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On September 26, 2022, four underwater explosions ruptured three of the four strands of the $20 billion Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines that traverse the floor of the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany.

That same day, Sweden and Denmark, in whose exclusive economic zones the explosions occurred, called the blasts deliberate actions.

Within 48 hours after the last leaks in the pipelines had been detected, NATO attributed them to acts of sabotage, while the European Union warned that “any deliberate disruption of European energy infrastructure is utterly unacceptable and will be met with a robust and united response.”

The pipelines made landfall in Germany. Sweden, Denmark, and Germany launched separate investigations. Both Stockholm and Copenhagen shut down their probes without identifying a perpetrator, while Berlin obtained an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian national suspected of being part of a team that blew up pipelines, according to reports in German mainstream media.

Several unnamed “senior Ukrainian defense and security officials who either participated in or had direct knowledge of the plot” allegedly told the Wall Street Journal that although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the attack, the CIA caught wind of it and urged him to stop it, which he purportedly did. But despite Zelenksy’s order to halt the plan, his then-commander-in-chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was overseeing the mission, “forged ahead.”

In February 2023, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report, based on an anonymous source ​“with direct knowledge of the operational planning,” alleging that the sabotage was a covert CIA operation.

The saboteurs, however, remain at large, with conclusive proof of the nation-state(s) that planned, ordered and executed the operation yet to be made public.

Almost immediately after the blasts, the average American and European mainstream media consumer was inundated with headlines and chyrons feverishly positing Russian culpability for hardly any other reason than the Kremlin was inherently diabolical. Russian President Vladimir Putin, it was propounded without evidence, blew up his own vital infrastructure to “harm, confuse, frighten, enfeeble and divide target states while maintaining plausible deniability,” and to “destabilize” Europe’s “energy security.”

Statements by Roderich Kiesewetter, a former German colonel who sits in Parliament for the conservative Christian Democratic Union, exemplify this limited line of thought. “It is therefore primarily a psychological question,” he told German media. “Russia wants to sow doubts about the government and the state as a whole."

Asked for further comment, Mr. Kiesewetter’s office said in an email that “we only exchange information on this topic with journalists we know.”

By contrast, the analytical depth of some of the evidence-free accusations leveled at Russia transcended a mere Manichaean assessment of the attack’s alleged perpetrator, arguing the Russian energy giant Gazprom – the pipelines’ majority owner – stood to benefit financially and legally from the destruction of the pipelines.

But events that have transpired since that fateful day in September 2022 cast doubt on claims that state-run Gazprom or Russia would benefit from the loss of the pipelines. 

Financial data

Most experts at think tanks and politicians who claimed the sabotage would benefit Gazprom pointed out that the Russian energy firm owns 51% of Nord Stream 1, alongside four European companies, and 100% of Nord Stream 2. Fewer detailed how crucial Gazprom is to the Russian state’s fiscal health. None, it appears, have incorporated into their previous theory the recent financial and legal developments that undermine the notion the sabotage would redound to the benefit of Russia or Gazprom.

There is evidence that the destruction of the pipelines has significantly contributed to Gazprom’s financial woes. In May, Gazprom announced a $6.9 billion loss for 2023, marking its first annual loss in over two decades. Reuters noted that the substantial loss came “amid dwindling gas trade with Europe, once its main sales market.”

The Nord Stream 1 pipeline was the largest source of Europe’s Russian gas supply. On its own, Nord Stream 1 was a vast energy source for EU nations, supplying them a whopping 35% of all Russian gas imports.

In 2021, Russia exported 155 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas to the European Union, accounting for approximately 45% of EU gas imports and nearly 40% of its total gas consumption. By comparison, China, with more than three times the population of the EU, imported only 22 billion bcm of Russian gas via pipeline in 2023.

In 2022, Russia’s federal budget revenues totaled $407 billion. Gazprom, as Russia’s largest taxpayer, contributed $80 billion to the country’s public coffers that year. Given this significant contribution, it seems highly implausible that Russia would jeopardize such a large portion of its federal budget revenues, especially during a time when it is at war with Ukraine and, by extension, with the West.

