A large-scale accident at the Nord Stream gas pipeline can benefit the Russian corporation Gazprom. This opinion was expressed by Mikhail Krutikhin, an expert on the gas market, on the air of the Freedom TV channel.

He considers several options for what happened, including seismic activity and the detonation of a sunken ammunition ship.

However, Krutikhin believes that first of all, you need to look at who benefits from this incident.

“But this is beneficial only to one player. This is Gazprom. As you know, Gazprom, on political instructions from the Kremlin, reduced gas supplies to Europe to almost 0. Since this violates contractual obligations, Gazprom risked being filed against it first arbitration cases, and then litigation, and will remove several billion dollars in fines from him for unfulfilled contracts," he explained.

The expert believes it was possible to justify himself only by providing evidence of an accident or technical malfunction on the gas pipeline.

"Here is the only one who could have provoked this accident, perhaps Gazprom itself," Krutikhin stressed.

Accident at Nord Stream

• On September 26, the operator Nord Stream announced a sharp decrease in pressure in both gas pipeline strings. According to them, this happened because of a hole in the pipe.

• Press Secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov said that Russia "does not rule out the possibility of sabotage." A number of countries are also considering this possibility.

• According to Swedish seismologists, the incident was not related to the earthquake - the second explosion was equivalent to a blast of more than 100 kg of dynamite.

• Russian analyst Dmitry Donetsky said that up to 500 million cubic meters of technical gas leaked from the pipes.