Ukraine has a sea coast and a Navy, so I have no doubt that they have combat divers. Thus the only issue would be a logistic one. My take is that it is trivial to send people to the Baltic along with access to diving equipment and boats. Via sea route it should also be very doable to ship explosives.
Any sort of underwater demolitions is pretty much the opposite of "trivial". How much diving have you done? The real world isn't like a James Bond movie.
I didn't say that underwater demolition was trivial.
I said that they surely had military trained in that sort of thing. Actually they even seem to have a 1st Underwater demolitions Unit, so...
It's getting those people to the Baltic that seems trivial to me. That does not mean I am accusing them, but that means they are on my list of suspects.
It's still possible enough for a nation that splintered off a previous world superpower. It's not like Soviet combat divers and their expertise just up and disappeared once the union dissolved in the 90s
BUDS is literally that, every SeAL does that. Not optional.
Not accusing the SeALs just the force I'm most familiar with.
A pipeline is impossible to guard so it's so so easy, it's a cakewalk. The real challenge is the impunity, you don't want to get accused like eg Allended accused CIA of blowing up its pipelines in Chile (gasoductos y olioductos) and the train line. It's a one-dimensional structure that is vulnerable along the entire distance, and more valuable the greater the distance it covers, so more valuable as it is more vulnerable.
Really to protect a one-dimensional resource conveyor, you need retal. There's nothing else. Everybody talks about protecting themselves, yeah and what wear a helmet to cross the street? No, no helmets! Yeah then make the pipeline's steel a meter thick, to protect it.
Retal.
America does that, when terrorists blow up its pipelines in Iraq for instance, they hunt them down and make them regret doing so. Not say they're sorry, make sure it turns out to have been a bad decision in hindsight. Those pipelines don't need to be any thicker. It's the thickness of the initiator's skull that must be overcome.
I'm fairly certain that BUD/S doesn't cover diving to the depths of those pipelines. Initial SEAL dive training is focused on open circuit compressed air and oxygen rebreather equipment. Deep, covert demolition missions like this would likely have to be done on a Mk16, and most SEALs lack that specialized training. I doubt the US Navy actually sabotaged those pipelines, but if they did then the diving was more likely handled by EOD or MDSU personnel.
Dude it's no problem. EOD can do it. SeAL can do it. Like splinter cell unit of the Army can do it. Every nation can do it. I could learn to do it in high school. Any diver. Anybody. Easiest shit. The issue is not getting caught. Not like diving a mile down like the guys at oil platforms, gotta live always under pressure, 80 meters, easy shit. And the difficulty is depressurizing, not pressurizing. And like 200 meters below sea level you go into like a trance...eh. Still can accomplish the mission, if they can translate into trance-ease.
It's nothing. Not a whole lotta guards from the Kremlin with their evil faces like movie bad guys (they're never not the bad guy) the whole time watching over the pipeline, let me tell you.
They do 100x harder shit than that every day. Navy SeALs are in 40 countries on any given day, that's just SeALs. Like no risk of death from that, no risk of needing to use SERE training, NOTHING, BUDS, basic underwater demolition, EASIEST SHIT!
This entire war has been an exercise in Ukraine using other people's resources to attack Russia. If they wanted to I'm sure the US and Ukraine could figure out how to get this done.
Because it’s a war of one-sided aggression. The rest of this comment tree indicates a tendency on your part to minimize that, so I’m providing the counterbalance.
During the entire war, Ukraine has only conducted a few small attacks on Russia. Almost all of their attacks have been on invading Russian troops inside Ukraine.
You are forgetting - A civil war of Western Ukrainians vs the Russian Eastern Ukrainians has been burning at varying levels of intensity for a number of years, which started with a US supported coup that overthrew a pro-Russian elected leader [1] (Article biased in favor of Western Ukrainians but gives a good picture)
Western Ukrainians firebombed Trade Union with the ~300 Ethnic Russians (Eastern Ukrainians) in it, and they were burned alive, in Odessa. [2]
Your take on Odessa is wrong on so many levels. For starters, the total number of people who died there was 45, not 300, and most of them weren't ethnic Russians, but rather locals (who are mostly Ukrainians, even if many of them are Russophone) who supported Yanukovich. Neither did it happen out of the blue - it was preceded by street fights involving firearms (and some of people carrying those firearms were later in the Trade Union House), said fights triggered by an attack by a pro-Yanukovich mob on an anti-Yanukovich protest.
