The fact that this area where the incident happened, Gulf of Finland, is not fully part Finnish/Estonian territorial waters, is only because of a bilateral Finnish-Estonian agreement. This was done in the 1990's purely for benevolence towards Russia.
Russia clearly hasn't acted in such way that they should enjoy these kinds of acts of benevolence. Finland and Estonia should seriously consider retreating from this agreement.
I don't think it's just benevolence. Territorial waters also doesn't mean what many think it means - unlike planes, ships have the almost-universally recognized right to cross territorial waters (innocent passage).
But what's more relevant here are rules about straits - territorial waters that fully enclose a section of someone else's territorial waters. My understanding is that that is a big part of the reason why the two countries restrict their claim of territorial waters to leave a corridor of international waters: They want to avoid the area falling under the straits rules (transit passage), which would give Russia more rights than it has now inside the territorial waters.
> ships have the almost-universally recognized right to cross territorial waters (innocent passage).
I’m far from a maritime law expert, but destroying cables doesn’t sound like innocent passage.
That's why they detained the ship...
You saying the Finland and Estonia are guilty of russia cutting their cables because they signed an agreement?!
No, he's saying that the area is international waters because Finland and Estonia agreed it was not either's territorial waters. It doesn't have to be international waters.
NATO probably doesn't want to play that game with China's stance on the seas around them.
They make a big deal about having international waters that foreign navies can transit.
The fight in and around China's sea claims is they encroach into what the rest of the world generally agrees are other countries waters not international waters. The US would still insist it could travel through the Taiwanese or Phillipine waters China wants to claim as their own. It doesn't seem to map at all on to the situation between Finland and Estonia.
The US just doesn’t recognize China’s claims to areas (eg, Taiwan or ASEAN sea islands), so doesn’t regard those as Chinese territorial waters in the first place.
The point of US freedom of navigation exercises is to assert free transit of allied and international waters, despite Chinese claims, rather than to transit Chinese territorial waters. US warships generally avoid areas which the US views as Chinese territorial waters.
Pretty sure they are saying "more vulnerable to" not "guilty".
That narrow passage is becoming a war zone. Look at a map. It's one of Russia's few outlets to the sea.
Look at the history of Russia vs. Finland and Russia vs. Estonia. This is one of the world's most hostile choke points.
I will never understand why it has to be this way and Russia cannot be a normal country that has the goal to join the EU and be prosperous instead of doing nonsense for over a hundred years now.
A thousand years almost. As a Pole I have no faith in Russia ever becoming anything other than a savage hostile wart on this planet. It's not just their leadership. It's the nation. More accurately their culture. Their malice is a result of a rare combination of ineptitude and megalomania all in one package.
France had almost a thousand years of autocratic and aggressive tradition. Prussia/Germany too. There’s many more examples.
These things can and do change.
Your enemy is not the people of the country you hate, it’s the government. If you believe it’s the people then you are a victim to propaganda, or some other source of highly biased information.
Think about what war really is, it’s almost always a bunch of powerful people who have a disagreement with a bunch of other powerful people, who then have to trick a bunch of less powerful people to fight on their behalf. If you feel like fighting you’ve been tricked.
When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.
No, it can be both the government, and the people.
The government for all of the reasons you say.
The people because they have fallen for and accepted propaganda. Thereby leading them to support the government and its toxic narratives.
I base this opinion mostly on seeing how Russian propaganda has poisoned my mother-in-law's mind. Many media reports and various other sources have verified that she is not an isolated example, most Russians accept the same propaganda narratives.
To add to this, culture can be changed significantly in a short period. See how the USA has changed in the past 20 years, the culture has changed 2 or 3 times now with vastly different values & attitudes between each. What does each period have in common? Thick gobs of propaganda being push in every nook & cranny. And lack of critical thinking on the individual level. If country X wants to change, it is very possible, its just a matter of time, persistence & brain washing. Brain washing the youth is the easiest path, especially if in the opposite direction than what their parents/elderly want.
> See how the USA has changed in the past 20 years
I’m not sure we will ever know the complete answer, but some of this change seems to involve Russia too.
Ask any Russian if Crimea belongs to Ukraine. None of them will give you the internationally accepted answer.
So yea, it's not just the government.
As a German, I must insist that your statement is absolutely wrong. The people of a country can be your enemy. A Government like Nazi-Germany or current day Russia cannot exist without plenty of support by its people in the first place.
