With this, even if they negotiate, there won't be any gas soon.
So, it's bad for russia, bad for eu, and the only one being better of is USA... who was threathened to do exactly this more than once.
It seems quite clear to me that in the short and medium term this ideological stance isn't going to hurt "evil Russian empire" a whole lot, while being extremely disruptive and harmful to everyone in the EU.
I don't know why people keep repeating this lie, do they want to support Russia so badly?
The real risk for Europe is a recession due to gas prices for industrial use - but that would mostly impact extremely rich places, like Germany.
Realistically.. even if they found an american submarine with "pipecutters" still connected to the pipeline, they'd say they'll do everything in their power(!!!)... and then send an angry letter to USA and replace an ambassador or two somewhere.
Wow Just wow. Ready to place responsibility at everyone but Russia's feet right? Such a blameless third party victim in all of this /s.
The pipeline itself was in good part Merkel's olive branch to connect Putin economically to the rest of the EU. The hope was that giving Russia more to lose would prevent these conflicts. Sure the US, among others, we're wary of this kind of interdependence.
Well, now we know how things shook out and we're all dealing with it. Germany from the back foot this round.
Now I'm not attributing any great foresight to naysayers (US among them), it was a nobel bid for peace on Germany's part and there's always a chance we'd be talking about the brilliance of deepening those connections with Russia.
But we can't.
Russia drove its tanks into Ukraine, nobody made them. They weren't under any great duress. Even the most unjustifiably charitable take of Russian justification accounts for what, just Luhansk and Donetsk? But they tried to take Kiev. Tried to take every bit of Ukrainian's coastline with the Black Sea through Odessa. Russia good out of it's way to poison their reputation here with conquest.
This could range from a small group staging a false flag to push Putin further (he is a surprise moderate of the extremely hawkish Russsian elements) to a different small group staging some form of protest by sabotage .. to any other ridiculous scenario imaginable.
