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.
