement to Reuters and to Hersh himself, who over the course of his decades-long career has famously exposed U.S. forces' massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians and shined light on the torture of detainees at the U.S-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
In recent years, Hersh has drawn growing backlash from mainstream media outlets and the federal government for casting doubts on the official U.S. narrative surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden and questioning whether bin Laden really masterminded the September 11 attacks. Hersh has also drawn criticism for relying too heavily on anonymous sources.
In his Wednesday piece, Hersh reported that "Biden's decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington's national security community about how to best achieve that goal."
“This is not kiddie stuff," the anonymous source told Hersh, calling the pipeline attack "an act of war" that would be seen as such if it was traced back to the U.S.
According to Hersh, who provided a detailed account of the closed-door deliberations that preceded the pipeline attack, "there was a vital bureaucratic reason" for the Biden administration's decision to rely on graduates of the U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center to carry out the operation.
"The divers were Navy only, and not members of America's Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership," he continued. "The Biden administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022."
As for why the U.S. would be compelled to sabotage the Nord Stream system, Hersh wrote:
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51% of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49% of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45% of Russia's annual budget.
America's political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that's exactly what happened...
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe.
The Biden administration wasn't quiet about its opposition to Nord Stream 2, which never became operational after Germany put the process on hold just days before Russian forces invaded Ukraine in late February of last year.
"If Russia invades—that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine—then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2," Biden said during a press conference on February 7. "We will bring an end to it."
"I promise you, we will be able to do it," the U.S. president added.
Citing his unnamed source, Hersh reported that "several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack" by Biden and other U.S. officials.
“The plan was for the options to be executed post-invasion and not advertised publicly," Hersh wrote. "Biden simply didn't get it or ignored it."
Hersh reported that a number of options were considered to sabotage the pipelines.
"The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly," the journalist wrote. "The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes."
The CIA denied Hersh's reporting, calling it "completely and utterly false."
Ultimately, according to Hersh, Norwegian officials proposed that the June NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea—sponsored annually by the United States Sixth Fleet naval unit—"would be the ideal cover to plant the mines" on the pipelines.
According to the reporting:
The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy's "research and warfare centers." The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.
"It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover," Hersh wrote. "The C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion."
The White House later had second thoughts about the proposed two-day detonation window, according to Hersh, and opted for a plan by which "the C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice."
"On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy," Hersh wrote. "The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission."
After conducting separate investigations into the pipeline explosions, which unleashed a large sum of planet-warming methane into the atmosphere, both Sweden and Denmark concluded that the blasts were a result of deliberate sabotage, pointing to traces of explosives found at the scene.
Neither country has publicly assigned blame.
In the days following the attack, speculation and baseless allegations circulated rapidly, with some European officials pointing to Russia while Moscow suggested that the U.S. or the U.K. may have been responsible.
While it remains impossible to verify Hersh's account without access to his source or other corroborating evidence, Wednesday's story put the international whodunit back up for serious consideration and generated a fresh round of questions about the possible U.S. role.
Ishaan Tharoor, a foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post, wrote on Twitter that while he is "not going to wade into debates over the sourcing and reporting" in Hersh's story, "it is without a doubt a bit odd how this whole story quietly went away once it became clear it didn't make any sense as an act of Russian sabotage."
"And of course, when the explosion actually happened, some folks in the transatlantic, anti-Kremlin space cheered it happily as a successful act of anti-Russian sabotage," Tharoor added, an apparent reference to a European member of Parliament's since-deleted tweet thanking the U.S. for the Nord Stream explosions.
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Ukraine Conflict Intensifies as Progressives Abandon Diplomacy Call
Republicans are capturing antiwar sentiment as progressives continue to duck.
Nov 03, 2022
The Russia-Ukraine war continued to intensify in the past weeks, as both Russia and Ukraine, supported by the US and NATO, are escalating their efforts to gain the upper hand. No longer a conflict between two neighbors, it is now a global crisis.
Meanwhile, 30 Progressive Democrats who called for a diplomatic initiative were squashed by the hawkish consensus in Washington. They withdrew their letter a day after issuing it. For now, Republicans are capturing antiwar sentiment as progressives continue to duck.
