So who was it? The Russians? The Ukrainians? The Americans? The Danes? Norway? Poland? Israel? The British? One year on, as speculation mounts and investigations continue, it’s unlikely any nation will be definitively fingered. And since allies will always protect useful proxies, at best, we can expect a scapegoat.

Seymour Hersh, American military muckraker, alleges US Special Ops were to blame. He claims US Navy divers planted the TNT during the 51st BALTOPS22, a Nato exercise involving “47 ships, 89 aircraft, and 7,000 personnel in the Baltic Sea” which was conducted some three months before the incident.

Certainly, President Biden, fuelled these rumours as he stood alongside German Chancellor Schultz and told a press conference that if Russia invaded Ukraine he would make sure that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it”. When a journalist asked how he would do that since Nord Stream 2 is in Germany’s control, he replied: “I promise you we’ll be able to do that”. The Chancellor nodded: “We are united”.

Russia, meanwhile, says it was BALTOPS22. But many suspect Putin is the guilty party. Russia has a long history of taking a “scorched Earth” approach in war, meaning they see value in damaging their own valuable assets in order to deny others the possibility of using them. They did this in the war of 1812, and during Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa when they destroyed their own crops and equipment. They are also, according to Ukraine, doing it today in Bakhmut.

Germany’s investigators point to a 50-foot pleasure boat called The Andromeda which hovered near the explosion site at about the time the explosives were thought to be set in place. The six crew were apparently all travelling on professionally forged passports and Germany’s investigators found traces of explosives aboard. It seems the vessel had been hired in Germany by a Polish entity, thus raising the possibility that it was the Poles. The New York Times has suggested that The Andromeda may have been occupied by the Ukrainians. Others gossip that Israel’s Mossad was behind it. They are usually attributed with the most successful intelligence capers, especially when no other answers can be found.

Other investigators discovered that Denmark’s P524 Nymfen naval ship and several Russian naval vessels approached the detonation location at the same time on September 21. Strangely, all turned off their transponders and disappeared from satellite signals. On September 22, a Swedish surveillance aircraft and a Swedish Corvette naval vessel also converged on the same spot.

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By Edward Luttwak

Then there was the 600ft Greek-flagged Minerva Julie which was laden with Russian oil. It was heading to Rotterdam when it suddenly stopped and hovered over the exact same site at the same time for seven whole days. They say they were awaiting delivery instructions. Then it turned around and went to Tallinn and St Petersburg instead of Rotterdam. The question seems to be “who wasn’t there?” It’s straight out of an Agatha Christie novel: there are multiple suspects, each have compelling motives and plausible alibis.

The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that official investigators in Denmark, Sweden and Germany are not sharing information with each other. They are all silent, not only because they aren’t ready to defend their findings but also because Europe finds itself in the biggest upswing of spy games since the Cold War. Russian spies are said to have infiltrated the Scandinavian and Baltic countries as well as Germany itself.

But in our feverish determination to name the culprit, we are losing sight of what that explosion illuminated. The world is teeming with plausibly deniable mercenaries — armies of highly skilled, war-hardened professionals. Some are in-house “Special Ops”, and some are former military personnel who are now guns for hire. It seems very likely that whoever carefully rigged the Nord Stream 2 to blow came from this kind of professional background.

The James Bond behind this explosion will not be in the SAS. He will be working in, or retired from, the SBS (Special Boat Services) or Russia’s GUGI or the Danish Frogman Corps. Or possibly this scuba diving demolition expert will be from the Swedish Röjdykare, Norway’s Minedykkerkommandoen or Israel’s Shayetet 13. Alumni from all these are quietly for hire. And they won’t be wearing uniform. Or at least not the uniform of the nation that hired them.

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Does Ukraine need to compromise?

By Aris Roussinos

The Geneva Convention has lost all relevance today as military doctrines have radically changed, allowing false-flag operations to haunt modern geopolitics. Both Russia and China have a strategy that calls for unrestricted or unlimited warfare. This means “anything goes”. Anything can be weaponised, including food, energy and civilians. And it means that pitching up without insignia, or in someone else’s insignia, is no longer out of bounds.