Even as Gazprom grappled with record losses due to its sharp decline in sales to Europe, Russia said it would increase taxes on the energy firm. A $500 million monthly levy was to be paid to the state until 2025, highlighting the state’s continued reliance on Gazprom for revenue. The tax increase was partly intended to bolster the budget, which faced a record deficit of 1.8 trillion rubles in January 2023.

Despite the financial data, which undercuts the claim that the attack would benefit Russia or Gazprom, numerous experts argued otherwise. Among them was Sergey Vakulenko, an energy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a research group. Mr. Vakulenko also served as head of strategy and innovations at the Gazprom subsidiary Gazprom Neft until February 2022.

“One irony of the attack is that Russia’s Gazprom potentially stands to benefit: it will no longer need to invent excuses not to supply Europe via Nord Stream 1,” Mr. Vakulenko wrote four days after the explosions. “Now it can claim a force majeure, which will dramatically reduce the risk of compensation claims for non-delivered volumes.”

But it is the very destruction of the pipelines that will likely be seen as the coup de grâce to Russian gas supplies via pipelines to Europe for at least three reasons. First, previously imposed Western sanctions would have hampered repairs. Second, fixing the pipelines would require months, if not years. Third, repairs could not have begun until Germany, Sweden, and Denmark concluded their investigations. “The explosions therefore effectively served to foreclose the prospect of a return of Russian pipeline gas to Europe on any significant scale for an indefinite period,” concluded the authors of a June paper from the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

This foreclosure of the possibility of Russian gas flowing again to Europe via Nord Stream 1 and kneecapping the potentiality for supplies through Nord Stream 2 have not evolved to Gazprom’s financial advantage. 

In addition to Mr. Vakulenko, seemingly countless other experts maintained the attack would benefit Gazprom or Russia. Two cases in point are Mikhail Krutikhin, an analyst of Russia’s oil and gas industry, and Andriy Kobolyev, the founder of the energy company Eney.

“By disabling the pipelines, Russia is protecting Gazprom from legal claims over its non-delivery of gas to its European customers,” Mr. Kobolyev said.

Mr. Krutikhin echoed Mr. Kobolyev’s assessment, telling The Odessa Journal that the sabotage “is beneficial only to one player,” because “Gazprom risked being filed against it, first, arbitration cases, and then litigation, and will remove several billion dollars in fines from him for unfulfilled contracts.”

Other experts contending the attack would benefit Gazprom or Russia include, but are not limited to: Ariel Cohen, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council; Emily Holland of the US Naval War College; Szymon Kardaś, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations; Olga Khakova, deputy director for European energy security at the Atlantic Council; Agata Łoskot-Strachota, coordinator of the Energy in Europe project at the Center for Eastern Studies; Aura Sabadus, senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis; and Simone Tagliapietra, energy fellow at the Bruegel think tank.

Like Mr. Vakulenko, Mr. Kobolyev and Mr. Krutikhin, none of the aforementioned experts responded to a request for comment.

Unfavorable legal developments for Gazprom

It can be verified that the prevailing legal landscape, like the financial developments, has not been propitious for Gazprom or Russia. The sabotage was not recognized by an arbitral tribunal as force majeure, contradicting the assessments of Mr. Kobolyev, Mr. Krutikhin and Mr. Vakulenko, who wrote that “a force majeure” would “dramatically reduce the risk of compensation claims for non-delivered volumes.” Uniper, a German energy firm, announced in June that a Stockholm-seated arbitral tribunal awarded it €13 billion in damages for non-delivery of gas and the right to terminate its contracts with Gazprom, formally ending their relationship that would have been contractually in force until the mid-2030s.

The tribunal’s ruling is momentous and demonstrably unfavorable to Gazprom. It may lead to the company’s exclusion from the European market: Its supplies to Europe were down 55.6% in 2023, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the €13 billion award significantly exceeds the estimated cost of repairing both dual lines of Nord Stream 1 and 2 by as much as 10 to 20 times and is comparable to the total cost of building either pipeline.

