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Results for Nord stream
Hard Numbers: Doctors’ orders in Korea, runaway train in India, self-immolation in DC, Case closed on Nord Stream
4: The South Korean government has given junior doctors four days to end a mass walkout over government plans to increase medical school admissions. The authorities say the admissions plan is meant to solve doctor shortages, but the junior docs say med schools can’t cope with larger student bodies, and that the biggest shortfalls are actually due to low pay. At the end of the four days the government will suspend medical licenses and open criminal cases against the strikers.
43: Social media posts showed a ghost train careening through northern India on Monday, after the crew hopped out for a tea and forgot to set the parking brake. The freight train began rolling down a hill and managed to travel without a conductor for 43 miles before it was stopped by officials who laid woodblocks across the tracks. Not quite as cinematic a save as the time that guy caught a runaway Indian locomotive on a bike, but still, with 53 cars laden with stone chips barreling down the track, this version had plenty of blockbuster appeal of its own.
2: There have now been two incidents of pro-Palestine protesters setting themselves on fire in front of Israeli diplomatic buildings in the US. On Sunday, a 25 year old US airman died after igniting himself outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. In December, an unidentified protester self-immolated outside the consulate in Atlanta.
17: A full seventeen months after mysterious explosions rocked the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines linking Russia to Europe, Denmark has closed its investigation into the incident. The Danes follow the Swedes who did the same earlier this month. The explosions occurred in the two countries’ economic zones. Copenhagen says it’s sure there was “deliberate sabotage” but doesn’t have more than that. Remember our piece on who likely did it? Read or watch it again here.
Did Ukraine plunge Europe into the dark last year? That’s the charge from unnamed Ukrainian officials, who claim Col. Roman Chervinsky, of Ukraine’s special operations forces, coordinated a sabotage operation that caused three explosions at the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on Sept. 26, 2022. The pipelines run from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, and Nord Stream 1 (Nord Stream 2 wasn't in use yet) provided about 35% of the gas European Union states imported from Russia prior to the war.
Through his lawyer, Chervinsky – who’s awaiting trial on charges of abuse of power related to a different matter – denied any role in the attack, calling it “Russian propaganda.” But he isn’t the focus of the Nord Stream accusations: Observers say they are really directed at Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer, to whom Chervinsky’s bosses reported.
Zaluzhny was recently involved in a public spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over an interview and op-ed Zaluzhny gave to The Economist, where he described the state of the war as a “stalemate.”
Those remarks – amid fears they might prompt Western nations to push for a settlement between Moscow and Kyiv – earned a sharp rebuke from Zelensky. A few days later, Major Gen. Viktor Khorenko, head of special operations forces and one of Zaluzhny’s deputies, was dismissed in a surprise move.
Zaluzhny is a popular figure and is considered a potential political rival to Zelensky, even though he hasn’t shown an interest in politics. The leak of the Nord Stream story may be the latest sign of a growing rift between Zelensky and the military, as the conflict with Russia drags into its second year, the counteroffensive stalls, and next year’s planned elections loom.
3,000: The arrest of two boat captains who ran a business ferrying US-bound migrants to the Darién Gap, a perilous stretch of jungle that spans Colombia and Panamá, has left more than 3,000 people stranded at a remote embarkation point on the Colombian coast. Authorities are now concerned about a humanitarian crisis as local infrastructure isn’t equipped to handle so many people at once.
2: Nothing compares 2 getting a cease and desist letter from Sinead O’Connor’s estate demanding you stop using her most iconic song at your rallies. That’s exactly what’s happened to Donald Trump, who blared “Nothing Compares 2 U” at a February event. The fiercely outspoken O’Connor, who died last year, once called Trump a “biblical devil.” O’Connor’s estate joins a long list of musicians who have told Trump to pull the plug, including Bruce Springsteen (“Born in the USA”) the Rolling Stones (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Pavarotti (“Nessun Dorma”), and Prince (“Purple Rain”), the original author of O’Connor’s song.
14: Indian investigators have determined that a train crash that killed 14 people last October in Southern India happened because the conductors were watching a cricket match on a cell phone. In fairness, it wasn’t just any cricket match, it was an epic faceoff between India and England that drew hundreds of millions of viewers, but still – you gotta keep your eyes on the track! The news comes just days after a separate incident in which an Indian freight train hurtled down more than 40 miles of track without a conductor.
