Writing the other day about various acts of sabotage under the Baltic Sea over the past few months, I had this to say:

A covert attack by unknown actors on a piece of (sometimes extraterritorial) infrastructure is a classic example of (to use the jargon) “gray zone” aggression, and a general promise of a military response is unlikely to be convincing enough to be a credible deterrent (the saboteurs will typically have long since left the scene). So, what to do?

Now there’s this news (via Politico):

German federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into a suspected case of sabotage after small holes were found in a liquefied natural gas pipeline under construction in the north of Germany.

Prosecutors have taken over an “investigation into the initial suspicion of anti-constitutional sabotage,” a spokeswoman for the Federal Public Prosecutor General told German public broadcaster NDR.

At least three ten-millimeter holes appeared to have been drilled at various places along the 55-kilometer-long pipeline, according to media reports. Gasunie, the company building the pipeline, first reported the holes attributable “to external interference” to police in November. . . . Germany has become increasingly reliant on LNG as it has moved to cut its dependence on natural gas from Russia following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Hmmm . . .

It’s certainly not impossible that the Russians or their proxies might have been involved in this.

Another possibility, of course, might be eco-fundamentalists.

A story worth watching.