by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:

Since late February 2022 Russia’s war with Ukraine has dominated the global headlines, but what may have been the most important incident in that conflict has received only a sliver of coverage in the Western mainstream media.

One year ago tomorrow a series of massive underwater explosions destroyed most of the $30 billion Russian-German Nord Stream Pipelines, probably Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure. All observers soon agreed that the blasts had been deliberate, likely constituting the greatest case of industrial terrorism in world history and an obvious act of war against Germany, NATO’s leading European member. And then in lock-step, nearly all Western media outlets declared that the Russians had destroyed their own pipelines, an action further demonstrating the dangerous insanity of President Vladimir Putin, our diabolical Moscow adversary. Only a handful of voices on the dissident fringe suggested otherwise.