The Cycle of Escalation is Underway
After a Ukrainian offensive reclaimed territory that had been conquered by Russia, Russia annexed four Ukrainian regions in September following a hastily-organized referendum.
The Republican bid to capture antiwar sentiment is already reaping results, and all the Democrats plan to do about it is discipline their left flank into conformity and claim that antiwar voters are Trump dupes.
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which deliver gas from Russia to Germany, were seriously damaged by undersea explosions Sept. 26. The U.S. has long sought to shutter Nord Stream 2, with Sen. Ted Cruz' effort to sanction companies building it having been turned back narrowly in January on a partisan vote in the Senate.
Ukraine's drone attack on Sevastopol Oct. 29, following an attack on the bridge connecting Crimea to Russia, resulted in Russia's cancellation of the UN-brokered grain export deal which had temporarily reduced the war's impact on food supplies and prices.
As Ukraine prepares to attack Kherson, the largest Ukrainian city captured by Russia since the start of the war, Russia reported that its newly mobilized troops are now inside Ukraine.
Nuclear threats rose from both sides, as Russian officials spoke of use of nuclear weapons while NATO carried out a 12-country nuclear war exercise in Belgium and the US prepared to moved newly upgraded nuclear bombs to Europe. Threats to the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia also attracted international concern.
The fight against climate change is out the window as a result of the war. Europe is reopening coal plants as the US/EU boycott of Russian oil and gas takes hold. Prices have skyrocketed as energy companies make record profits, and people in the EU and US are looking at an extreme winter without enough heat or food. Some people may die.A Ukrainian, and Global, Conflict
Massachusetts Peace Action opposes U.S. military support to Ukraine - which amounts to $20 to $40 billion already in 2022 depending on how you count it. We support humanitarian assistance to war victims, cuts in the military budget, and a focus on a negotiated settlement.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a crime of aggression, a threat to Ukraine's sovereignty whose first offensive was an attack on the capital, Kyiv. The war's toll on the Ukrainian people has been horrendous. Ukraine, a founding member of the United Nations, has the right to resist the attack and other UN members have the right to assist it.
At the same time, the US and NATO provoked the war by moving NATO up to the Russian border over three decades, supporting Ukraine and arming it as it failed to implement the 2015 Minsk 2 accords, signing a strategic partnership with Ukraine in November 2021, and refusing to seriously negotiate over draft treaties presented by Russia in December calling for an end to NATO enlargement.
Ukraine's resistance is justified, but the conflict is not only about the fate of Ukraine; it concerns the whole world. It is a proxy war in an escalating geopolitical struggle in which the US seeks to maintain its world hegemony against challenges from Russia and China. US and UK intelligence are deeply involved in Ukraine's war effort, the US is essentially financing Ukraine's economy and military, and US special forces are on the ground. Russia is weaker than the US, economically, militarily, and diplomatically, and if it is squeezed beyond the breaking point, escalation to nuclear war is not impossible.
European dissent against the war is becoming serious. Right wing parties have already taken power in Italy and Sweden, while Britain is on its third prime minister this year. Large protests against inflation and the war economy are rocking Paris and Prague.
The Democrats as War Party
Inflation is hitting the US working class hard, and with a global recession predicted for 2023, antiwar sentiment is already rising in the US.
57% of Americans support diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine.
But who will lead the rising antiwar sentiment?
While antiwar voices are gaining significant traction among Republicans, they are only a whisper on the Democratic side.
68 Congressional Republicans voted no on Ukraine aid back in May, and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said in October that if the Republicans take control of Congress, they would not write a "blank check" for Ukraine. President Trump offered his services as a mediator, and reactionary, racist member of Congress Paul Gosar (R-AZ) offered to host talks in Arizona.
Progressive Democrats led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) released a letter Oct. 24 calling for President Biden to initiate diplomacy with Russia to settle the conflict, even while they supported more military aid. It had taken three months for them to muster 30 signers on the letter, but when it was released, some of them said they had changed their minds. Jayapal retracted the mild letter the next day, saying she didn't want progressive views to be confused with those of Republicans.
Establishment Democrats like Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) attacked the progressives, saying "This letter is an olive branch to a war criminal who's losing his war." Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi blasted Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), the only Massachusetts signer, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) promised more Ukraine aid "until victory is won".
