Nothing I say is referring to domestic politics or a domestic political party.
I feel 90% convinced it was the Russians.
Currently Russia is in a choke hold in Ukraine. They are NOT winning. The longer this goes on, the higher their losses, the more destabilized things get at home, threatening Putin’s rule. As it is, he better be sleeping with one eye open and potato chips sprinkled around his bed at night.
In the current situation, the more young Russian’s he feeds into Ukraine is just throwing them into a meat grinder with no equipment and no training. The majority of them will shoot their officers in the face and surrender the first chance they get.
Putin is desperate to shake up the current trend. He is running out of oligarchs to toss out of windows.
1. The Ukrainians are not willing haggle away their sovereign territory. Would we? If Russia had “liberated” Alaska, because it was always really still part of Russia after all, would we just let them keep it to avoid any hostility?
2. As long as the Ukrainians are determined to fight, the West is determined to support them with every weapon we can spare. Those weapons are becoming more advanced and the Ukrainians are making good use of them. The weaponry is allowing the Ukrainian bravery a chance to tilt the balance. The sanctions are really just now starting to really bite. (They take about 6 months.) Putin is running out of runway.
3. The West has been very careful and not given Putin the excuse he needs to blatantly attack vital supply arteries in Poland, etc.
4. If he can not cut off those supply routes, he face an eventual humiliating withdrawal like Iraq’s forced evacuation of Kuwait. It’s starting to look a lot like that, with rivers of retreating Russians carrying all the stolen consumer goods they could lay hands on.
5. If the West won’t give him an obvious excuse, Putin will invent one. Like the Germans faking an attack on the a radio station on the Polish border.
6. With the West’s surveillance capabilities, I find it hard to believe a vessel delivered those explosives (even a sub). More than likely it was an explosive laden “Pig” sent down the pipeline internally. Since the supply was going to stop flowing anyway. It doesn’t make any sense other than as a manufactured Casus Beli. Either the West was going to finally boycott or the Russians were going to cut off flow in retaliation for sanctions. Putin wasn’t really losing anything by blowing them up, but could claim it as a direct attack by the West justifying limited proportional attacks on supply targets in certain NATO countries that are supplying Ukraine.
Putin is willing to take a great risk to stop the supply of weapons to Ukraine because he knows the current path leads to his destruction. He is willing to tip over the chess board and hope to find a better position in the chaos. The West and Ukraine are winning. They have no need to flip over the board. They want the current trend to continue to play out. It’s the loser that needs to take risk to try a reset.
Remember. Putin doesn't want Ukraine as much as he wants what's after Ukraine. Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Ukraine was just supposed to be the staging area to jump off from.
The real show – the real war – comes after. The two most important gateways to the Russian heartland remain: the Baltic Sea coast and the portion of the Polish gap that lies in, well, Poland. Unlike Ukraine, the countries in question here – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – are members of the NATO alliance. And of the European Union as well.
https://zeihan.com/ukraine-the-war-after-the-war/If they are not stopped in Ukraine, they will have to be stopped in NATO territory and that will cost American blood. I'd rather spend the treasure and let Ukrainians kill Russians for us.