It's a combination. Here in the US, a large chunk of the population supported Trump, knowing full well what kind of things he would do. And another large chunk of the population are trying to stop him.
You can't blame the population as a whole. But I suspect it's uncommon for the government to be completely disconnected from (some portion of) the population's sentiments.
> But I suspect it's uncommon for the government to be completely disconnected from (some portion of) the population's sentiments.
However, that sentiment is shaped by the media available to the citizens, and in places like Russia, that means primarily by the government itself. So it's not so clear cut what the sentiment would have been had it not been for the governments propaganda.
Russia has behaved the same way under 4 radically different forms of government.
I have to admit, I've never been persuaded by this western idea that if you get rid of Putin, everything will be better.
I'm not sure what part of Russian history, or contemporary Russian society, gives people confidence in this idea?
I'm not being anti-Russian here either. I feel the same way about our nation here in the US. Even if we were to rid ourselves of Trump for instance, we would still have serious issues with a large body of people who support Trump-like policies. A wise Europe would still be obliged to be on guard against us.
Every nation has belligerent elements. Russia is no different. While, say, Putin, may be an expression of that belligerent element, I'm unconvinced that he is the belligerent element itself. I think it's foolish, potentially fatal, to make that assumption.
> I have to admit, I've never been persuaded by this western idea that if you get rid of Putin, everything will be better.
I’m mangling a quote from someone, but extreme environments breed extreme leaders.
To rise, Putin had to be better than his rivals. Presumably they were ruthless, clever, calculating etc.
I’m not sure we want to hear from his successor.
In the last 125 years Russia has been through monarchy, liberal communism (Kerensky), dictatorial communism (Lenin, Stalin), bureaucratic communism (Khrushchev to Gorbachev), liberal capitalism, oligarchy, and now dictatorship. None of them worked very well.
Whenever there's trouble, Russia's history demands a strong leader. When one arises, the strong leader soon becomes the trouble.
> Whenever there's trouble, Russia's history demands a strong leader.
By ‘strong’, do you mean violent dictator?
Maybe some of the provinces that are held by force should be allowed self determination. Maybe less violence would then be ‘needed’.
Nations make their own Logic. The US has to control or befriend the oil producing countries to maintain the petrodollar (which really maintains the dollar, which is the lynchpin of the global economy). This leads to “wars for oil” where the US doesn’t take any oil (it just needs the country to return to the dollar market - so price their oil in dollars).
Russia is a continental state so it requires its Neighbors to be weak so they cant threaten Russia. As much as it tries to escape this logic, it can’t. Russia’s core interest is to dominate and subjugate its near abroad. It has to. It’s the only way for it to become a global power.
> It has to. It’s the only way for it to become a global power.
Unless of course doing so makes them far poorer and isolates them culturally/economically, and completely embarrasses their image of having a strong military.
What is your logic or rationale for this view? I think the contrary view is easy to argue - Russia is one of the head states in BRICS which is the largest international union in the world both by population, and which has also economically surpassed the G7 as well. And militarily they're fighting a war against an endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies being armed and funded by the entirety of NATO, Europe, and a few odd balls -- and they're winning, at a cost of < 10% GDP. What other countries could match that?
I think you mean they're obstinately continuing the invasion they thought would be over in three days. Sending an endless stream of regulars, conscripts, and prisoners against people defending their homeland with drones and secondhand cold war gear.
A million casualties for a territorial stalemate is certainly one kind of winning.
They are only doing ok because of Trump’s support for Russia. Europe badly needs to get its shit together but if the US actually engaged, it could end the war promptly.
It’s a pity Putin was gifted Crimea by the west.
What are they winning?
The peace treaty will clarify that, but I think the more important thing is the establishment of a multipolar world order. That, in and of itself, can lead to conflict, but I also have some optimism that it might bring in a paradoxical peace in the same way that nuclear weapons did. The reason nukes have been good is because it makes it clear that war is unwinnable which effectively ended direct conflict between world powers. Yet of course proxy wars are alive and well with Ukraine being the king of them all. And the US may be unable to defeat Russia in this war, but it's also equally unlikely that Russia could defeat the US in a similar scenario. So, "The only winning move is not to play."
