One Polish politician, who is married to a left-leaning American writer Anne Applebaum, kicked off a firestorm across social media this past week by attempting to place the United States as the party that damaged Russia’s Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on the floor of the Baltic Sea this past week.
The social media post from Radoslaw Sikorski came to light in the wake of the explosions which were reported from the known locations of the pipelines located in the Baltic Sea, which was subsequently followed by a massive drop in pressure from the conduits.
“Thank you, USA,” expressed Sikorski, who is a member of the European Parliament and chairman of the Delegation for relations with the United States, via a Twitter post.
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“[By the way], there’s no shortage of pipeline capacity for taking gas from Russia to Western Europe, including Germany,” expressed Sikorski via social media. “Nordstream’s only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity.”
“All Ukrainian and Baltic sea states have opposed Nordstream’s construction for 20 years,” he went on. “Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine. Someone, @MFA_Russia , did a special maintenance operation.”
The Russian company that runs and maintains the pipelines, Nord Stream AG, put forth their own statement on the matter, labeling it “unprecedented.”
“The destruction that occurred on the same day simultaneously on three strings of the offshore gas pipelines of the Nord Stream system is unprecedented,” the company stated in a release. “It is not yet possible to estimate the timing of the restoration of the gas transport infrastructure.”
A report published by Spiegel, a German news outlet, stated that the CIA had warned Germany about possible attacks against the Baltic Sea gas pipelines a few weeks ago. Berlin is presently under the assumption that it was a targeted attack against the Nord Stream system, explained unnamed sources.
As the largest economy on the continent, Germany heavily relied on natural gas for Russia for over 55% of its total imports before the start of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict. The producer price index for industrial products in Germany has spiked by over 45.8% year-over-year as of August 2022, as reported by data issued from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, which came after an increase of 37.2% in July 2022 and 32.7% in June 2022.
Quite a few different manufacturers have since paused their operations in response to extremely elevated energy prices and a likely drop in consumer demand. Industrial production throughout the eurozone has dropped by roughly 2.3%, as expressed by info released by the European Union.