40: A Dutchman (and a flying one at that) has set the Guinness World Record for being the longest-surviving recipient of a heart transplant, which he received 40 years ago. Bert Janssen, who received the alt-heart as a 17-year-old after being diagnosed with a terminal cardiac condition, has survived nearly three times as long as the average recipient. And it's not as though he lives a quiet life – he is a hang-glider pilot.
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
A Quick Take to kick off your week. Lots we could be talking about. But I want to go to Russia, where we have had a major terrorist attack with over 130 Russian citizens gunned down, killed by terrorists.
The United States has warned the Russians both publicly so that American citizens would know about the concern, but also with actionable intelligence privately over the past couple of weeks that ISIS was planning an attack on an area with major crowds in Moscow. Putin publicly dismissing that, kind of wish he hadn't, but that we are where we are. And Putin has now spoken to the nation. There have been a number of gunmen that have been rounded up and arrested four, that we know of, Tajik citizens and Putin did not mention that ISIS has taken credit for this terrorist attack, nor that they then released videos of some of the attackers as they were engaging in terrorism inside the rock concert venue.
Instead, he spoke implausibly about links to Ukraine that don't actually exist. Why would ISIS-K do this? I mean, the main reason is because one of their two home bases, Syria and Iraq, in Syria, destroyed by Bashar al-Assad with the direct help from Putin and the Russian military. Nobody else doing that with Assad on the ground. And there have been many terrorist attempts against Russians as a consequence in that regard, but none with spectacular success for them like we've just witnessed.
Why wouldn't Ukraine be responsible? Well, first of all, because they haven't actually been targeting civilians at all. In fact, the one time that they engaged in terrorism and it was terrorism was an attempt to kill an individual, high level Russian extremist, but who was not a political figure. He had been informally an inspiration to the Kremlin and been calling for pogroms against Ukraine, which he said shouldn't exist as a nation. And they didn't get him. Instead, they got his daughter and the United States and other NATO allies were quite angry about the fact that Ukrainians were engaged in that. But aside from that, it's been attacks on critical infrastructure. That's another thing. And certainly, if you want to talk about the Nord Stream pipeline, highly unlikely the Russians would have blown up their pipeline. Much more likely the Ukrainians either by themselves with support would have been responsible for that. The investigations have been inconclusive. That strikes me as not enormously plausible.
Also, Ukraine has been hitting a lot of refineries, Russian refineries, and that's a pretty big deal. About 5% of Russian exports are now offline. Oil exports. That could go up a lot. It could be more than half easily in coming weeks to months of over 3 million barrels a day that the Russians export. If Ukraine starts hitting Black Sea facilities, which they're certainly capable of doing. So global economic impact of this war continues to be very significant. Ability and willingness of the Ukrainians to hit targets inside Russia as well as occupied Crimea, Ukrainian territory, but the Russians annexed it back in 2014 illegally, all of that is certainly par for the course. But the idea that the Ukrainians would be involved in large scale terrorism or support it is not only implausible on the basis of the evidence, but also implausible in terms of what they've been doing historically. But of course, that doesn't matter to Putin, who now intends to use this to drive more military efforts against Ukraine, more civilian casualties.
And that's what we saw in the initial 48 hours after the attack. Unprecedented levels of missiles being sent against the capital, Kyiv, with lots of civilian targets as well as west Ukraine, Lviv in particular. We are seeing that Putin is indifferent to civilian deaths, those of the Ukrainians and, of course, those of his own people. And we probably do now see a much more mobilization from Russia, especially now that the election, the so-called election, is over and more Russian weapons that are going to be used against the Ukrainian people.
The most concerning piece of all of this, I mean, leaving aside the fact that Russia now has a second front they need to fight on, they have, you know, a concern with radical Islamic terrorism that has grown in terms of the capabilities and whether or not Putin says he's going to fight it, he's going to need to fight it. And that's going to take away scarce resources for him and it's going to put more Russian civilians at risk. But the bigger concern, the global concern, of course, is the potential for this war to expand. And there are a couple of incidents that should raise those warning bells. First, the fact that just over this weekend, of all of the missiles that were launched by Russia against Ukraine, one went through Polish airspace for less than a minute, something like 40 seconds, but nonetheless, a Russian missile that actually went through the airspace of a NATO ally. Clearly wasn't targeting that NATO ally.