The ruling has not been made public. As such, the tribunal’s rationale for rewarding such a large amount over a short period of non-delivery, as well as the severity of contract terminations, is hidden from public scrutiny. But the gravity of the decision testifies to the massive volumes Nord Stream 1 had been capable of delivering since 2011: Uniper claimed it had already incurred at least €11.6 billion in losses from gas volumes not delivered in the approximate six-month period from mid-June to November 2022.

According to the June paper by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, “the relief in the form of termination rights awarded by the Uniper-Gazprom tribunal and, possibly, other tribunals translates into more immediate – but also potentially financially severe – effects on Gazprom in terms of lost revenues.”

Above all, the tribunal’s ruling makes clear that invoking force majeure not only did not shield Gazprom from compensation liability during the entire period from mid-June to August 2022, when it claimed sanctions were an impediment to deliveries, but also after the Nord Stream sabotage in September 2022. “This, in turn, confirms that neither event was recognized by the tribunal as force majeure,” the authors of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies paper clarified. In other words, Gazprom was held liable for undelivered volumes, even though its pipelines had already been blown up by an, as yet, unidentified group of saboteurs from an unknown nation-state.

The non-recognition in June by the Stockholm-seated arbitral tribunal of Gazprom’s declaration of force majeure may also have far-reaching consequences for the company. “If other arbitral tribunals reach conclusions similar to those of the Uniper-Gazprom tribunal – effectively enabling buyers to terminate their contracts – and if buyers decide to do so, the future of Russian pipeline gas in Europe would be largely foreclosed,” according to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies paper.

Similar court rulings “would mean the end of significant exports of Russian gas to Europe,” concluded the Oxford paper.

Accompanying these detrimental legal developments for Gazprom is the potential for a further negative repercussion: the seizure of its assets. The day after Uniper announced its €13 billion award, the CEO of the Austrian energy firm OMV, a financial backer of Nord Stream 2 and part owner of Russia’s Yuzhno Russkoye gas field, said that “the payments of anybody to Gazprom in Europe could be seized.”

Later that same month, Reuters reported that Orlen, Poland’s largest energy firm, warned that other European gas companies could seize their payments for imports from Gazprom.

It seems logical, then, that Gazprom would be entitled to know who is behind the attack on its infrastructure. Yet, ironically, the energy giant may be dependent on Germany for answers. Not only is Germany the sole country with an investigation still open, but it also took over 99% of Uniper in December 2022, bailing out the company with 13.5 billion euros of public funds. Although Uniper has reportedly been reimbursing the government, German taxpayers, who bore the most expensive heating costs ever in the winter of 2022-2023, equally deserve to be told who planned and executed the Nord Stream sabotage.

Conspicuously, the US has filled the vacuum, becoming the world’s largest liquefied natural gas exporter in the first half of 2022 and maintaining its top position in 2023.

European parliamentarians and government officials claimed the sabotage would benefit Russia

Politicians and government officials claimed the sabotage would benefit Russia. Among them is Gerhard Schindler, the former head of Germany’s federal intelligence agency.

Russia “stands to gain the most from this act of sabotage,” said Mr. Schindler. “The halt in gas supplies can now be justified simply by pointing to the defective pipelines, without having to advance alleged turbine problems or other unconvincing arguments for breaking supply contracts.”

Ine Eriksen Søreide, the chair of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense in the Norwegian parliament, agreed with Mr. Schindler. “It’s fair to say that it is one country that has an interest in doing what has been done,” she said. “That is Russia.”

Tellingly, Ms. Søreide’s Norway currently supplies more than 30% of the EU’s gas. Gazprom had provided about 35% of all Europe’s gas before the war in Ukraine, but Bloomberg reported in May that Norwegian state-owned “Equinor now plays an outsized role in the ups and downs of the continent’s gas prices.”

Similarly, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann,  the chairwoman of the Defense Committee in the EU Parliament, said Russia may have attacked “to shake up our markets.”

Ms. Strack-Zimmermann, who is on snuggly terms with lobbyists representing weapons manufacturers and has been described as a “defense hawk,” has demanded increases in Germany’s military spending and even insisted Germany’s armed forces activate 900,000 reservists.

