Lubmin, the German village where the pipeline runs dry

Usually, the Baltic Sea is calm. Along the four kilometers of snow-covered beach that form the coastline of Lubmin, in northeast Germany, there's nothing to suggest the presence of the famous Nord Stream pipelines. However, from this town of 2,100 inhabitants in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in the former GDR, the underwater infrastructure that connects St. Petersburg, Russia, to the European continent has been providing cheap gas to all of Germany since 2012. In September 2022, a mysterious explosion damaged those facilities and buried this partnership, which had already been called into question by the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Since then, the price of gas has almost tripled in the region.