Of course this says nothing at all about relatively small regional conflicts, but in the grand scheme of things I'm far more concerned about WW3 than I am about these. That's not to understate the impact of what can (and is) happening in these sort of conflicts, but at the end of the day I don't think humanity will ever 'evolve' beyond war, and so in the mean time I think the goal should be to not end our species over something that will inevitably look like a pointless waste of life in a few decades. Keep in mind that WW1 was unironically called 'The War to End All Wars' before we started attaching an ordinal to it.
The peace treaty? What peace treaty? Multipolar world order is a buzzword that failed states like Russia certainly like to spout on their media channels to try and prove that they are not complete failures, and that in fact losing a million people to barely advance a frontline over 3 years is just and necessary. At this point they should be really worried about China just waltzing in on Siberia and taking whatever they need.
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Because then they’d have to recognise their failures. It’s like an alcoholic that keeps drinking in order to keep pushing back the reckoning of reality.
Look at the map. It's huge. In order to maintain its territorial integrity it has to act like a super power, or it has no reason to exist in its current form.
And yet somehow Canada manages to get by without all the drama. Brazil as well.
A nation state's values should align with EU for them to be part of the group. I don't think Russia would ever choose to join the union considering that even UK(which is culturally closer to Europe) left it.
For individuals, a person might ask "Why can't Rodney just behave himself" without accepting that Rodney is violently anti-social and likes to throw liquidy turds at everyone. And for species, a person might ask "Why can't spider monkeys just behave themselves" without accepting that spider monkeys are dumb animals and that's what they do.
But if I point out that this same thing applies to the Russians as a whole, then suddenly I'm racist.
When I think about this, I often come back to thinking that the societies that underwent some conflict or difficult times, absolutely cannot have a member of an older generation in charge, because the only thing they do is to continue that conflict, completely manufacturing it again if needed, just to get their "revenge". Current Russian attempt at genociding Ukrainians is all the more tragic in that the generations, that remember the previous hostilities, were almost all gone by now. Alas, that corner of the world is again poisoned for several generations ahead.
Russia did inquire about joining NATO multiple times, as far back as the 50s as the USSR, in the 90s after USSR collapsed, and then again by Putin in the 2000s. It was rebuffed each time.
Joining the EU would be somewhat nonsensical as they would gain very little from it and cede substantial sovereignty in exchange. It's the same reason places like Norway have no interest in joining the EU.
(0) GP didn't mention NATO, (1) NATO exists primarily to defend against Russian aggression, so obviously they're not allowed to join, and (2) besides the incidental details added for flavor, the actual question is why Russia insists on being broadly hostile to the world rather than broadly cooperative.
The logic of 'No of course you can't join us - we're organizing to fight you!' is a good way to create a self fulfilling prophecy. Beyond that, one of the big practical reasons NATO exists is to stop its members from fighting against each other. Europe had centuries of never-ending and ever deadlier warfare eventually culminating in WW2. NATO largely stopped that by putting them under a common umbrella. Of course a practical reality is that history has shown alliances need an external enemy, or they start to turn on themselves. If the US had foreseen had powerful China would be today, I expect Russia would have been 'enlisted' into NATO.
And I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world. They cofounded BRICS which comprises near to a majority of the world's population, and also a greater share of the world's economy than e.g. the G7. Rather the "problem", and one that applies to China too, is that they will never behave in a submissive fashion to the US. They want a multipolar world, whereas the political establishment in the US still dreams of a hegemonic world order, akin to what we had after the USSR collapsed. This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict, and as the saying goes - when two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
> 'No of course you can't join us - we're organizing to fight you!'
If only this had a more complicated explanation than something akin to schoolyard drama.
> NATO largely stopped that by putting them under a common umbrella.
You're thinking of democratization, the end of imperialism, and the elimination of aggressive regimes. Helped along by the financial devastation caused by the war.
> I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world.
Sure, unless you listen to all of their broadly hostile rhetoric or are on a Malaysian or Azerbaijani airliner or something.
> This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict
This your way of saying Russia needs to cut undersea cables and invade neighbors?
>Russia did inquire about joining NATO multiple times, as far back as the 50s as the USSR,
But Russia never inquired in good faith. It was only ever sarcastically. And had it joined NATO (perhaps because the west was stupid, which it is), then right now we'd be in the pickle of trying to reconcile one NATO member invading another (likely) NATO member, and wondering what to do about it. Russia doesn't honor its treaties, neither according to the spirit of the law nor to the letter.