Considered “a rising star” in European politics, Ms. Strack-Zimmermann is also not new to spreading disinformation. After a missile hit Polish territory, she created a post on X blaming Russia without evidence. “This is the Russia that some people here absurdly still want to negotiate with,” she wrote. “The Kremlin and its inmates must explain themselves immediately.” Yet when it became clear the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces, she deleted the post.

Despite allegations by these politicians and government officials, Swedish and German investigators have thrown cold water on the theory that Russia had something to do with the Nord Stream sabotage. The relevance of the observed Russian vessels has been “dismissed” by German investigators and their movements “have been able to be excluded from the investigation,” Expressen, a Swedish paper, reported. The ships’ “positions have been mapped and the conclusion must be that they have not been in such a place that they could have carried out the deed.”

Mats Ljungqvist, the lead prosecutor on the Swedish investigation, told The Guardian he was “aware” of the Russian ship movements before. “This is not new information to us,” he said.

Ljungqvist previously stated to The New York Times, “Do I think it was Russia that blew up Nord Stream? I never thought so. It’s not logical.”

Reporting has either attributed the attack to the US or Ukraine.

Twice, in February and then March 2023, the United States blocked a Russian request at the United Nations Security Council to establish an international investigation into the blasts.

None of the data obtained during the only independent expedition to all four blast sites (in which I participated), including underwater drone images, videos, and sonar images, suggests Russia’s involvement.

The West and the US in particular, with its worldwide Integrated Undersea Surveillance System and preeminent intelligence gathering, can identify the perpetrator. Mr. Vakulenko himself wrote, “If the perpetrator was Russia,” the West “would certainly know Russia is behind the explosions.”

Yet, in the face of the financial, legal, and geopolitical developments, public statements by Swedish and German investigators, as well as data from our expedition and the West’s surveillance capabilities, Mr. Schindler said that “there is a lot to suggest that this was a false flag operation by the Russians” as recently as last month.

Notably, during his time as Germany’s spy chief, Mr. Schindler came under criticism following the 2013 leaked revelations by Edward Snowden, the former American intelligence contractor, that the US National Security Agency had been spying on its allies, including tapping into then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone.

Mr. Schindler, Ms. Søreide, and Ms. Strack-Zimmermann did not respond to requests for comment.

The pipelines still held significant value for Russia and Gazprom

Many analysts and experts have asserted that the pipelines no longer held significant value for Russia, accurately noting that Gazprom itself had, in August 2022, cut off the flow of gas via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.

But much the same as assertions that Russia or Gazprom would benefit from the sabotage of the pipelines, arguments put forward by Mr. Vakulenko and others appear to have misfired with comparable cursoriness.

First, the pipelines constituted robust geopolitical leverage for the Kremlin. Second, Russia had begun “pricing out the cost to repair the pipe and restore gas flow.” Finally, repairing the pipelines had not been dismissed from consideration by European shareholders.

“On the other hand, the Nord Stream consortium companies and eventually Gazprom might even hope to collect some insurance for the damaged pipelines,” wrote Mr. Vakulenko. “Given that they already looked set to become a stranded asset, that would be far from the worst outcome for the giant company.”

On these points, Mr. Vakulenko’s logic only partly holds up under scrutiny. In March, Gazprom and the other shareholders brought a €400 million lawsuit against their insurers for refusing to pay an indemnity for explosions that ripped apart Nord Stream 1. However, this sum, which would presumably be divided among the shareholders, is a mere fraction of the billions Gazprom bagged from gas deliveries through Nord Stream 1. It is also a mere trifle next to Gazprom’s staggering $6.9 billion loss, the approximately $14 billion in compensation it may pay Uniper, and, above all, the potential uncoupling of the Russian energy firm from the European market.

According to Mr. Vakulenko’s analysis, Nord Stream 2’s $10 billion value was greatly diminished because, in February 2022, Germany terminated its certification process, preventing gas deliveries from ever beginning. But here his logic, too, is deficient: Russia’s offer to supply gas via Nord 2 Line B, the one strand that wasn’t damaged in the attack, was rebuffed by the West. Furthermore, Gazprom has yet to file a lawsuit for damages related to Nord Stream 2.

