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It’s been almost two years since saboteurs attacked the Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea. And despite the best efforts of geopolitical gumshoes, the world over, there has yet to be a definitive answer to who carried out the attack, on whose orders and why.
News that German prosecutors this month issued a warrant for the arrest of a Ukrainian diving instructor residing in Poland has seemingly satisfied no one: Ukraine this week dismissed any sniff of complicity as “nonsense,” as did Poland. Russia, for its part, accused German investigators of looking to close the case while trying to conceal the “real culprits.”
To borrow from an old legal phrase, “well they would, wouldn’t they.” You see, as Keith Brown of Arizona State University explains, it is in Moscow’s interests to keep the case open and push the line that Kyiv and Washington were behind the infrastructure attack,
“Russia’s narrative on Nord Stream may well, when all the investigations are said and done, be the dominant one. But what is clear is that Putin’s accusations against Ukraine and the United States are motivated not by commitment to justice, but by a drive to disrupt and distract,” Brown writes.
Elsewhere this week, we have been following goings-on at the Democratic National Convention and climate change’s “overshoot myth.”
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