But why assume that a state actor was behind the sabotage? We live in a world where non-state actors dominate the landscape of geopolitics. Why is it so hard to imagine that the culprit might not have been a nation but a corporation or even a Machiavellian sort of billionaire? Everyone assumes that a state was behind the sabotage because the methodology and equipment were so advanced. But states increasingly share their capabilities — such as Pegasus, the snooping software that extracts everything from your phone — with private contractors and even civilians with no discernible ties to military or intelligence organisations. The appeal of the untraceable connection is perhaps the most important reason nations increasingly work with private contractors.

It is also true that the global debt burden globally has placed increasing pressure on militaries and intelligence services to cut costs and move costs off the books, incentivising outsourcing. James Bond wouldn’t work directly for the British Government anymore. He’d be a contractor. Similarly, Erik Prince, America’s most visible expert in this domain, works for many governments and not just for the US. Private individuals have become outsourced agents.

We’re seeing examples of this everywhere. The Wagner Group was once President Putin’s plausibly deniable private militia. America has Blackwater or Academi to name only two. Even the Danes seem to use private military contractors these days. Years of wars in the Middle East have given rise to a cadre of people with a certain set of skills. Did we really think they’d retire to a nice suburb, especially when there is so much money bidding for their services?

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These highly trained professionals are perfectly capable of executing all kinds of tasks in other countries. India’s much feared Special Group has been accused of an assassination in Canada. Russia insists Nato has deployed Special Ops in Ukraine.

But regardless of who sabotaged the pipe a year ago, it’s time to ask how modern wars are being conducted. Are we witnessing the privatisation of warfare, whereby public authorities outsource the pursuit of national interests to private parties? Special Ops across Nato have been complaining that they are over-deployed because they are so capable and relatively cheap. But should nations be relying on Special Ops, whether official, retired or mercenary status, to achieve national security objectives? There’s always a limit to outsourcing. With Nord Stream 2, we seem to have hit that limit.

Even more worrying is the fact that the explosion marked a definitive turn from decades of land wars to a world dominated by naval warfare. For it’s not just energy pipelines that are being targeted, but also internet cables. Consider the Svalbard internet cable cut on January 6 2022 (an interesting day for many reasons). A mega-yacht was hovering above the fastest internet cable in the world when some five kilometres of it went missing. Luckily, somebody had put a backup cable in place. Otherwise, cutting that cable would have caused Western satellite-based missile and weapons guidance systems to fail. More seriously, it would have shut down the internet and brought about the end of UberEats.

Was the mega-yacht a Russian military vessel? It was a plausibly deniable vessel, even though it had a submarine embedded in its hull. The Norwegian military seized it but eventually had to let it go due to lack of evidence that it was involved in the cable cuts.

Ever since, the world has witnessed a wide range of subsea internet cable cuts. Last October, for instance, the Marseille cable, which connects the US, Europe and Asia, and the Shetlands-Faroe-Islands cable were both cut in October 2022. The latter is central to keeping track of Russian subs passing through the GIUK Gap (Greenland Iceland UK Gap) at a time when concerns about the possible use of nuclear weapons is being overtly threatened. Yet the media assumes this subsea cable warfare doesn’t matter because people think WIFI comes out of thin air, while the superpowers don’t want to admit to the vulnerability.

But if modern society cannot function without subsea infrastructure, what is the strategy for defending it against such attacks? The riddle of the Nord Stream explosion, whether or not it is solved, invites us to think about an ocean of new possibilities.

After all, this war is nothing less than a godsend for Western elites. Domestically, it is a well-known fact that periods of international crisis or war tend to bolster the popularity of a country’s government or political leaders (the rally-around-the-flag effect) — especially if the country in question doesn’t actually have boots on the ground, and therefore coffins returning home, in which case it’s all gain and no pain.

You might remember the eerily prescient 1997 satire Wag the Dog, in which the US president enlists the help of a Hollywood producer to fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract voters from a sex scandal in which he’s involved. Every major Western leader could do with a similar booster shot. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau have all been performing abysmally in the polls, due in no small part to their disastrous (if not outright authoritarian) handling of the pandemic and its social and economic fallout.

