On the morning of August 6, near the coastal town of Furuvik, a Russian couple named Semyon Rusanov and Tatyana Milenina were declared a threat to the security of the Swedish state. They had lived in Spain for five years. They opposed the war in Ukraine. They had not set foot in Russia since 2022. They had a tent, fishing rods, and two tourist walkie-talkies, and they had camped within sight of the summer cottage used by the chief executive of an arms company. For this they were interrogated for seven hours, locked in a migration detention center, and ordered deported.
No espionage charge was filed. No charge of any kind was filed. Säpo, the Swedish security service, never took the case. The couple’s lawyer said they were never notified of any suspected crime. The evidence, entire, was that they spoke Russian, carried radios sold to hikers, and could not explain their choice of campsite to the satisfaction of a policeman. On that foundation the state moved against them.
An American reader might file this under European strangeness and move on. That would be a mistake. What happened at Furuvik is a small, clear demonstration of the machinery that Washington has spent three years installing across Europe – the machinery of the necessary enemy – and the wreckage at the center of the story lies at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, where it points not at Moscow, and not really at Stockholm, but at home.
The pipeline Washington promised to destroy
Begin with the pipeline, because everything else hangs from it.
On February 7, 2022 – seventeen days before Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine – President Joe Biden stood beside the German chancellor and made a promise about Nord Stream 2, the pipeline built to carry Russian gas to Germany. “If Russia invades,” Biden said, “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” A reporter asked how, given the project lay under German control. “I promise you,” the president answered, “we will be able to do it.”
Seven months later, someone did. On September 26, 2022, four explosions ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines beneath the Baltic. In February 2023, Seymour Hersh – the reporter who exposed the My Lai massacre and the CIA’s domestic spying — published an account, sourced to a person with direct knowledge of the planning, of how the United States did it: Navy divers from the Diving and Salvage Center in Panama City, Florida, planting remotely triggered charges under cover of the NATO exercise BALTOPS 22, detonated three months later by a sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian aircraft. Hersh reported that the operation was routed through Navy divers precisely because, unlike Special Operations Command, they are not required to report to Congress – that when the national-security bureaucracy debated the plan, CIA director William Burns came back and said, “Do it.” The purpose, Hersh’s source told him, was to lock Europe into the war at a moment when allies were wavering: destroy the pipeline, and you destroy the temptation to make peace and buy Russian gas again.
The White House and Norway denied it. Hersh’s account rests on a single anonymous source and has not been independently confirmed. I set it beside you not as proven fact but as the account Washington has never had to answer under oath – because, as we will see, the one country positioned to force that answer chose instead to look away. And whatever one makes of Hersh’s source, the hard facts around it are not in dispute: the president publicly vowed to end the pipeline, the pipeline was destroyed, and the United States was, as even Russia’s critics conceded, the principal beneficiary of its destruction.
The ally that agreed not to look
Two of the four explosions occurred inside Sweden’s own exclusive economic zone. This was the largest attack on civilian infrastructure in modern European history, and Sweden was sitting on the crime scene. It sent down divers. It recovered debris carrying explosive residue. It declared the case gross sabotage. And then, across sixteen months, it did everything within its power not to establish who was responsible.
When Denmark and Germany proposed a joint investigation team, Sweden refused to join, because doing so would require sharing material “subject to confidentiality directly linked to national security.” When it closed the investigation in February 2024, it claimed it lacked jurisdiction over an attack in international waters, and it passed its sealed findings to Germany, where secrecy laws kept them from the public. Sweden’s own state broadcaster described the outcome without a shred of illusion. It was, SVT’s analysts said, “a fairly convenient way out for Sweden,” because a real public reckoning carried “an obvious risk that authorities and senior politicians got involved and made an already bad security situation worse.”
There is no need to allege that Sweden destroyed evidence; the public record does not show it, and the charge is unnecessary. What Sweden did openly is the point. It held the physical wreckage of an attack that reshaped the energy map of the continent, and it decided not to look, in public, and it called the decision national security. An ally of the United States, sitting atop evidence that might have implicated the United States, elected to seal it and hand the box to Berlin. This is what alliance discipline looks like from the inside: not orders barked down a chain of command, but a smaller partner quietly declining to ask the question whose answer would embarrass the larger one.
The timing removes any doubt about the stakes. Sweden closed the Nord Stream file in February 2024. It joined NATO, abandoning two centuries of neutrality, on March 7 – one month later. A country does not embarrass the alliance it is in the act of joining.
The vote the Swedish people were denied
For an American audience, the next piece is the one that should land hardest, because it is the mechanism by which “the West” is manufactured and presented to you as spontaneous.
NATO expansion is sold at home as the free choice of frightened nations rushing under Washington’s umbrella. Sweden shows how that choice is actually produced. Its constitution provides for binding referendums on questions of national magnitude, and abandoning two hundred years of neutrality was such a question. When the Left Party moved to put NATO membership to a vote, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson refused. A referendum, she said, was “a bad idea.” Her reasoning was the same phrase, worn smooth from use: “There is a lot of information about national security that is confidential, so there are important issues in such a referendum that cannot be discussed and important facts that cannot be put on the table.” The foreign minister added that a vote would only polarize the public and hand Russia an opening for disinformation – the citizenry itself reclassified as a security risk.
