Editor’s Note:

With Nord Stream 2 seemingly a done deal, Germany’s wishful thinkers say the geopolitical balance will not change if the Kremlin no longer needs the big pipe crossing Ukraine to the EU. In retort, skeptics say: once gas runs through Nord Stream 2, the Kremlin may no longer feel constrained to play Mr. Nice Guy with Ukraine.

During the first week of August, 2008, I was in Tbilisi when the Georgia-Russia war broke out. Given the fog of war, most of us – foreigners and Georgians — did not comprehend Russia tactics. Today, we know key elements were pipelines.

On Aug. 5, 2008, as pre-war skirmishes flared, a mysterious fire took out the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil line in Refahiye, eastern Turkey, 750 km from the war zone. Only six years later, Bloomberg was able to run a story blaming the fire on a Russian cyberattack.

Closer to the events, two weeks after the war ended, Mark Trevelyan of Reuters traveled to a Georgian village 25 km from the Azeri border. In a report filed Aug. 29, 2008, he wrote that local herdsmen showed him 42 bomb craters that went up and down a remote stretch of the oil line running from Baku-to the Black Sea. Some fell within 15 meters of the 150,000 barrel a day pipe. Russian pilots clearly messaged: “Look at what we can do.” Seven years later, in July 2015, Russian soldiers demarcating the de facto Georgia-South Ossetia border, moved the fence 1 km to the south, close to the village of Orchosani, Georgia. This gave Russia control over a short length of the Baku-Black Sea pipeline. For the Kremlin, pipelines are part of the art of war. With Best Regards, Jim Brooke