TURKEY PERSPECTIVE

Ankara watches with the nervousness of a country whose name is on the pipe. The targeted pipeline is called TurkStream -- it crosses Turkey first before reaching the Balkans. Daily Sabah, close to the Erdogan government, reports the facts with unusual balance: Vucic's sabotage accusation AND Peter Magyar's "false flag" thesis appear in the same article.

This equidistance is strategic. Turkey cannot accuse Kyiv without undermining its mediator ambitions in the Ukraine conflict. It cannot accuse Orban without weakening a partner who depends on Turkish gas infrastructure. Ankara sticks to the facts: "two large packages of explosives with detonators" found at Kanjiza, Defense Council convened in Budapest.

But the unspoken is crucial: Daily Sabah never mentions the vulnerability of the Turkish section of the pipeline. If saboteurs target the Serbian segment, what protects the 930 km of pipeline crossing Turkey under the Black Sea and overland? No Turkish outlet asks this question publicly -- the answer would open a debate on infrastructure security the government prefers to avoid.

For Ankara, TurkStream is both a geopolitical lever and an Achilles' heel. Every incident is a reminder of both sides of that coin.