Progressives Face a Choice
For most of the past 50 years, Democrats, or some of them, have usually been at least a little bit better than Republicans on issues of war and peace. Some Democrats pushed to end the Vietnam war; Democrats generally favored arms control agreements during the first Cold War; many Democrats opposed the Iraq War; Obama made a nuclear deal with Iran and partially relaxed sanctions on Cuba; and Biden last year withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
But these comparatively peaceful policies have always been part of a hegemonistic strategy. When the economy was good, Democrats offered the working class and American people "guns and butter", relative prosperity for a portion of the population at home together with an imperialistic foreign policy. JFK and LBJ initiated the Vietnam war, Bill Clinton responded to the end of the first Cold War by expanding NATO, and Obama launched the "pivot to Asia" to contain China. President Biden's national security strategy and nuclear posture documents, released in October, take a clear position in favor of long-term geopolitical confrontation. Domestic industrial policy is now to be harnessed to the goal of society-wide confrontation with China and Russia.
Progressives face a choice. They can fight for social justice within a cold war framework, or they can widen their scope and fight that framework. In April 1967, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. faced the same choice and spoke out against the Vietnam war. Many of his liberal supporters deserted him, and a year later, he was assassinated.
Longer term, a social justice coalition that accepts relentless confrontation with China and Russia, and international conflict as the norm, is doomed. Resources are not infinite. The economy is headed for recession. Climate change will not wait. A fight with China means intensified Asian hate.
On October 26, progressives blinked and opted not to challenge the war drive. This will end badly for Democrats. Public opinion often supports wars when they start, but enthusiasm fades as the cost and lack of progress becomes apparent. The Republican bid to capture antiwar sentiment is already reaping results, and all the Democrats plan to do about it is discipline their left flank into conformity and claim that antiwar voters are Trump dupes.
Can Diplomacy End the Conflict?
Regardless of politics, the Ukraine war still has to be settled if the country is not to be reduced to ashes. Many respected voices are calling for urgent diplomacy to calm the fighting.
Pope Francis, UN Secretary-General Guterres and Henry Kissinger are among world figures who have called for a negotiated settlement. Former diplomat Jack Matlock, international economist Jeffrey Sachs, and military scholar Andrew Bacevich have made similar calls.
Ukraine-Russia negotiations in March, mediated by Turkey, produced a draft agreement with 15 points, but talks broke down.
Diplomacy should have three tracks: US-Russia, NATO-Russia, and Ukraine-Russia.
The US and Russia have serious issues between them, totally apart from the Ukraine war. The US walked away from the INF and Open Skies treaties well before the war started, and Russia has ended implementation of the New START treaty. The US and Russia have no working deconfliction hotline, like the one which kept the lid on hostilities in Syria, so their militaries can communicate to clarify threat perceptions.
Russia rightly perceives NATO as an anti-Russian alliance. NATO should talk to Russia to reduce the NATO threat to Russia and, after a ceasefire, demilitarize the border between them. NATO should commit not to admit new countries and it should be replaced by a new European security architecture, including Russia, as was envisioned by some in the 1990's.
Can Ukraine and Russia reach an agreement that respects the concerns of both sides? After the 2014 insurrection or coup deposed a pro-Russian president with a pro-western one, fighting in eastern Ukraine was calmed by the Minsk 2 accords, which called for regional autonomy and language rights for the eastern provinces, many of whose residents sympathize with Russia. Ukraine, with US support, never implemented the bargain, but this example shows that hard bargaining can reconcile seemingly incompatible positions. Regional autonomy of the eastern provinces, internationally supervised referenda to determine their status, or simply a ceasefire followed by a 10-year cooling off period, are possible tools to find a peaceful and democratic future for the disputed territories.
Unfortunately, the Ukraine war is becoming a partisan issue in the U.S., which means that common sense may be hard to find in Washington. If the Republicans take Congress on Nov. 8, neither party will likely be able to focus on Ukraine diplomacy. As happened during the 20-year Afghanistan occupation, they are more likely to try to outdo each other in being seen to support the war. It is going to be a long winter.
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The Question Still Bubbles: Who Blew up the Nordstream Pipeline?
We may never know who sabotaged Nordstream 2. But it wasn't the first, nor likely the last casualty of such fierce geopolitical conflict.
