He was expecting to waltz into Kyiv in a few days, decapitate the Ukrainian government (literally), not to have to wage an intense war of attrition. Of course h

He was expecting to waltz into Kyiv in a few days, decapitate the Ukrainian government (literally), not to have to wage an intense war of attrition. Of course he miscalculated because of piss-poor intelligence (the one thing the former USSR was usually good at), that doesn't make the original calculation irrational. Now if he had sabotaged the Norway-Denmark-Poland Baltic Pipe, he would have achived the same objectives, preserved his own capital investment, and killed off a potential competitor to Russian gas. Sure, it would have been a direct attack against a NATO country, but so was the 2014 bombing of the Czech munition depot in Vrbětice.