Putin warned on the fourth anniversary of the special operation that Ukraine and its Western patrons are plotting “a possible explosion targeting our gas pipeline systems – TurkStream and Blue Stream pipelines – along the floor of the Black Sea. They simply cannot back down. They do not know what else they can do to undermine this peaceful process aimed at settlement through diplomatic means.” This isn’t the first time that Russia warned about such a plot, with prior ones analyzed here, here, and here.
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What’s most important about this latest warning is that it coincided with the Foreign Intelligence Service warning on the same day about an Anglo-Franco plot to transfer nuclear technology and even bombs to Ukraine. That was analyzed here, and just like with Putin’s warning about the latest plots against Russia’s pipelines to Turkiye, the purpose is to derail the peace talks by provoking Russia into either preemptively escalating against Ukraine as a deterrent or authorizing an overmatched retaliatory escalation right after.
In either scenario, the aforesaid talks’ US mediator could then be manipulated by the Europeans, who’ve been trying to subvert Trump’s peace efforts this entire time, into misperceiving such moves as “unprovoked aggression on false pretexts”, thus possibly torpedoing their negotiations. In response, Trump might then also be manipulated into authorizing his country’s own overmatched “retaliatory” escalation if the Europeans claim that Putin “humiliated” him, which could risk spiraling out of control.
The Europeans and Ukrainians’ shared goals are to perpetuate the conflict, drag the US back into its Biden-era level of involvement, and then provoke a Cuban-like brinksmanship crisis between Russia and the US that they believe would ultimately result in significant concessions from the former. To that end, they’re plotting to provoke the usually restrained Putin into preemptive escalations or overmatched retaliatory ones, absent which he’ll be forced to accept a nuclear Ukraine and more blown-up pipelines.
The only realistic way for Russia to avoid this zero-sum dilemma is publicly warning the world about these provocations in the hope that Trump will hear about them from the media even if the provably untrustworthy CIA doesn’t brief him about what Putin and his spies just said. They’d then expect him to either do his utmost to avert these planned provocations or not fall into the trap of being manipulated by the Europeans if Russia preemptively escalates or authorizes an overmatched retaliatory escalation.
Russia’s main motive is to preserve the US-mediated peace talks with Ukraine, therefore preventing the dangerous scenario of US escalations that could spiral out of control, while its secondary one is to show Trump how the Brits, French, and Ukrainians are working behind his back to subvert his peace efforts. This speaks to Putin’s sincere desire to peace, albeit not at any cost, ergo why his team continues negotiating hard and won’t accept the far-reaching concessions being demanded of it by Ukraine.
All in all, nobody knows whether Ukraine and its Western patrons will still try to go through with these two provocations after Russia just exposed them, but at least Trump can’t credibly claim to be ignorant of these plots in the event that Russia either preemptively escalates or escalates afterwards. As of now, Russia doesn’t want any escalation either from its adversaries or that which their provocations might soon force it into, but it’s signaling that some escalation is possible if Trump doesn’t thwart these plots.
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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