Oct 29, 2022
Two stunning explosions deep below the Baltic Sea last month set off one of the greatest whodunits in the long history of US-Russia hostility.
The sabotage of Nord Stream is just the latest and most spectacular example of how vital pipelines are to the political and economic security of many nations.
The explosion ruptured a pipeline that was built to bring liquid natural gas from Russia to Germany. That is likely to reshape European life. It will drive up energy prices as winter begins while removing an instrument Russia has used to influence European governments. The attack also illustrates the profound but little-understood importance of pipelines in modern geopolitics. This is the first major sabotage of an important international pipeline. Now that a precedent has been set, it may not be the last.
The pipeline that was attacked, called Nord Stream 2, was a joint Russian-German project that the United States opposed from the start. In February President Biden promised that if Russia invaded Ukraine, "there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." When asked how that would be possible, he replied, "I promise you, we would be able to do that." After the September 26 attack, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it "a tremendous opportunity once and for all to remove the dependence on Russian energy...We're now the leading supplier of LNG to Europe."
Germany and other countries that planned to use liquid natural gas from Russia may now have to buy it from the United States. Hours after the explosion, former Polish defense minister Radek Sikorski tweeted a picture of the methane bubble rising from the Baltic with the caption "Thank you USA." In a second tweet he elaborated: "Nord Stream's only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity."
The pipeline is heavily armored, with layers of concrete surrounding tubes made from metal alloys. Most who have studied the attack agree that it could only have been carried out by a "state actor." The United States, Britain, Russia, and possible Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, are thought to be the only countries with the undersea power to carry it off. Once accomplished, the action removed the most important tool Russia had to pressure Germany--and perhaps assured that Germany will not stray from the US policy of arming Ukraine. Circumstantial evidence suggests that this could have been an American operation.
Journalists and other professional skeptics, however, realize that some things that seem obvious and just plain common sense are actually not true. Russia may not have undersea commandos able to plant powerful explosives along the pipeline, but it could have been blown up from inside. Russia, which controls access to the pipeline, could have carried out the attack that way. Why would it blow up its own pipeline? According to those who support this theory, the motive would be to drive gas prices higher and push Europeans into freezing darkness so they would press their leaders to stop supporting Ukraine.
The executive director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, asserted soon after the sabotage attack that it was "very obvious" who did it, but refused to say more. Sweden is investigating but will not reveal what it discovers because, according to a Swedish official, "that is subject to confidentiality directly linked to national security." A member of the German parliament asked what Germany's government knows, and the government reportedly replied that it could not answer because "even the slight risk of disclosure cannot be accepted."
This mystery will probably not be resolved soon, or perhaps ever. The sabotage of Nord Stream is just the latest and most spectacular example of how vital pipelines are to the political and economic security of many nations.
Conflict over a pipeline led the CIA to participate in its first regime-change operation. In 1949 the first president of independent Syria, Shukri al-Quwatli, refused to allow a consortium of American oil companies to run the Trans-Arabian Pipeline across his country. That defiance led the CIA to promote a military coup that deposed Quwatli and installed a military-led government that quickly approved the pipeline. Syria never returned to democracy.
In the 1990s, the United States exercised intense pressure to assure that new pipelines from rich fields in the former Soviet Union would not run through Iran or other unfriendly countries. Russia has periodically raised or lowered the price of gas from its pipelines according to whether particular governments are friendly or hostile. China is using pipelines as part of its ambitious Belt and Road initiative that seeks to bind Eurasia together under Chinese influence. In 2014, after Russia's annexation of Crimea, the European Union blocked a proposed pipeline that would have carried Russian gas to Austria and Italy.
Most pipelines are vulnerable. One candidate for future sabotage might be Turkstream, designed to carry gas from Russia to Turkey and then on to Bulgaria, Hungary and Serbia--all countries that have been reluctant to support Ukraine. A "pipeline war" could lie ahead.
So who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline? Thousands of unexploded mines from World Wars I and II still litter the Baltic. Blaming one of those mines would be most convenient. That would allow all to believe that this was an unfortunate accident, not an act of international vandalism. There's no hard evidence to support that theory, but neither is there any to support the charge that the culprit was the United States or Russia. That may keep speculation bubbling like the methane gas that exploded from under the Baltic last month.