The latest data shows that the rally-around-the-flag effect is already working its magic: approval ratings for all Western leaders have registered a significant bounce since the beginning of the war. Biden has enjoyed the best makeover of all, going overnight from Sleepy Joe — the embarrassing grandad known for farting at parties — to “leader of the free world”, as he self-styled himself in his State of the Union address last week.

But there’s more at play here than a few percentage points in the polls. On a deeper level, we seem to have entered a particularly decadent stage of Western capitalism. Today, ruling elites are increasingly unable to generate societal consensus or hegemony in either material or ideological terms — due to neoliberalism’s innate tendency towards ever-growing levels of capital concentration and its disdain for democratic participation and empowerment — and are therefore forced to rely on repressive and militaristic measures in order to remain in power and stifle any challenges to their authority.

Hence their need for a more or less permanent state of crisis or emergency capable of justifying such measures. Which might help explain why the West seems to have been mired in a perennial state of “crisis” for much of the past 20 years: the post-9/11 global terrorism crisis, the post-2008 financial-economic crisis, the pandemic crisis and now, just as the latter seemed to be waning, the military crisis in Ukraine. All this against the background of a worsening climate and ecological crisis. Indeed, “crisis” no longer represents a deviation from the norm; it is the norm, the default starting point for all politics in the West.

In this sense, the framing of Covid as a “war” — the ultimate state of exception — was no accident. But nothing beats a real war when it comes to rallying people around the status quo. This moment is bound to exacerbate the worrying trends that have emerged during the pandemic: the consolidation of the media, the blatant resort to crude propaganda, the shutting down of any meaningful form of public debate, the “cancelling” of dissenting voices, and the demonisation and criminalisation of whomever happens to be the public enemy of the moment — yesterday the unvaccinated, today the “pro-Russians”.

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At the international level, the weaponisation of the suffering of the Ukrainians might prove even more beneficial to Western elites. Their order isn’t merely in an internal crisis but externally as well. It’s threatened by the rise of new regional powers — first and foremost China but to some extent Russia as well. In the US, they still struggle to accept that the “unipolar moment” is over. Our world is multipolar, whether the State Department in Washington likes it or not. The crisis in Ukraine is in many ways a result of this collective denial, of the West’s inability to conceive a new order, and of its foolish dream of somehow turning the clock back to the Nineties.

By meddling in Eastern Europe, and ignoring Moscow’s security interests, the West invited conflict in Ukraine. It’s worth noting that the US is now adopting against China the same strategy of military encirclement that ended up triggering Putin. When a similar crisis breaks out with China at some point down the road nobody should be surprised.

Events in Ukraine make such a conflict increasingly probable. And that is because they offer the West and its military-industrial apparatuses the perfect excuse to whip up a new Cold War and militarise Western foreign policy, under the guise of defending the “free world” from a new Russo-Chinese Evil Empire. It also helps that billions of dollars are waiting to be made in the process. Indeed, arms manufacturers are licking their lips at the prospect.

The consequences for Europe will be profound. From the perspective of the US, it prevents the strengthening of Russian-European relations and the rise of a Eurasian geopolitical reality. It allows the US to reassert its hegemony over Europe, in particular Germany. Indeed, several commentators have argued that the crisis in Ukraine was partially manufactured by the US in order to torpedo the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

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That pipeline was vehemently opposed by every element of the US establishment, from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. It’s no secret that thanks to the “shale revolution” the US is now a direct competitor of Russia in the field of natural gas exports. But even more importantly, the US feared that stronger, friendlier relations between Germany — and with it the rest of the EU — and Russia would have chipped away at Europe’s reliance on the United States’ security umbrella.

Well, as a result of recent events, the pipeline has been shelved once and for all. In fact, the talk in Europe is how to “decouple” once and for all from Russian gas (that’s if Putin doesn’t decide to turn off the tap beforehand). This is a double win for the US. Europe is likely to pivot towards the US for its gas imports as relations with Russia grow colder. And tensions with Russia have already boosted European support for Nato, which had become lukewarm in recent years. The result: the US maintains its military stranglehold over Europe.