Irreparably damaging its own pipelines appears “especially nonsensical if Moscow wants to reserve the option of resuming natural gas deliveries to Europe at some point in the future – and to continue using energy as a political lever,” Der Spiegel reported.

Unlike for Nord Stream 2, Gazprom has sued for damages on Nord Stream 1

In March, Nord Stream AG – a consortium in which Gazprom holds a controlling 51% stake, alongside four European energy companies – filed a €400 million lawsuit against Lloyd’s of London and Arch Insurance for refusing to pay an indemnity for the subsea blasts that ripped apart Nord Stream 1.

Lloyd’s of London and Bermuda-based Arch Insurance denied the claim, arguing their policies do not cover the underwater explosions that ruptured Lines A and B of Nord Stream 1 because the damage was inflicted by “a government.”

In June, Nord Stream AG responded, arguing it is incumbent upon the defendants – the Western insurers – to furnish evidence identifying the nation-state responsible for planning, ordering, and executing the sabotage.

“The Claimant’s [Nord Stream AG] case…is premised on the Defendants’ case being established, i.e. that the Damage constitutes destruction of or damage to property by or under the order of any government,” Nord Stream AG stated in its Response to the Defendants’ Request for Further Information. “The Claimant will therefore rely in that respect on such facts and matters as are alleged and may be proved by the Defendant in that regard.”

These dynamics of the lawsuit are potentially uncomfortable for the West. To avoid a substantial indemnity payment, the Western insurers may be legally compelled to identify the country responsible for that attack – inevitably a Western country or countries.

“Otherwise...,” stated the Nord Stream AG response, “the further information requested [proof of which “government” is the perpetrator] is not reasonably necessary and proportionate to enable the Defendants to prepare their own case or to understand the case they have to meet.”

(Nord Stream AG’s response was made public by Swedish engineer Erik Andersson, who led the only private investigative expedition – in which I participated – to all four blast sites of the Nord Stream pipelines.)

Should the Western insurers fail to identify the “government” culprit, they may be liable for €400 million, a mere fraction of more than €13 billion in damages that a court has ruled Gazprom must pay Uniper. For them, identifying the responsible government, or governments, would be tantamount to an admission that the country – Ukraine, which the West supports in the conflict with Russia –  committed an act of sabotage on the critical infrastructure for which they provided coverage. Conversely, if the US is the perpetrator, it means the supposed guarantor of European security has executed an attack against its protectorates. Either revelation would be mortifying for NATO and the West.

Gas supplies: Russian geopolitical leverage or snuffed out by Western sanctions?

Gazprom has blamed Western sanctions for both the reduction and subsequent stoppage of gas supplies via Nord Stream 1. On June 14, 2022, Gazprom announced it was reducing the flow, justifying the reduction “due to the failure by Germany’s Siemens to return gas compressor units in due time after their repair.” One month later, on July 14, 2022, Gazprom informed several European buyers in a letter, backdated to June 14, that it was retroactively declaring force majeure on deliveries. Finally, on September 2, 2022, Gazprom announced the total shutdown of gas deliveries via Nord Stream 1, alleging that Western sanctions had prevented it from receiving the necessary parts for maintenance and repairs to a turbine needed for safe pipeline operation.

The West pushed back, accusing Russia of blackmailing Europe with energy amid the war in Ukraine and at the peak of Europe’s energy crisis. In July 2022, Germany stated that since the delayed parts were intended for use beginning in September, their absence could not be related to the reduced gas flows. The following month, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the turbine could be shipped to Russia as soon as it accepted its receipt. “The current sanctions affect neither the import of the turbine to Europe nor its export to Russia,” stated a government press release. It remains unclear whether the turbine and parts designated for September are the same.

Similarly, Russian gas supply was not under EU sanctions at the time, prompting Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, to counter that Moscow could increase supplies by a third if it chose to do so.