But Polish and other NATO allied aircraft scrambled. And that is not something we have seen so far since the war started a couple of years ago. Also, the fact that there were a missile explosion targeting Odessa just a couple of weeks ago when President Zelensky was there, in addition to Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. And it was literally only a few hundred yards away that this missile exploded while those two men, those two leaders were on the ground and exposed very clearly. I don't believe that Mitsotakis was targeted, but the fact that he could have been hit as an NATO leader would have also put us in unprecedented danger in terms of the geopolitical order.
Certainly since anything we'd seen since 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. What's behind that? Well, I mean, I think the most likely thing behind is that Putin doesn't have complete and operational control over everything that's going on on the ground. His military is badly trained and organized. And this was probably a mistake. Woops. But, you know, the fact is that when you have lots of people go into Ukraine and borders, look, you know, they look very defined on a map, but they're very porous in real life. And the potential for mistakes to lead to extraordinary escalation, pretty high. And certainly the willingness to allow for those mistakes to be made is higher than you would like it to be. The checks and balances there don't seem to be all that concerning for the Kremlin or for Vladimir Putin. Of course, a worse explanation would be that Putin actually is prepared to take those risks to brush NATO back. And that, of course, would lead to much more likelihood that we would have escalation that would bring a NATO ally into the war, something that clearly nobody out there wants to see.
But it's worth talking about in the context of all of this, it's much more likely the Ukrainians are now going to get their 60 billion of support. That would be the largest piece of military support so far from the United States, approved likely in mid to late April. They're seeing more ammunition, more economic, more military support from the Europeans, even though the lion share of the military support is from the US and the war continues to be dangerous, continues to be unstable and continues to be no end in sight.
So that's where we are after some very unfortunate headlines and events over the last couple of days. And I'll talk to you all real soon.
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everyone. And have you seen the latest news on Nord Stream 1, 2? It has been months since that pipeline, those pipelines were destroyed, were sabotaged, and we haven't had any information on who's behind it. Been big questions. Why would the Russians blow up their own pipelines? I've been skeptical, and the investigations that the Europeans have been engaged in, no evidence whatsoever. There was this piece by Seymour Hersh that I looked into pretty closely, one anonymous source claiming the Americans and the Norwegians were behind it. That turned out to be not standing up on its facts on a whole bunch of pieces of ostensible evidence brought in the piece. But now we have a New York Times piece that's come out with direct sourcing from US senior officials, including intelligence officials, claim that there is evidence that a Ukrainian organization was behind the explosion.
Now, I want to say, first of all, that was my view over the last few months, is if anyone was likely behind it would probably be Ukraine. And the question is, would they have the capacity? Because the interest was certainly highest. They are the ones that desperately want to ensure that the Russians don't continue to have leverage to potentially drive a wedge around European support and get that gas flowing again from Russia into Germany and into Europe.
Now, they're big questions given the level of sophistication that would be required in pulling off an attack like that, and also doing it without any fingerprints at all in terms of the investigations and the intelligence, would the Ukrainians be able to pull it off? So they're very interested, but could they actually do it? And the view was, well, maybe not. And I would've said no, except for some of the other attacks that we've seen the Ukrainians pull off, like blowing up the Kerch Bridge from Russia to Crimea, which I was quite surprised to see them be able to do. As well as the assassination attempt that almost happened against Aleksandr Dugin, instead killing his daughter, and only because she decided the last minute to take the car that he was meant to be in, and that was just outside Moscow.
So the Ukrainians have shown more capacity than a lot of people have believed, but still lots and lots of questions here that are going to need to be investigated. One is this Ukrainian organization, this outfit, an extremist group, do we believe that they were operating by themselves or did they have direct support/complicity of the Ukrainian government? It's hard to imagine that such an attack would've happened and the Ukrainian government had no idea. And I say that in part because of funding and in part because of the impact that it would have, and so you're potentially doing a lot of damage to Ukraine's position vis-a-vis the Europeans, even the Americans, if you get away with it. Why would you take that kind of a risk as an organization ostensibly supporting Ukraine unless the government was behind it? Also, would you have that kind of capacity without direct governmental support?