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Dangerous Annexation in Ukraine Makes US-Russian Diplomacy Even More Vital
It is precisely when relations are at their worst that high-level diplomatic engagement is most important.
Sep 30, 2022
The Russian government's move today to annex the territories it has occupied in Ukraine is absolutely illegal, as well as a very serious escalation of the conflict. The local "referendums" in support of this move were a sham and will quite rightly be condemned by the vast majority of states around the world.
Even states like China that have been so far unaligned with the West and more sympathetic to Russia in this conflict have made clear that they will never accept forced annexations.
In these exceptionally dangerous circumstances, it is important to remember the lessons of the Cold War.
The Russian action greatly complicates the search for an eventual peace settlement, as Ukraine and Western nations won't formally accept nor recognize the annexation. At the same time, once these territories have been officially accepted into Russia under the Russian constitution, it will be much more difficult for a future Russian government to give them up. Nonetheless, barring the very unlikely prospect of a complete victory for either side, at some stage a ceasefire to end full-scale war will still be necessary.
Above all, the drastic nature of the Russian action makes it even more essential that Washington and Moscow enter into direct talks to prevent the war from spreading and escalating into a direct clash between the United States and Russia, which in the worst scenario could lead to a nuclear exchange that would destroy civilization.
The very fact that direct peace talks between Ukraine and Russia are now so difficult means that the Biden administration must assume greater responsibility for diplomatic efforts to contain and limit the conflict. Not to do so would essentially be abdicating its responsibility to protect the United States and the American people from threats to their very existence.
This danger is in no sense hypothetical or speculative. Both before and during the war, the Biden administration has responded to Russia's aggressive moves by increasing its support to Ukraine. At every point, the Russian government has responded not by backing down, but by further escalating in turn. If this cycle of escalation continues unchecked, then the prospect of direct nuclear conflict between America and Russia will become an active probability.
In these exceptionally dangerous circumstances, it is important to remember the lessons of the Cold War. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the U.S. establishment and its allies in western Europe came together to prevent the further spread of Soviet power and Stalinist communism in Europe. In that effort they were completely successful, leading to the containment and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet communism.
At the same time, the Eisenhower administration rejected the idea of "rolling back" Soviet power in eastern Europe by military means, arguing that this strategy would lead to an extremely high risk of nuclear war in which both the Soviet Union and the United States would be largely destroyed. President Dwight Eisenhower, as the former allied commander in World War II, also understood that even a conventional war in Europe would once again reduce that continent to ruins -- including those east European countries that U.S. hardliners wished to liberate.
As a result of this wise decision (and the Soviet decision not to risk nuclear annihilation by exploiting its superiority in conventional forces in Europe), war was avoided, and over time, lines of communication were put in place between Washington and Moscow to limit the risks of unintended escalation. At present, such lines of communication have largely broken down. Diplomatic links are more limited than at the very worst moments of the Cold War. Meetings between high-level officials have ended completely. Yet -- paradoxically but logically -- it is precisely when relations are at their worst that such contacts are most important.
At certain points during the Cold War, failures of communication led to acute dangers of conflict. Thus, as recorded in Soviet documents cited in books by authors like Serhii Plokhy on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet leadership deployed missiles to Cuba because it was convinced that this was the only way to deter a U.S. invasion of the island.
Soviet fears were not irrational; the United States had staged the "Bay of Pigs" invasion by Cuban emigre forces, and when it failed, hardliners in Washington did indeed urge a direct U.S. invasion. Yet by the time the Kremlin made its decision to deploy missiles, President Kennedy had in fact already categorically rejected the idea of U.S. invasion. A Soviet move and U.S. response that brought the world to the very brink of nuclear cataclysm was therefore objectively unnecessary and could have been avoided by frank and honest private communications.
Today, to avoid escalation towards nuclear war, it is necessary that Washington and Moscow begin talks that would allow secret but credible assurances by both sides -- just as President Kennedy's agreement to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey in return for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba was kept secret by both sides. These assurances should concern first and foremost issues that could point directly towards outright war between the two countries.
To avoid escalation towards nuclear war, it is necessary that Washington and Moscow begin talks that would allow secret but credible assurances by both sides...
