Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the top right corner of the screen. There you see a battery icon. Every night, without exception, you plug that device into the wall outlet. If you forget, your Apple device costing 1,200 euros turns into a useless piece of glass by midday. For fifteen years now, American tech giants like Apple, Google, and Samsung have been trying to convince us that this is simply the reality of modern technology. You want a faster phone? Then you'll have to learn to live with battery anxiety. But while Silicon Valley fights this battle against the laws of physics, a historic disruption is taking place in China that renders the entire iPhone ecosystem obsolete.
In contemporary geopolitical and technological discourse, we are constantly presented with a narrative of relentless competition, technological separation, and the so-called necessity of 'decoupling' between the West and China. American politicians and policymakers speak with great pathos about containing China's technological rise, imposing sanctions, and protecting Western innovation through exclusivity. Yet, when we pierce through the rhetoric and look at the hard, undeniable facts of the market, a completely different picture unfolds. A picture where the so-called unbridgeable gap is not only bridged, but where Chinese innovation fundamentally rewrites the rules of global capitalism.
Europe's energy supply is in a state of deep, structural vulnerability—a reality systematically downplayed or wrapped in a narrative of triumphant resilience by the official channels of the European Union. While the European Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen, attempts to convince the world of a successful transition and an overcome dependency, the hard market figures and fundamental economic analyses point to a very different truth. Europe stands on the brink of a potentially catastrophic energy crisis, where prices are not merely fluctuating cyclically but are structurally driven up by a combination of physical market tightness, a fundamentally flawed market design, and short-sighted geopolitical policy.
As a civilization that builds with self-healing concrete, carbon-fiber rebar, and algorithmic structural optimization, we look back at our ancestors with a patronizing fondness. We look at medieval cathedrals or colonial fortresses and marvel that they managed to stand at all, assuming their builders were operating on blind luck, superstition, and an abundance of manual labor. But then we look at our own infrastructure. Our modern highway overpasses sprout structural cracks within three decades. Our concrete high-rises are plagued by "concrete cancer" (alkali-silica reaction) and structural degradation before their first major centennial.
There is no sugarcoating it: the European Union is going through a disastrous decade, and the ways to conceal the structural problems any longer are slowly but surely running out. Germany has been recording a declining industrial production for several quarters in a row and is losing hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing sector. France is borrowing heavily to cover current expenditures, and the interest burden is suffocating any form of economic oxygen.
I am not a journalist. I am not a commentator. I am a retired deep‑sea diver/welder who worked on pipe‑laying vessels worldwide, and later a team leader at the natural gas terminals in Zeebrugge and Dunkirk. Those terminals were not involved in the sabotage of Nord Stream. I have been retired for 14 years and have no secret information. What I know about underwater explosions does not come from YouTube – it comes from working at depths of 10 to 165 metres, with a welding or cutting torch in my hand.
The publication of scientific research is a particularly lucrative industry. The most recent estimates suggest it generates an annual turnover of approximately 19 billion US dollars (or 16.67 billion euros), with margins of around 40 percent. These staggering figures largely reflect the fact that the "Big Five" commercial publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE, profit from work that is largely funded with public money.
In certain geopolitical channels and on Persian-language platforms, a concerning message is currently circulating. Iran would have drawn up a specific list of European energy infrastructure as potential targets. The reasoning put forward is that Ukraine, under President Zelensky, is acting as a European proxy army. According to this narrative, Kiev's actions would justify retaliation against European energy interests. For the attentive reader of De Jakobijn, it is essential to look beyond the superficial sensation. We must separate the factual core of these claims from geopolitical distortion.
The Nord Stream saga has taken a turn for the absurd, with a new book claiming that the star saboteur who blew up the gas pipelines was a Ukrainian erotic model-turned-deep sea diver. This detail is the latest addition to an ever-shifting story – while one key coincidence has completely flown under the radar. Published on June 19, ‘The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Greatest Sabotage in History’ promises an inside look at the operation that destroyed the Nord Stream lines. Author Bojan Pancevski doesn’t quibble with the ‘official’ story circulated by the German media – that a Ukrainian commando unit carried out the attack, but adds some pulp-fiction flourish to the tale.
Ukraine should compensate Germany for the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the co-leader of the right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alice Weidel, has said. German investigators have attributed the explosions, which crippled the pipelines built to transport Russian gas to Germany, to a small group of Ukrainian operatives. The alleged ringleader was extradited to Germany from Italy last autumn. Moscow has repeatedly questioned Berlin’s account of the attack, arguing that such a sophisticated operation could not have been carried out by a handful of divers in NATO-monitored waters without state backing.
On September 26, 2022, the silent depths of the Baltic Sea erupted. Four explosions near the Danish island of Bornholm tore through the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines—the engineering marvels that for decades had served as the vascular system of the European economy, pumping cheap Russian gas directly into Germany . It was the largest act of industrial sabotage in modern European history, an event so violent that it registered on seismic networks. Yet, two years later, the silence surrounding the perpetrators is deafening. There have been no arrests, no public interrogations, and a palpable lack of urgency from Western investigators . While the geopolitical blame game continues—with theories ranging from a pro-Ukrainian rogue cell to U.S. strategic dominance—the economic body count is no longer a theory. It is a brutal, measurable reality.
POTSDAM /Germany/, May 7. /TASS/. Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergey Nechayev, has emphasized that the ongoing immunity granted to those responsible for the sabotage against the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines is fueling a dangerous chain reaction. "Who is behind this terrorist attack? The fact that it was a terrorist act is now beyond question, not only for us but even for the German government," he stated. "Yet, we remain in the dark about the perpetrators. All the claims about a pleasure yacht with amateur divers are simply fabrications. We must identify who orchestrated and executed this act of terror."
Professor Ola Tunander, senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), has analysed the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines for many years. In an extensive interview with journalist Patrik Baab, Tunander presents evidence that does not point to a small group of Ukrainian divers on a sailboat, but to a long-planned operation led by the United States — possibly an act of state terrorism.
In addition to the many overland pipelines connecting Russia to China, Russia had also developed a similar large-scale offshore project called Nord Stream. This pipeline lies on the floor of the Baltic Sea and, until 26 September 2022, transported Russian natural gas directly to European countries.
The article below is a faithful reproduction of an English version published on Sputnik. This site is not accessible in the EU due to sanctions against Russia.
Hearings on the sabotage of Nord Stream have begun in London. Nord Stream, the operator, claims it is entitled to €580 million in compensation from insurer Lloyd’s of London.