So one would expect that if it's an Ukrainian organization, the Ukrainian government probably at some level knows about it, probably at a high level knows about it. Let's keep in mind that despite all of the support from the United States, and it's been incredible, the military support, the economic support, Biden's trip directly to Kyiv, that there's not a lot of trust between the United States and Ukraine at the highest levels. There's a lot of alignment. There's a lot of belief that the Ukrainians need to be able to defend their territory and beat back the Russians. There's a lot of respect with Zelensky's courage and his ability to lead his people over the last year of war. I mean, really facing death himself on a daily basis on the ground in Kyiv. He's enemy number one for Putin and the Kremlin. No one wants to be in that position, and yet Zelensky has been. But that's not trust.
And when you talk to senior level American officials and European officials as well, NATO officials, it's not as if they believe that the Ukrainians are telling them everything they're doing. And further, that if the Americans or Europeans were to press the Ukrainians, for example, on when negotiations might need to start, what they should be about, there's a view that you couldn't keep that private, that would be leaked by the Ukrainian government to harder line allies like Poland, like the Baltic States and to the press very quickly. So there is a challenge here that if this was credibly the Ukrainian government behind it, it is going to worsen the view in the United States and among allies that when push comes to shove. Zelensky as much as you want him to win, is not someone that you can completely count on, rely on with sensitive information or in the war's next phase. In other words, as you move towards at some point actual diplomacy. That's a problem.
I would also say there's a problem because the Europeans have made it very clear that whoever is behind this Nord Stream explosion, remember Russian pipelines, but critical infrastructure that was necessary for the Europeans, and in international waters, they said whoever's responsible for it, they must be held accountable at the highest levels. And I've heard that from Ursula von der Leyen. I had that conversation directly with the Estonian Prime Minister a couple of weeks ago. She made that very clear. The Germans have made that very clear. Okay, well, at the beginning, I think there was a presumption on the part of many of them that, well, we're really talking about the Russians.
But of course we're probably not talking about the Russians. So what does it mean if the Ukrainian government is responsible at the highest levels? If we find that out, how are they going to be held accountable for blowing up these pipelines? And that's a very serious concern for the credibility of a coalition to hold together, as well as for strong, continued support of Ukraine by the West, which is utterly essential if Putin is going to stay on the back foot on the ground in Ukraine in terms of the ability to not make his war aims successful.
So I think this is important news. We're going to follow this story going forward. I'm glad that we're getting information finally, even if only a little bit from these investigations, but there are still a lot of questions to be answered. So that's the latest. Talk to you soon.
The controversial Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia to Germany and Europe made headlines last September when several sections mysteriously exploded deep underwater, causing the surface of the Baltic Sea to bubble.
Multiple investigations determined the explosions were an act of sabotage, but they failed to identify a culprit. Most experts in the West pointed the finger at Russia, suspecting it was an attempt to worsen the winter prospects of an already energy-starved Europe to weaken its resolve to support Ukraine.
But I never fully bought into that theory.
Why would Russia blow up its own multi-billion-dollar infrastructure and destroy its biggest source of leverage over Germany, Europe, and the West? While the pipelines were already offline, the Russians were counting on the Europeans eventually getting weary of going without their cheap gas. The ability to turn the tap back on was Moscow's best bet to undercut Western support for Ukraine.
Most importantly, it's been nearly five months without a shred of evidence linking Russia to the sabotage. If there were anything at all that pointed to the Kremlin, US intelligence would have found it and we would already know about it. The fact that we don't tells me the Russians probably didn't do it.
Enter veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who last week published an explosive piece on his Substack blog alleging the United States blew up the pipeline in a joint covert operation with Norway behind Germany's back and deliberately hidden from Congressional oversight.
The US and Norway categorically denied any involvement, calling Hersh's article "utterly false" and "nonsense." Still, the story was a propaganda gift to Vladimir Putin and his cronies, giving ammunition to US critics in Russia, China, and parts of the developing world.
If true, not only would it give Russia justification to escalate its asymmetric attacks against the West (which they were going to do regardless) — but also it would drive a wedge in the NATO coalition and have massive political (and even legal) ramifications for the Biden administration.
Does Hersh's theory hold up?
The man is a journalistic legend, having earned a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the My Lai massacre and cover-up. But much of his work since then has been shoddy and — worst of all — rife with motivated reasoning. His (understandable) bias against the US intelligence community and national security establishment colored his widely discredited claims that the Osama bin Laden killing was a cover-up and that the Syrian government didn't use chemical weapons.
The fact that this latest story aligns so neatly with Hersh's ideological prism should invite skepticism. And indeed, a look under the hood of Hersh's report reveals a whole lot of holes — and no smoking gun.