It’s worth remembering that not too long ago Macron diagnosed Nato as being “braindead” and called for Europe to build its own common defence system. Both France and Germany reacted with the diplomatic equivalent of disgust to the new security pact between Australia, the US and the UK (AUKUS). That’s a thing of the past: now European leaders are once again lining up to pledge their unconditional allegiance to Nato — and to bolster their military spending and thus their contribution to the Alliance.

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Consider Germany’s foreign policy pivot — the announcement that it will be increasing its military spending to over 2% of its GDP in direct response to the situation in Ukraine. Sweden and Finland have reportedly given consideration to joining Nato; Switzerland is ending its neutral status and joining the EU’s sanctions on Russian assets. Even Ireland, neutral for a century, is considering joining Nato. Increased military spending in Europe means more US military hardware entering the continent. Moreover, the crisis along Europe’s eastern flank, should it be prolonged, will inevitably hamper trade relations with China. For America the geopolitical view looks cloudless.

The EU’s political autonomy will be reduced, to the extent that military considerations — determined in Washington — will trump other concerns. It will now be far harder for the EU to punish countries like Poland and Hungary for alleged deficiencies in their “rule of law” given their strategic importance for Nato. As Wolfgang Streeck writes: “In short, as Western Europe is returned to “the West”, the EU is reduced to a geoeconomic utility for Nato, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help “the West” encircle Russia on its Western flank… The implication for von der Leyen and her crowd is to confirm their subordinate status”.

That’s not to say that the crisis is not an opportunity for EU elites as well. It offers them a chance, at last, to push ahead with plans for a “common defence policy”, something Macron has been advocating for a long time. The issue had been contentious, both in Washington — where it was feared that a militarily independent Europe would be less reliant on the US – and in Berlin, which was sceptical of helping France use the EU as a cover for its global ambitions. Public opinion in Europe never embraced the idea.

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However, the conflict in Ukraine has swept away any doubts. For the first time ever, the EU is supporting member states as they supply military equipment to embattled Kyiv, mobilising €500 million under the European Peace Facility. This is a classic example of the EU’s long standing integration-through-crisis strategy: exploiting moments of public fear and disorientation to surreptitiously deepen an integration process that lacks popular support.

From the US perspective, such plans don’t represent a direct threat at the moment, so long as Europe’s military machine remains under the effective command of Nato. Whether they will create transatlantic tensions down the road remains to be seen. For the peoples of Europe, neither option is particularly appealing. Either a European army under the aegis of the US security establishment or one under the aegis of France and a remilitarised Germany? Whatever happens, arming the EU — an institution as undemocratic and oligarchic as they come — remains a bad idea. But war is a racket, as US Marine Corps Major General Smedley D. Butler famously claimed, and no one wants to be left out.

Russia is the world’s second biggest exporter — supplying nearly five million of the 100 million barrels of crude oil the world consumes every day. More than half of those exports flow westwards into Europe, through pipelines that cross Ukraine and Belarus. It’s difficult know which is the grimmest scenario: that the oil stops flowing due to sanctions or sabotage; or that the trade continues — filling the Kremlin’s coffers while Russian bombs rain down on Kyiv.

Markets are responding to the heightened risk in the usual manner, which could cost us dear. Oil shocks have a nasty habit of crashing economies — causing chaos far beyond the garage forecourt.

In July 2008, oil prices surged to a record high of $147 barrel. The knock-on effects were catastrophic. The ruinous cost of commuting undermined confidence in car-dependent housing developments, which crashed the sub-prime mortgage market and triggered the Global Financial Crisis. Meanwhile, the Russians took the opportunity to invade a neighbour — in this case, Georgia.

