As an aside, note that the ongoing geopolitical conflict between the USA and Russia revolves mainly around the global oil & gas market, IMO (which is somewhat b

As an aside, note that the ongoing geopolitical conflict between the USA and Russia revolves mainly around the global oil & gas market, IMO (which is somewhat biased as I focus on energy issues). In particular, it's over where the revenue from oil and gas sales is deposited (hence the related currency flow controversies). This has been an ongoing point of conflict for the past two decades, dating back (IMO) to Putin's rejection of an Exxon bid for majority ownership in Russia's largest oil company in 2003. Exxon did go on to build the Sakhalin-1 project for Russia (comparable to Shell's involvement in Sakhalin-2) in the following decade, so it wasn't yet a complete split (that has now occured with Sakahalin, as Russia is in complete control of output and Exxon/Shell etc. have left as of 2022). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakhalin-I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakhalin-I Blowing up major pipelines is a serious escalation, however. One step beyond that would be blowing up LNG tankers (which would also include loss of life, i.e. the ship's crew, assuming this was done offshore - near-shore would be much worse). The real prize in this conflict is control of and access to the European energy market, and control of the resulting revenue streams. Of course, Europe would be better off with massive renewable build-out, but for whatever reasons European leaders have been slow to adopt this strategy, and now they're in the unenviable position of having to pay premium prices regardless of which supplier they eventually turn to. Interestingly, such a move would like cause a collapse in world oil prices to the point that expensive-to-operate fossil projects (US & Russian LNG projects that is) would likely become mutually uneconomical. Regardless, reckless escalation of this nature is a bad idea, and should not be encouraged or cheered on.