Russia needs to give Washington assurances that it does not intend to attack any NATO member. Washington needs to assure Moscow that it will not make any move to blockade the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, and that it will stop short of supporting any Ukrainian offensive aimed at recapturing Crimea and seizing the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. Both sides need to give assurances that they will not sabotage the other's infrastructure -- an especially urgent issue given the (as yet unexplained) sabotage of Russia's Nord Stream undersea gas pipeline to Germany.
As part of the process of moving towards such talks, U.S. officials should understand that while on the one hand Russia's annexation of these territories marks a very serious escalation, on the other it also masks a colossal scaling down of Russian ambitions compared to the first months of the war. The Kremlin's original plan was to capture Kyiv, subjugate or replace the Ukrainian government, and reduce Ukraine to the status of a Russian client state. When that failed, Moscow hoped to conquer all or most of the Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine. Both of these plans were foiled by Ukrainian resistance backed by Western weaponry and intelligence.
The Russian defeat in Kharkiv has forced Russia both to increase its forces and to further scale back its goals. Now, Putin's goal seems to be permanent Russian control of a portion of eastern Ukraine (excluding the main cities of Kharkiv, Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk), so as to allow him to ward off attacks by Russian hardliners and claim to the Russian people that his criminal and disastrous war has led to some sort of success for Russia.
The latest Russian statement says that what Moscow calls the "special military operation" in Ukraine must continue until "at a minimum" the whole territory of the Donbas has been "liberated." This is a strong indication that ambitions beyond that have in practice been abandoned under the impact of military reality.
By presenting this war as one to defend Russia's own territory against Western-backed Ukrainian attack, Putin also hopes to justify the greater demands for sacrifice that he is having to make on the Russian people in support of the war. Megalomaniacal ambition appears to have been replaced by a measure of desperation -- but that only makes the present situation all the more dangerous, and direct talks between Washington and Moscow all the more urgent.
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Climate Scientist Demands 'War Crimes' Charges for Whoever Ordered Pipeline Sabotage
The call from Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson came as a fourth Nord Stream leak was discovered, intensifying fears of an unprecedented release of planet-heating methane emissions.
Sep 29, 2022
A Stanford University climate scientist on Wednesday called for war crimes charges against whoever is found to have ordered the apparent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline system, an incident that experts say could result in the largest-ever recorded release of methane emissions.
"Whoever ordered this should be prosecuted for war crimes and go to jail," Stanford's Rob Jackson told the Associated Press as scientists assessed the potentially massive environmental impact of the pipeline damage, which European countries and NATO have formally concluded is the result of a deliberate attack.
"This is a colossal amount of gas, in really large bubbles."
On Thursday, Swedish authorities announced the discovery of a fourth leak in the Nord Stream pipeline network that carries Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea, adding to the three leaks found earlier this week. Sweden said it detected two underwater blasts the same day the first three leaks were discovered.
While speculation and finger-pointing abound--with European Union officials suggesting Russia is to blame and Moscow hinting that the U.S. or another NATO country may have been behind the attack--it's not yet clear who was responsible and no credible evidence has been presented by those making accusations.
In a statement Thursday, NATO said that "all currently available information indicates that this is the result of deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage."
"These leaks are causing risks to shipping and substantial environmental damage. We support the investigations underway to determine the origin of the damage," the alliance added. "Any deliberate attack against allies' critical infrastructure would be met with a united and determined response."
Since the leaks were first detected earlier this week, scientists have voiced alarm about the climate disaster that could result, given the quantity of gas pouring out of the pipelines and the planet-warming potency of methane.
Danish authorities have estimated that the two pipelines contained a combined 778 million cubic meters of gas when they were breached--and gas is still flowing out of the pipelines days after the leaks were detected.
"This is a colossal amount of gas, in really large bubbles," Grant Allen, an environmental science expert at Manchester University, told The Guardian on Wednesday. "If you have small sources of gas, nature will help out by digesting the gas. In the Deepwater Horizon spill [in the Gulf of Mexico], there was a lot of attenuation of methane by bacteria."
"My scientific experience is telling me that--with a big blow-up like this--methane will not have time to be attenuated by nature," Allen added. "So a significant proportion will be vented as methane gas."