So the most consequential foreign-policy decision in Sweden’s modern history was pushed through parliament in haste, and the people in whose name it was taken never cast a ballot. Sweden’s peace movement, one of the oldest in Europe, talked to an empty room. The umbrella did not descend on a nation that begged for it. It was raised over a nation that was not consulted, by a government that told its own people they could not be shown the reasons.
Every part of this is administered with the same key. The phrase that jailed two tourists, that sealed the pipeline, that removed a nation’s alignment from the reach of its own voters – national security – is not the description of a threat. It is the name of a locked door, and Washington has master keys to a great many of them across Europe now.
First Russia, then Ukraine, and the alliance safe either way
Here is the turn that exposes the whole apparatus.
For two years the working assumption in the American press was that Russia had blown up its own pipeline – a claim that never survived a moment’s scrutiny, since the blasts destroyed Moscow’s chief economic leverage over Europe, but which fit the mood and demanded no evidence. That story has collapsed, though not in Hersh’s direction. German prosecutors now allege the sabotage was carried out by a cell of Ukrainians who chartered a yacht in the German port of Rostock on forged documents and dove to plant the charges. One suspect, former Ukrainian officer Serhii Kuznetsov, was extradited from Italy and charged in July with coordinating the attack on behalf of Ukrainian state entities. A second, Volodymyr Zhuravlyov, was arrested in Croatia in August 2026 – on the set of a Hollywood film about the sabotage. When Poland was asked to extradite him, its court refused, ruling that destroying an enemy’s infrastructure in wartime “is not sabotage but denotes a military action.”
Two accounts, then, compete for the seabed: American divers acting on a presidential vow, or a Ukrainian cell acting for Kyiv. The accused deny it, the governments deny it, and the courts will argue it for years. But notice what both accounts share. Neither is Russia. Both point at Sweden’s own side of the war. And this is exactly why the Swedish seal was worth what it cost. A public verdict, reached in early 2024 on the threshold of accession, would have forced the alliance to admit that the party which bombed a pipeline in Sweden’s own waters was not the enemy the whole rearmament was built to fight. It was Washington, or it was Kyiv. Either way, the enemy at the bottom of the sea was a friend.
That is the logic of a war economy, and Americans have watched their own government run it for a generation. The enemy is not discovered by investigation; the enemy is fixed in advance by policy, and the facts are arranged around it or buried beneath it. When Russia could be blamed, the pipeline was proof of the Russian threat. When the evidence turned toward Washington and Kyiv, the pipeline became a German court’s problem and a Swedish silence. The threat is the product. Saab, whose executive’s cottage started this story, understood that better than anyone: since February 2022 its order backlog has climbed to 318 billion crowns and its shares rose 131 percent in seven months, and its chief executive tells investors plainly that Russia “is not interested in peace” and the rearmament “has only just begun.” The enemy the couple were mistaken for is the enemy that pays his salary, and the American taxpayer’s, and half of Europe’s now.
What the court said, before they made it forget
Semyon and Tatyana were released on August 11. A Stockholm migration court overturned their detention, and the Migration Agency soon cancelled the deportation order and the two-year Schengen ban. The agency’s finding was flat: the police had produced no evidence that the couple threatened internal security, public order, or safety. The court was plainer still. “The mere fact of Russian citizenship, and that they speak Russian,” it ruled, “cannot be grounds for a decision on detention.”
A judge in a NATO country in 2026 was obliged to state, as though announcing a discovery, that being Russian is not a crime – because the apparatus around her had already decided, on no evidence at all, that it was near enough. Even then the state would not release its grip: the couple remain under a separate preliminary investigation for trespass and, absurdly, “preparation for aggravated theft” – the flailing of a system that has seized someone and must now manufacture a reason.
The tourists were fortunate in the one way that matters. They were given a courtroom, and in a courtroom the evidence must be shown. When it was demanded, the phrase that had jailed them dissolved into a Russian accent and two hiking radios. The pipeline was never given a courtroom. The Swedish public was never given a ballot. Held to the ordinary standard of proof, the enemy Sweden needed – the enemy the whole alliance needs, and that your own government sells you in the same words – turned out to contain nothing at all. That is the point of an enemy. It is not there to be proven. It is there to keep the door locked, and to keep you from asking what Washington did on the other side of it.
A note on evidence. Seymour Hersh’s account of US responsibility for the Nord Stream attack rests on a single anonymous source and is denied by the US and Norwegian governments; it is presented here as a serious, unrefuted allegation, not as established fact. The competing German prosecution of Ukrainian suspects is ongoing, and those suspects deny involvement – responsibility remains legally unresolved. What is documented and undisputed: Biden’s public vow to “bring an end to” Nord Stream 2, the destruction of the pipelines, Sweden’s recovery of explosive-laden debris, its refusal of a joint investigation, its closure of the case on jurisdictional grounds one month before joining NATO, and the migration court’s ruling. The identification of Saab CEO Micael Johansson as the “protected person” is SVT Gävleborg’s, and includes his own on-record remarks. This article does not claim Sweden destroyed seabed evidence; the record shows selective secrecy, which is grave enough.
Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.
