On September 26, 2022, infrastructure vital for both Germany and the EU as a whole was attacked as never before in post-World War II, peacetime (at least formally) history. In the vicinity of the island of Bornholm, at the midpoint between the Polish and Swedish coasts, four explosions sabotaged the massive Nord Stream I and II gas pipelines, which run along the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

The immediate consequences were enormous. In terms of environmental damage, all too often overlooked now, the pipelines were filled with methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes enormously to global warming. According to the UN, its heating effect is 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Also, methane “is the primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas, exposure to which causes one million premature deaths every year.”

The exact amount of this toxic gas that the Nord Stream saboteurs made bubble up into our shared atmosphere is hard to quantify, but there is no doubt that it was large, and we would all be much better off if it had stayed in the pipelines. Initial estimates pointed to five times the volume released in a 2015 methane disaster in California. That was “the largest known terrestrial release of methane in US history.” Its impact was compared with driving seven million cars per day, and it displaced thousands of people.

Put differently, the Nord Stream attack set a milestone not merely in European but also the global history of man-made ecological disasters. But the California leak was, at least, an accident – the Baltic one, so much larger again, was the result of a deliberate act of eco-terrorism. It’s no wonder that Rob Jackson, a Stanford climate scientist, quickly – and correctly – concluded that “whoever ordered this should be prosecuted for war crimes and go to jail.”

Yet apart from eco-terrorism, the Nord Stream attack was also, of course, an act of aggression against Germany as a state. And against the whole of the EU, too, as Mikhail Podoliak, the habitually dishonest top adviser to Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, underlined at the time of the sabotage. He was right, of course. Indeed, it was such a severe act of aggression that it should have led Germany and the EU to quickly identify the perpetrators and take drastic action against them. Moreover, if the terrorists had state backing, as is likely given the complexity of the attack, then those actions should have ranged from sanctions and severing diplomatic relations – as a minimum – to military retaliation. And since Germany is a NATO member, the alliance’s famed Article 5 – treating an attack on one member as an attack on all of them – could easily have been applied as well.

At the time, Podoliak was, of course, brazenly lying about an important detail. Against rhyme and reason, he blamed the attacks on Russia, which had zero conceivable interest in destroying pipelines that it had heavily invested in to facilitate energy trade with the EU, that afforded some geopolitical influence (although propagandists in the West and especially Poland have always........

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