Before the turbine could be returned to Russia, President Vladimir Putin responded that Gazprom would require legal documentation confirming that the equipment was not subject to sanctions and that any future maintenance would not be affected by sanctions.

What truly motivated Gazprom’s declaration of force majeure, its decision to reduce and ultimately cut off gas flow, and its apparent refusal to receive the turbine? Was Russia aiming to protect the value of its currency and limit its exposure to asset freezes, as it decreed in March 2022, requiring buyers to pay in rubles for Russian gas? If so, these moves would likely have safeguarded Russian gas deliveries rather than putting them at risk.

Alternatively, was Gazprom intentionally manipulating gas volumes to use as a bargaining chip over Europe, with the goal of extracting geopolitical concessions over Ukraine?

The answers to the questions are not clear and there may be truth to both sides. Although the sanctions, the missing turbine, and other due maintenance rendered a reduction in supplies “inevitable,” the “pressure that reduced flows place[d] on Europe was probably not lost on the company either,” according to a July 2022 paper from the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Suspicious actions by Gazprom

“While all of the evidence is being carefully reviewed, it seems reasonable to expect that some of it will soon be declassified,” wrote Mr. Vakulenko on September 30, 2022, four days after the leaks in the pipelines were detected.

Now, nearly two years later, exactly nothing has been declassified.

To be fair, Mr. Vakulenko and others have not pretended to ascribe conclusive responsibility for the attack; they have merely contributed to the widespread propagation of the sophistic argument that the sabotage would play out in Gazprom’s or Russia’s favor. Such framing of the Nord Stream saga has baselessly bent the narrative’s arc toward a specious denouement of dubious Russian culpability on the flimsiest of pretexts.

But aspects of Gazprom’s behavior do appear suspicious. The company allowed 30 days to pass before declaring force majeure, sending a letter to its European buyers backdated to June 14. There is no evidence it actually invoked force majeure, though the arbitration proceedings may have been a “textbook case” of force majeure. Additionally, it seems Gazprom did not devote ample legal resources to its defense.

These perfunctory efforts by Gazprom – it appears not to have bothered to appoint an arbitrator, for instance – may be explained by the company’s lack of anticipation for a “surprising”  and “landmark judgment” against it. From the beginning, Gazprom’s intention may have been to disregard any international court rulings, instead “betting on what appears to be a general market assumption that the prospects of gas buyers being able to enforce any awards against Gazprom appear bleak,” according to the Oxford paper from June. The paper also notes that enforcement against Gazprom’s assets is “likely to be an uphill battle for reasons including sanctions, potential asset concealment, and parallel court proceedings.”

Added to the suspicion that Gazprom may have known all along it never intended to make any of the damage payments, and was confident its assets would remain safe, is the possibility that the sabotage may not have been the masochistic act some accused Russia of committing. It is “not obvious that other tribunals will similarly not recognize the Nord Stream explosions as force majeure events,” wrote the authors of the Oxford study.

Finally, the sabotage may not have hurt the Russian economy significantly. The International Monetary Fund expects Russia to grow 3.2% in 2024, faster than all advanced economies. By comparison, Germany, the country that depended most on inexpensive Russian gas, is projected to be the worst-performing among advanced economies for the second consecutive year, according to both the IMF and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Media organizations and experts at think tanks engage in propaganda

Media organizations and experts have arrogated to themselves the power to inculpate Russia. “Russia Blows Up Gas Pipelines, Declaring an All-Out Energy War It May Already Have Lost,” Time magazine titled a brazenly cocksure yet deeply baseless article three days after the bombs were detonated. “Russia’s Attack on Nord Stream Pipelines Means Putin Has Truly Weaponized Energy,” ran a gratuitously confident headline on 19FortyFive. Forbes followed suit, reporting without foundation that “Russia has been implicated in the attack, though the Kremlin are denying it.”

“What on earth is going on, in the energy sector? Yes that’s right, we can bring a TikTok reference into an article about global commodity markets,” the Forbes piece oddly continued. “It’s how we do.”

