Yeah this article is sus. For one, Joe Biden isn't the president of Ukraine. He can be an intermediary, but in the end, it's Zelensky and the Ukrainian parliament that'll be at the negotiating table. It's also left out here the details of what Ukraine would be getting in return for 20% of their land and I'm sure Crimea.... which has to be NATO membership. They cannot be secure if Russia still controls Crimea. Geographically they will always be threatened. Even a Senile version of Biden would know that, and knows they can't give up Crimea without NATO forces policing the sea.
My guess is any potential peace deal of trading Ukrainian land for peace the carrot for Ukraine would be NATO membership.
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now Seymour Hersh https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p...tream?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web "Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning."
"Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’” Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.” What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward. Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack. “It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines. 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. The Panama City boys would do their thing and 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.
And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved. Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?” Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing. Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation. The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia. The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law. In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution. The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer? The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”) On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. 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. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
Nobody here cares about the likely false rumors the US directly attacked a sovereigns economical infrastructure. And they will justify it if it turns out to be true.
not sure I understand. are you say "so what" if Biden ordered the destruction of Nord Stream? or something else...
No idea the accuracy of this, but if true, this is pretty amazing. The main concern I'd have with the US doing something like this is damaging our allies, but it looks like this was all planned and done in coordination with them. Sounds like the US pulled off a complex operation to strike Russia where it hurts. My main complaint about the Biden/NATO response to this whole war has been that we're very reactionary and keep letting Russia dictate the rules. This type of stuff is exactly how the West should be supporting Ukraine - we should be doing more of it. The US is understandably unwilling to put boots on the ground, so providing Ukraine with weapons while simultaneously crushing Russia's ability to conduct war is the strategy. https://www.politico.eu/article/rus...ropean-union-sanctions-war-round-two-ukraine/ Russia’s oil revenues plunge as EU’s oil war enters round 2 Both measures are also linked to price caps imposed by the G7 club of rich democracies aimed at driving down the price that Russia gets for its oil and refined products without disrupting global energy markets. Those actions appear to have bitten into the Kremlin’s budget in a way other economic penalties levied in retaliation for Russia's invasion of Ukraine have not. The Kremlin’s tax income from oil and gas in January was among its lowest monthly totals since the depths of COVID in 2020, according to Janis Kluge, senior associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Kluge noted that while Russia’s 2023 budget anticipates 9 trillion rubles (€120 billion) in fossil fuel income, in January it earned only 425 billion rubles from oil and gas taxes, around half compared to the same month last year.