First, the explanation he lays out for hiding the operation from Congress isn't internally consistent. Hersh initially claims the operation was devised without special operations personnel to avoid having to notify Congress. But any covert action pursued under Title 50 authority — the section of US code governing covert and direct action undertaken by the intelligence community — would have had to be briefed to Congress regardless of what assets were used.
Hersh then suggests that the operation was actually "downgraded" to avoid Congressional notification. But that's not a thing: If it was a covert action, the government was legally required to notify Congress, end of story.
Second, Hersh's interpretation of President Joe Biden's and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland's pre-invasion remarks as unambiguous threats of military sabotage is self-serving and disingenuous. If, as Hersh claims, the administration went through so much trouble to hide the operation from Congress, why would it foreshadow it publicly not once but twice?
The most logical reading is that they were instead referencing diplomatic engagements with Germany to halt pipeline operations, which were already underway.
Third, the publicly verifiable facts don't align with Hersh's timeline. He specifies that US Navy divers supported by a Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper planted the explosive charges during BALTOPS — the NATO military exercises conducted annually in the Baltic Sea — in June 2022. But publicly available data shows that none of Norway's five Alta-class ships were in the region during that exercise.
Hersh further claims that a Norwegian P-8 Poseidon — a maritime control aircraft — dropped a sonar buoy on the day of the blast to trigger the explosives. But according to flight tracking, none of the five P-8s that Norway operates were in the area that day.
That neither of these assets shows up on tracking data is critical because Hersh's core claim is that Norwegian assets were used precisely so these maneuvers wouldn't need to be covert.
More broadly, the very contention that the US would sabotage infrastructure partially owned by a key ally (Germany) in concert with another shared ally (Norway) without alerting Berlin beggars belief given what we know about Washington's strategic interests.
At the time, the Biden administration was pursuing closer ties with Germany on a range of issues, including tech regulation, China decoupling, and reversing the pullback in transatlantic cooperation initiated by the Trump administration. Blowing up Nord Stream would have jeopardized all those initiatives and invited Russian retaliation for a questionable benefit: definitively ending Germany's already-dwindling dependence on Russia to strengthen NATO unity.
Targeting Germany in cahoots with Norway also would've risked fracturing the NATO coalition Biden had explicitly focused on bolstering from day one — a risky move for a generally risk-averse administration.
To be clear, none of this means the US didn't do it. After all, Washington had been critical of these pipelines for years. And very few countries on Earth could pull off such a challenging operation, with the United States topping the list. Hersh could plausibly be wrong about the how while being right about the who, but his article doesn't prove anything.
If not Russia or the US, then who?
Who else had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to pull off such a risky, complex, and fingerprint-free operation?
My money is on Ukraine. Ukrainians had the most to gain from blowing up this multi-billion dollar, Russian-owned cudgel. They were also the most risk-tolerant. Russia poses an existential threat to them, so they are willing to do almost anything to prevail. They knew they couldn't win without a strong and united NATO behind them, and they knew the alliance would be vulnerable as long as Russia could leverage its gas against Germany.
Five months ago, I would've been skeptical that the Ukrainians had the technical and operational capabilities to do something like this. But I also didn't think they'd be able to blow up the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to Russia, itself quite a sophisticated operation. Nor did I imagine they could assassinate Darya Dugina just outside of Moscow. So it's clear the Ukrainians are eminently willing and able to plan and execute high-risk reasonably complex operations.
Is it possible Ukraine had help from one or several NATO members? Poland, for instance, has been the most strident Russia hawk in the coalition, aware that it's next on Putin's wishlist should Ukraine fall. It's not inconceivable that the highly competent Polish special forces could have pulled off such an attack. Of course, as far as means go, the Americans would have had the most operational capability to help Kyiv with this. That's what made Hersh's theory compelling at face value.
Absent any proof, though, it's speculation all the way down. And make no mistake: There's no proof of anything — not yet at least.
Beware of anyone who claims otherwise.
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6: Remember the last time a piece of critical infrastructure was blown up and everyone argued about whether it was Russia or not? We still don’t know who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline last September, but as early as last June the US apparently learned of a plot by six Ukrainian special forces operatives to attack the underwater line. Was Ukraine always the most likely culprit? Sorry Seymour Hersh, some of us thought so.