The oil shocks of the Seventies plunged the West into a decade-long retreat and the impact wasn’t just economic. A fragilised America was routed by the communists in Vietnam and traumatised by the ayatollahs in Iran. Meanwhile, the Russians took the opportunity to invade a neighbour — in this case, Afghanistan.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 was also soaked in oil. At the time, 70% of Western Europe’s oil supplies were imported via the Suez Canal. So when it was nationalised by the government of Gamal Abdul Nasser, panic ensued. Against American wishes, the British and French tried to seize back control of the vital artery. This prompted a furious President Eisenhower to punish his disobedient allies — by using the oil weapon. The Americans refused to release emergency supplies from their reserves, thus forcing the British to backdown — followed by France (and Israel). Meanwhile, the Russians took the opportunity to invade a neighbour — in this case, Hungary. 

As Helen Thompson explains in her excellent new book Disorder, this was not the end of the matter: “Too often seen primarily as a story about post-war British power, the Suez crisis shattered the idea that the United States would always act as an oil supplier of last resort to its allies.” The loss of trust would have lasting consequences.

A humiliated France joined with West Germany to deepen their partnership — and lay the foundations of the European Union. Thompson quotes Konrad Adenauer’s words to the French Prime Minister: “Europe will be your revenge.” Another fateful outcome was that Western Europe did a deal with Khrushchev to gain access to Soviet oil production. Pipelines were built from East to West, re-establishing Russia as a major energy exporting power. Which brings us back to today.

The nations of the West will either hang together or hang separately. In respect to energy supplies, that means putting the trans-Atlantic relationship before domestic popularity. For instance, the Biden administration could easily pander to the American electorate by restricting exports of oil and gas. US consumers would probably benefit — but only at the cost of weakening European resolve in the face of Russian aggression. Indeed, without help from their allies, the most vulnerable countries — especially those bordering Ukraine — will be left wide open to Putin’s energy blackmail. 

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Europeans must make sacrifices too. In particular, the Germans need to atone for the special part they’ve played in undermining Europe’s energy security. As well as permanently scrapping the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Berlin must revisit the insane decision to shutdown the country’s nuclear power stations. If it’s possible to restart the reactors, then that would send the clearest of signals that Europe will do what it takes to stand strong.

It’s important that we distinguish between short-term and long-term imperatives. In the short-term, we need to secure alternative supplies of oil and gas as a matter of urgency. If that means cosying-up to Saudi Arabia, then so be it. The same goes for Iran — negotiations to reach a new deal with the Tehran government were already underway before the Ukraine crisis and should be accelerated.

Meanwhile, back home, we shouldn’t be shy about squeezing a few more drops of oil and gas from the North Sea. It pains me to say it, but this is an issue on which my fellow greens need to shut-up. Yesterday, in what may be the worst-timed letter in history, the the Climate Change Committee wrote to the British government to oppose new North Sea production. Obviously, the Committee’s main concern is climate change, but we’re not talking about using more fossil fuels — we’re taking about reducing what we buy from Putin. 

In any case, there’s a huge green prize to be won here. In the longer-term, the environmental agenda is perfectly aligned with the security agenda. 

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Over the last few months we’ve learned the hard way that depending on fossil fuels is a threat to our prosperity — and to our sovereignty. If we want to free ourselves from the destabilising effects of volatile energy prices and to snatch the oil weapon from the hands of our enemies, then we must free ourselves from fossil fuels altogether. That can’t be achieved overnight — hence the need for stop-gap measures — but it can be achieved within a generation. 

Fundamental change is coming, the only question is how fast. So far, policy has been driven by climate change objectives, which operate on a timetable stretching into the second half of the 21st century. But the security agenda doesn’t allow us to wait that long. This isn’t about saving the planet, it’s about saving ourselves from the oil tyrants.

After weeks of looking like Russia was going to invade, Putin now seems to be backing down. Why?

Firstly, we can’t get too complacent — that “some” in the BBC headline is doing a lot of work. Russia is not going home completely; rather, what it has done is given a major signal that it is de-escalating.

And this shouldn’t come as a surprise. From the beginning, the talk of Russian invasion that has filled the Western media has been irrational. Technically, any incursion into Ukrainian territory by Russian forces is an “invasion” — and Russia is already occupying the Donbas region in the east of the country. But between that and “marching to Kyiv” lies a geopolitical and military gulf.

