Europe's energy crisis is not new and they hang onto every work from Russia/Gazprom to determine if the price of methane will increase.
One might pay attention to fact the pipeline was blown up as was the bridge. But, there is no report of a direct link between the two.
This is an article I read this morning which invokes the issue of governance and who patrols such structures, the cost and the feasibility of such things.
October 8, 2022By Natalia Drozdiak
NATO allies are struggling (click here) to work out how to better safeguard undersea critical infrastructure after the Nord Stream pipelines blasts laid bare the difficulty of monitoring facilities and identifying any attackers.
The sheer scale and underwater depth of assets such as pipelines — or data cables that allow the internet to function — heighten the challenge for governments. With most systems owned by private companies, proving which government may have sponsored an attack is even more complex.
“We’ve had a theoretical concern that it could be vulnerable but until these Nord Stream explosions, we have not seen an incident like this on that infrastructure,” said Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow for security and defense policy at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, D.C. “Now this sets off lots of worries about what other kind of infrastructure can be targeted.”
Russia’s bellicose rhetoric and steps to throttle Europe’s energy supplies have sparked concern that Moscow might target crucial underwater infrastructure like the pipelines from Norway that supply more than a fifth of the continent’s natural gas, or some of the 400 undersea data cables that carry about 98% of international internet data and telephone traffic around the world....
continued in next entry...