Le piège Nord Stream

The sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines on September 26, 2022 surprised the international community. Since then, observers have been speculating as to who might have been behind the attacks. Russia, the United States, Ukraine and Poland have all been singled out because of the advantages that rupturing these pipelines might bring them.Even before the sabotage occurred, the Nord Stream project had fuelled discontent between the Americans and the Germans, and even within Europe itself.The first pipeline went into service in 2011 and the second, completed in 2022, has not delivered a single molecule of gas, thanks to the Russian invasion.French journalist Marion Van Renterghem has delved into the story behind the decision to build these two pipelines, which are more than 1,200 km long and lie beneath the Baltic Sea between Russia and Germany.The author’s thesis is simple: Europe, and especially Germany, has gradually allowed itself to be trapped in the Machiavellian plan that Russian president Vladimir Putin implemented when he took power in 2000.The plan was to bypass Ukraine, the historical axis for Russian gas supplies to Europe. And then, once Ukraine was out of the picture, the plan was to invade that country, without any decisive reaction from Europe, which meanwhile had become overly reliant on its gas.The story begins in 2001, with a speech Putin gave in Berlin as the West and Russia stood united against the terrorist acts of 9/11. Putin announced the end of the Cold War and the reorganization of a Russia which had faltered under former president Boris Yeltsin. Putin’s speech was enthusiastically received in Germany.But the worm was already in the apple. Far from being a leader dedicated to getting his country’s economy off the ground, Putin intended to run an expansionist state, reclaiming territories lost after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.He began in 2001 by using extreme violence to subdue the rebels fighting for Chechnya’s independence.