Throughout the past month, Russia only ever had around 100,000 troops on the border. That may seem like a lot, but as the former British soldier and military analyst Mike Martin has pointed out, it is nowhere near enough to take all of Ukraine, let alone hold it. Then there’s the international backlash that would follow — as well as the fact that there’s no appetite among Russians for conquering Ukraine, as there was for thieving Crimea.

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But while the press coverage has been a touch hysterical, for once you can’t blame the media. They’ve taken their lead from the politicians — and none more so than Joe Biden, who for weeks has been telling the world that Russia would invade. So adamant (many would say feverish) was the US President on this point that his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky had to plead with him to “calm down the messaging” in a recent call between the two.

And it wasn’t just the talk. The US began evacuating its embassy staff, which soon created a domino effect of scuttling diplomats across Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. Even the Israelis started getting diplomats’ families out — something they almost never do short of full war. I confess this is when I began to entertain some doubts. Washington had kept its diplomatic staff in Kyiv during the height of the fighting when Russia first invaded in 2014. I should know: I met with its then-US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in his office just after Russia launched a major offensive.

But contacts in DC put this down to the scars of the recent Afghanistan evacuation; according to one source, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Adviser, almost collapsed with the stress during the calamitous withdrawal. Never again would the US allow itself to evacuate its people in total panic at the last minute with enemy forces closing in all around and the entire world watching.

Frankly, I found it all a touch embarrassing. And this, I think, is the point. It is impossible to know what calculations factor into Putin’s thinking, but there is a long record of what he has said — and nothing is more instructive than his comments in his 2005 State of the Nation address to the Russian people, when he called the collapse of the Soviet empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

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Now Putin is not stupid. He knows the USSR is never coming back. What he intended, I think, was to lament the loss of his country’s superpowers status, prestige, and respect. But here’s the thing: it is tough to be a superpower when your GDP is half of Britain’s; when you can’t fight the US in a conventional war because you know you’d be hammered; and when you live in perennial fear of China stealing the eastern part of your state.

So if you can’t actually be a superpower that can match the US, then what’s the next best thing? Well, you can act like one — especially if you sense weakness in your enemy. Putin began amassing troops on the Ukrainian border soon after Biden — a man the Kremlin thinks is old and weak — took office. Once that happened, he got Biden’s attention and it has never wavered since. Biden asks for meetings and calls. He expresses his willingness to talk to Putin any time and any place. That’s the most powerful politician in the world — and a traditional modern enemy — pretty much at your beck and call. That’s Russia being a world actor. That’s prestige; that’s status.

And while you’re there, why not remind the Europeans — especially the German government — who heats their voters’ houses? Get the new Chancellor of Germany in and make sure he knows the score. Get Emmanuel Macron to come round and plead with you, while you make him sit at the other end of a long table like a supplicant. Get one of your underlings to insult the British Foreign Secretary. And perhaps most importantly, get Ukrainian officials to say the country will never join Nato — which is of course what you fear more than anything else — and do it all without firing a shot, without marching to Kyiv, and without the inevitable sanctions and diplomatic isolation that would follow.

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Don’t think this is the end, though. Far from it. BBC News headlines now squawk Nato’s warnings that there is no sign of Russia de-escalation. The Sun shrieks that a huge dawn invasion is set for today. The Kremlin, meanwhile, says troops that have been on “exercises” are returning to base. Back and forth and up and down the troops go, and with them the heart rate of the watching world.

You can be sure of this: the troops won’t all go home. A force will stay on the Ukrainian border so that Putin can raise or lower tensions whenever he needs— as well as use other means: reports are now coming in that Ukraine has suffered Cyber attack, almost certainly from Russia.

In this sense, Russia uses its presence similar to the way that Iran uses its nuclear programme: as a means of extracting concessions. So it threatens but it never fully acts — because to do so would mean to exchange leverage for punishment.

Putin has always been pretty rational, even cautious. It appears this is still the case. It may well be that after 20 years of acting like a Tsar, he has gone mad, like so many before him, and something crazy is coming. But for a moment it seems that this whole affair has been another big Russian victory. Putin has won this round — and we let him get away with it.