11,100: If you’re in this hole, keep digging! A Chinese oil company is set to dig the world’s deepest hole – 11,100 meters down into the oil-rich Tarim Basin in Northwest China. The aim is to study the evolution and internal structure of the Earth, but also, of course, to potentially boost China’s access to much-needed energy resources.
54: At least 54 Ugandan peacekeepers were found dead at an African Union base after an attack there by al-Shabaab jihadists. Al-Shabaab has been waging an insurgency against Somalia’s central government for more than a decade, but today’s death toll is one of the highest since the African Union force joined a Somali government offensive against Al-Shabaab last August.
3 trillion: Apple, formerly known as the world’s first $2 trillion dollar company, has now become the world’s first to reach a market value of $3 trillion. The milestone coincided with its announcement that Apple devices will no longer correct one of the most common swear words to “ducking,” a feature that has long irritated iPhone users and caused some ducking hilarious typos.Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. Quick Take to kick off your week, and I want to talk about Nord Stream one and two. These are the pipelines, the gas pipelines that the Germans had wanted and the Russians had built, multi-billion dollar pipelines to bring gas from Russia into Germany and Europe. The United States had been very critical of these pipelines for years. The Trump administration particularly vocal about it, and only shut down after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and then sabotaged, blown up.
So who did it? It's a big question. And the presumption immediately after the explosions back in September that came from the West and Ukraine was that it was the Russians. And there was no evidence, but you're blaming the Russians for everything since they invaded Ukraine and they're committing all these war crimes. But this one always struck me, Nord Stream, as not having enormous credibility, trying to figure out why would the Russians blow up their own multi-billion-dollar pipelines?
Especially because, when you talk to Russian advisors, the presumption was that, over time, over years, Russia's focused on Ukraine. The Europeans perhaps not so much. The expense for the Europeans and providing support goes up. The costs, as they get colder over time, goes up and they get weary. And so having an option of getting Russian gas turned back on could be attractive for a potential peace movement. Not saying it's going to happen, but certainly was seen as an option by the Russians that they wouldn't want to suddenly take off the table by blowing up their own pipeline. So then after the pipelines were blown up, there have been a couple of investigations that the Europeans have conducted for months now. And there has been not a shred of evidence that has pointed to the Russians being responsible for this sabotage. And you'd know that if they found anything that pointed to Russia, because they'd want the world to know, they would tell us.
And especially after the extraordinary intelligence from the United States on Russia's plans to invade Ukraine, as well as various faults, flag efforts that the Russians were scheming up as the drumbeat of war was increasing, that the Americans made known to allies and some of which they made public. The fact that the United States has come up with nothing, I mean, I'm not just talking about fingerprints or signature on the explosions, I'm also talking about any communications, signals intelligence and email, anything from anyone involved in this effort. We have no idea who's behind this. So it doesn't smell right to me that the Russians are responsible. So then who is?
And, well, enter Seymour Hersh, a very well-known journalist. He got a Pulitzer Prize for his work uncovering the Mỹ Lai massacre by the United States in Vietnam. And he writes this extraordinary piece independently published on his Substack newsletter that fingers the United States and Norway in a covert operation blowing up these pipelines. It got huge attention, especially and predictably with Russian state media and the Russian government now saying that they're planning on taking steps to retaliate. The question is, does the story hold up? If it does, it's an extraordinary story. It would risk driving a wedge in the NATO coalition. It's worth taking a look at. And I've done that now, and I will say that, as skeptical as I am that the Russians are behind Nord Stream one and two exploding, the Hersh story doesn't hold up at all.
First of all, the core concept that the United States would target infrastructure partially owned by a key ally without telling the Germans about it runs very counter to what the United States has been doing in the war. I mean, at the same time that this occurred, the US was pursuing much deeper ties with Germany on a lot of issues like tech regulation and China decoupling and strengthening transatlantic ties to reverse the pullback and cooperation that you saw in the Trump administration. Blowing up Nord Stream risks all of those initiatives for a very questionable benefit to the United States, which is breaking Russia-Germany ties, while also risking spiking energy prices in the EU.
Partnering with Norway, a chartered NATO member, to sabotage Nord Stream also risks fracturing internal NATO cooperation, which Biden and his entire team have made very clear, both publicly and privately, has been the single most important gain that they have seen since the invasion has started. The fact that NATO, which was fragmenting, now has a reason for being. It's expanding, it's very coordinated, consolidated under US leadership. You risk that. Biden administration strikes me as much more risk averse than that. But okay, that's a practical and theoretical argument. Now, need to talk about some of the things Hersh said in the piece itself. Explanation that he lays out for hiding the operation from Congress isn't actually internally consistent. Hersh's claim that the operation was devised without using special operations personnel in order to avoid notifying Congress is actually incorrect.
