I would say the operation went off as planned. The capacity to ship gas on Nord Stream 1 was cut, but luckily, the pipeline hadn't been in use for a month at the time. According to this site, https://berthub.eu/gazmon/ , In March 2020, 100-150 GW of Gas went from Russia to EU, right before the pipeline cut, that had gone down to 50GW, and after the cut it dropped to 30GW.
So the question is, what was the strategic effect for the US, Ukraine, and/or Russia to have done this?
My take, its almost as good for Russia to play victim than it is for the US to cut Russia's Gas. It would be interesting to see how dominant this story was in Russia, given the Ukrainian advances in late 2022.
Russia had stopped gas flows on NordStream 1 26 days prior to the explosion [1].
This was after a series of reductions, stops, and restarts where they reduced flows and tried to get Germany to break sanctions to send parts. That they then ultimately rejected and wouldn't receive. E.g. [2].
When Germany offered the parts. They refused them, stopped NS1 entirely and offered to activate NS2 with Germany. [3] Germany refused and resisted the blackmail attempt.
Then the explosion happened a couple of weeks later. After that Russia again offered to activate NS2 with Germany. [4]
In this context, the US going ahead with the plan to demolish NS1, and leave NS2 50% operation makes zero sense.
So the question is, what was the strategic effect for the US, Ukraine, and/or Russia to have done this?
My take, its almost as good for Russia to play victim than it is for the US to cut Russia's Gas. It would be interesting to see how dominant this story was in Russia, given the Ukrainian advances in late 2022.