“Do” exactly what, seems a fair question for Forbes. The outlet provides an answer, albeit a head-scratcher: “But seriously…It’s like an episode of Jerry Springer. The only problem is that it impacts all of us.” So if “you’re confused by all this, don’t worry,” readers are told, because Forbes is “going to run you through what’s been happening, the problems up ahead, and how investors can navigate these uncharted waters.”

At the time of writing, neither Forbes, 19FortyFive nor Time has written a correction to address or rectify the misrepresentations and inaccuracies in their articles. Nor has the slew of other media organizations running counterfactual or unsupported pieces.

Coverage of the sabotage in mainstream media and establishment magazines has almost invariably declined to associate it with Gazprom’s financial and legal struggles or Russia’s diminished geopolitical clout with the West. The only outlet to break the omertà may be the Financial Times, with the paper writing in February that Gazprom appeared to be in a much better position,” but that “its prospects changed in September 2022 when underwater blasts ruptured the Nord Stream gas pipelines…drastically reducing Moscow’s ability to use the fuel as leverage.”

Such admission that the sabotage harmed both Russia and Gazprom enfeebles the idea, put forth by Mr. Vakulenko and others, that destroying their own infrastructure would benefit them. Ironically, not only is Mr. Vakulenko himself sourced in the February Financial Times article, but he has also been quoted in the paper seven times and written two op-ed pieces for it since the explosives tore holes in the pipelines more 600 days ago – time aplenty to adjust his analysis accordingly.

Mr. Valenko was last quoted in the paper on July 22, 2024, but he has not used any platform to reconcile his initial claims with the now available facts. (It appears Vakulenko’s closest approximation to acknowledging that the sabotage was harmful to Russia or Gazprom came in June 2023, when he referred to investments in the pipelines as mere “sunk costs” but offered no further elaboration beyond noting that selling pipeline gas to China “will never be able to replace Russia’s decimated gas trade with Europe.”)

Gazprom and Russia were harmed, not helped, by the Nord Stream sabotage

In view of the financial and legal developments since the nearly two-year-old sabotage, some experts have taken corrective steps, conceding that Russia and Gazprom were harmed, not helped, by the destruction of Nord Stream 1 and 2.

In September 2023, Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies, said that Russia may have aimed “to kill two birds with one stone” by blowing up the pipelines.

Asked what he meant, Mr. Umland explained that one bird was to weaken Western support for Ukraine. The “allegations” implicating Ukraine may compel Europeans to believe that “Ukrainians are not much better than the Russians because they would blow up pipelines,” he told me.

The second bird, according to Mr. Umland, was that the sabotage may facilitate Gazprom’s avoidance of compensation claims for non-delivered volumes. However, when asked whether, in light of Gazprom’s financial struggles and the unfavorable tribunal ruling, he acknowledged that only one of those birds may remain true today.

“I think it’s [the sabotage] still a source of dissent,” Mr. Umland told me. “But clearly this entire war was not in the interest of Gazprom.”

Enduring damage to both Russia and Gazprom is still omitted

The greatest damage to both Russia and Gazprom was twofold: First, the sabotage is likely to have dealt the final blow to Russian pipeline gas in Europe. Second, the arbitral tribunal ruling allowing Uniper to terminate its existing contracts with Gazprom – and potentially similar rulings from other tribunals – will largely close off the future of Russian pipeline gas sales to the continent.

Brandishing gas supplies to occupy higher geopolitical ground is very different from placing bombs on your own critical infrastructure and permanently severing access to your largest market. This alone underscores the deficiency and incompleteness of arguments claiming that Gazprom’s struggles and the resulting loss of revenue for the Russian state are “entirely self-inflicted.”

Yet, despite the numerous facts that have emerged since the attack, the harm to Russia and Gazprom caused by the sabotage remains willfully disregarded. Politicians and experts who claimed the sabotage would prove financially, legally, or geopolitically beneficial to Russia or Gazprom seem to have only skimmed the first few chapters of the Nord Stream story. Thus far, close to none of them have engaged in any public self-correction after hastily familiarizing themselves with its complex plot. But, with the perpetrator of the sabotage not yet unmasked, there is still an opportunity for them to preorder the unfinished sequel to the book. It may end up being an international bestseller.