A covert action pursued under Title 50 authority, that's the part of US Code that allows the CIA to pursue covert action regardless of what assets are used, would still be briefed to Congress. And that never happened. Specifically, CIA can request DoDEA personnel through the Defense sensitive support system. And those requests are briefed to Congress every month. And in Hersh's telling, the CIA would've asked the US Navy for deep water divers via that system, and Congress would've been notified. Whether those divers were special operations or not actually is immaterial to that process. He then suggests that the operation was downgraded to avoid congressional notification. That's not actually a thing. If it was a covert action, there would've been a finding before DoDEA assets were requested or before operational planning got past the initial stage. So the argument here kind of is nonsensical. Okay.
Also, the publicly verifiable facts, which are critical, don't line up with Hersh. He specifies that a Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper was used to support the divers that were planting explosives during the Baltops exercises. Now, public tracking shows that none of Norway's five Alta-class ships were in the region during the exercise. Further, Hersh claims that a Norwegian P-8, that's an aircraft that does marine tracking, dropped a sonar buoy on the day of the explosion that triggered the explosives. But none of the five P-8s that Norway operates were in the area that day per flight tracking. That these don't show up on public tracking is critical because Hersh's whole claim is that the reason that the Norwegians were used is so that the flights and ship activity wouldn't need to be covert. This doesn't align with the data. The other thing I would say is that Hersh's own anti-establishment and specifically anti-intelligence community bias should draw some skepticism.
As I mentioned, Hersh, the work he's done on Mỹ Lai was extraordinary and a true public service, and he got a Pulitzer for it. But more recently, he's done work claiming that the Osama bin Laden killing was a coverup, that the Syrian government didn't use chemical weapons. And they're both notable for being unbelievable and designed really to rebut specific claims made by the US intelligence community. And unfortunately, this article really lines up with that ideologically, and also without having the information to back it up. So, what then is really going on here? Who was behind it? I mean, the fact that Hersh is wrong doesn't mean that that NATO wasn't in some way behind this. And it's, by the way, not inconceivable that Hersh's anonymous source, gave him details that are disprovable in order to undermine the central argument in the piece. I mean, if you dismiss it as "I'm doing right now" as clearly factually wrong, it colors future claims that the United States was responsible that are potentially more credible.
I personally think that the Ukrainians are the most likely culprit. I mean, in the sense that they're the ones that have the most to gain. And they're also the ones that are the most risk acceptant. I mean, this war is an existential risk to them, and they're willing to do almost anything to ensure that their country still exists. And if the NATO alliance starts to break, that's an utter disaster for them. They need to make sure that that energy can't go to the Germans going forward. They don't want that to be a possibility because it's their future, literally their future as human beings that's on the line. Now, the main problem with the Ukrainian argument is, do they have the capabilities, the technical capabilities? And six months ago, I would've been very skeptical. But I also wouldn't have thought they'd be able to blow up the Kerch Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, and they did. And that was pretty sophisticated operationally.
They also, of course, attempted to assassinate Alexander Dugin, ended up killing his daughter just outside Russia. Also pretty sophisticated assassination just outside Moscow. They also have been involved in shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant that was occupied in Ukraine, the largest nuclear plant in Ukraine, but occupied by the Russians. I mean, if those shells had gone awry, you could have had a nuclear accident. So the willingness of the Ukrainians to take big risks is significant. I suspect they're the most likely. Could it have been with some NATO support, for example, Poland? Who knows that, if it wasn't for the Ukrainians fighting, they'd be fighting themselves.
They're therefore by far the most hawkish in orientation towards Russia. That is plausible. They're the ones that have been pushing the hardest for getting fighter jets to the Ukrainians to fight the Russians, for example. It's certainly possible. The Americans, of course, would have the most operational capability to pull off such an attack. And that is at face what makes Hersh's article very interesting. But again, at least, as he's argued, it strikes me as completely wrong, and frankly very irresponsible. So that's why I wanted to use my platform to go through the facts as they stand.
I hope everyone finds this useful. I look forward to talking to everybody real soon.