That narrative never made any sense, anyways. Like, how did even the most credulous westerner explain that to themselves?
Ze evil Ruzzian orcs, incapable of logic due to their inferior brainpan: "ah, yes, I shall bomb my own pipeline to force the effeminate Europeans to buy oil and gas from the US, this is sure to lead me to victory."
Like, what's the framing there? That Russia blew up its own pipeline to get people to be mad at Ukraine for cutting off their energy supply somehow? And then the only spin at all was that they just had a single journalist who nobody knows by name and hasn't been relevant for 20 years post about it on a website nobody's heard of behind a paywall?
Mark Ames logic: I am very smart, I tell you Putin will never invade Ukraine -> but… Putin invaded Ukraine!! -> Since I am very smart, Putin must be stupid to invade Ukraine -> since Putin is stupid, he is probably stupid enough to blow up his own pipeline
It took Seymour Hersh to get on RWN for him to shut up about this completely stupid argument of his.
Ze evil Ruzzian orcs, incapable of logic due to their inferior brainpan: "ah, yes, I shall bomb my own pipeline to force the effeminate Europeans to buy oil and gas from the US, this is sure to lead me to victory."
I can hear Yugopnik doing his 'ze evil Russian orc' voice in this whole sentence.
Maybe it's that Putler decided to teach Germany/the EU a lesson by blowing up their own ... Idk . It's so dumb to even think about, I can feel my braincells dying in real time. NATO so obviously did it, I can hardly imagine the level of delusional propaganda brain needed to believe otherwise.
I believe the story was supposed to be that it was a false flag by Russia, done to frame the US and make the EU states angry enough to not help the US/Ukraine.