The AP reported Wednesday that early estimates indicate the damaged pipelines could "discharge as much as five times as much of the potent greenhouse as was released by the Aliso Canyon disaster, the largest known terrestrial release of methane in U.S. history."
That leak, discovered in California in 2015, unleashed around 100,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere.
Rowan Emslie, a spokesperson with the Clean Air Task Force, told CNN Thursday that "the unprecedented aspect" of the Nord Stream damage and resulting methane release "is that we don't think we've seen a leak this large, this fast before, which is why it's so worrying."
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Apparent Sabotage of Nord Stream Pipelines Risks 'Unprecedented' Climate Nightmare
While it's unclear who was responsible for the damage, Greenpeace E.U. said "what's certain is that this is terrible news for the climate, and that Europe's addiction to gas must end."
Sep 28, 2022
As questions and accusations continue to swirl in the wake of the suspected sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline system, environmentalists and scientists are beginning to come to grips with the devastating climate impact of the incident, which sent gas bubbling to the surface of the Baltic Sea and unleashed a yet-unknown quantity of methane emissions into the atmosphere.
One early estimate from Jean-Francois Gauthier, vice president of measurements at the satellite firm GHGSat, indicates that the Russian gas pipelines were unleashing more than 500 metric tons of methane per hour when they were first damaged.
"This leak highlights how dangerous it is to rely on fossil gas."
As of Wednesday morning, gas was still pouring out of Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 around 48 hours after the three leaks were first detected by Danish authorities.
While neither Nord Stream 1 nor Nord Stream 2 were operating at the time of the damage, both contained a significant amount of gas whose largest component is methane, a powerful pollutant with more than 80 times the heating potency of carbon dioxide.
Nord Stream 2--which Germany, backed by the United States, barred from starting commercial operations in response to Russia's assault on Ukraine--was believed to contain 177 million cubic meters of gas at the time of the apparent attack, which prompted a torrent of speculation and finger-pointing among world powers as European authorities pledged to investigate.
Andrew Baxter, energy transition director at the Environmental Defense Fund, noted that based on estimates of the pipeline's gas contents, the damage to Nord Stream 2 could spew 115,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere, roughly "the same climate impact as the annual emissions of 2 million gasoline cars."
Greenpeace E.U. warned that the combined gas from both of the leaking Nord Stream pipelines "could have the same climate-wrecking potential of 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide."
"This leak highlights how dangerous it is to rely on fossil gas," the group argued. "We don't know exactly how much gas was in the pipelines, how much leaked, and how much is absorbed by the water instead of the air. But what's certain is that this is terrible news for the climate, and that Europe's addiction to gas must end."
Bloomberg reported Wednesday that "scientists are scrambling to work out just how much methane, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases, has escaped into the atmosphere," and the "fear is that it could be one of the worst releases ever."
David McCabe, a senior scientist with Clean Air Task Force, told the outlet that "the potential for a massive and highly damaging emission event is very worrisome."
"If these pipelines fail, the impact to the climate will be disastrous and could even be unprecedented."
"There are a number of uncertainties," McCabe added, "but, if these pipelines fail, the impact to the climate will be disastrous and could even be unprecedented."
Bloomberg points out that "the largest known release in the U.S. happened at a gas storage facility in Aliso Canyon, Los Angeles in 2015, where an estimated 97,100 metric tons of methane was emitted over several months."
Denmark's defense command, which captured aerial footage of the leak in the Baltic Sea, said the largest of the three leaks resulted in a surface disturbance of over half a mile in diameter over a period of several hours, heightening concerns of a climate catastrophe as authorities rushed to mitigate the damage and determine who was responsible.
"The NSI and NSII leaks risk becoming a climate and ecological disaster," tweeted Stefano Grassi, the head of the European Union energy commissioner's cabinet. "We are in contact with [member states] to look into what happened and find the fastest way to stop leaks and avoid worse damage."
Josep Borrell, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said in a statement on behalf of the bloc Wednesday that "safety and environmental concerns are of utmost priority."
"These incidents are not a coincidence and affect us all," Borrell continued. "All available information indicates those leaks are the result of a deliberate act. We will support any investigation aimed at getting full clarity on what happened and why, and will take further steps to increase our resilience in energy security."
"Any deliberate disruption of European energy infrastructure is utterly unacceptable," he added, "and will be met with a robust and united response."
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