Now that there's no longer any point in hiding it, we should expand NATO to include everyone that is marginally adjacent to Russia. Japan, South Korea, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan. Hell, why not throw Taiwan in.
There’s a Russian joke that Russia’s mission in the world is to show other countries how not to be.
Or if we get more serious: it's mix of imperial ambitions, feeling of been humiliated by west and desire of revenge, (cultural level) aggression, arrogance, ignorance and been sure that Russia is a special country with special pathway and superior culture and one of world superpowers (that been ignored and this is not "fair")
A couple of days after russia started war, on it's official news agency site was auto published article that was supposed to be victory lap (after all it was supposed to be 3 day special operation). It was promptly removed but not before it was archived. You can read decent translation here and it will show you some glimpses of what I wrote above https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t2vz4v/ria_news_ac...
For reference: I was born back in USSR and lived there till my early teen years. Been closely following russian media, discussion platforms, etc ever since.
Because that wouldn't benefit Putin personally as much as the status quo? And he's the decision maker. Dictators routinely make decisions where they hurt their country to keep a much bigger slice of the pie for themselves...
A “normal country” like the UK or Hungary or Switzerland?
Really though it’s because Russia mostly has nothing going for its millions of people except petrochemical exports.
The short, uncouth but Occam’s Razor answer is because Putin has a micropenis and/or his parents were incredibly abusive towards him.
Russia would first have to be a "normal country". It would need an educated populace and a non-extractive (manufacturing or services) economy. It suffers from both a resource curse and Dutch disease. It is difficult to form a middle class that's independent of state institutions and employment. It has poor demographics and brain drain. It has no independent elites (academics, journalists, judges, business people), so the only restorative force in the society is brutal punishment for non-alignment with a cult of personal power.
Even if Putin wanted to join the E.U., the economy, social structures and institutions, and uneducated voting populace wouldn't allow it to be stable enough to join.
Russia at this point can't even be a successful authoritarian state like China. It's hard to say that it will never be a democracy, but those with a memory of the 1990's find that idea traumatic. Looking far forward in time, eventually global oil independence and demographic decline may force economic reform.
It would need an educated populace
How do you measure that?
It's not just literacy, although that's nearly required to engage in the public discourse. It's really more like indoctrination. The voting populace has to have an implicit belief in public institutions, believe that attempting to vote or losing a vote is not cataclysmic (not a great reason for violence or retribution), and have patience that the system will gradually correct with future votes rather than require a authoritarian to restore order. I think you can also add a distaste for cults of personalities, and a willingness to vote in disagreement with religious leaders. Lastly, voters have to have a shared delusion that their vote matters, which it practically does not (economic value of voting is negative for the individual).
Russia likely doesn't meet these requirements, and the U.S. has had many failed democratic experiments in places like Afghanistan where this culture is missing.
I think the reason Russia today is relentless anti-West is rooted the post-Soviet era in many ways characterized by (the alcoholic) Boris Yeltsin. Wikipedia gives the summary: "Yeltsin oversaw the transition of Russia's command economy into a capitalist market economy by implementing economic shock therapy, market exchange rate of the ruble, nationwide privatization, and lifting of price controls. Economic downturn, volatility, and inflation ensued. Amid the economic shift, a small number of oligarchs obtained most of the national property and wealth, while international monopolies dominated the market." and I'd add millions of people died (not an exageration).
The Putin regime began with Putin using military force to arrest any disloyal oligarchs while formulating his anti-Western ideology. But sequence of event explains why most Russians today have zero faith/interest in joining the Western World.
Yes: Notice that without the Baltic Sea, which is effectively closed, and the Crimean region of Ukraine, Russia is not a European naval power, and experts have long argued (afaik) not much of a European power.
Similarly, notice how much they invested in their naval base in Syria on the Mediterranean (though I'm not sure of its status now, and they oddly seemed to abandon Assad, who provided it to them).
More critically, think of a war: How do they trade by sea by sea? Their economy could be choked off, restricted to Pacific trade and trains across Asia to the population centers. They are in a corner.
That or the Suwalki gap. They're both flashpoints.
Yep, if Russia wants to expand its conflict against Europe, Narva in Estonia is most likely place for it. Over 90% of its population is ethnic Russian, and it's located right next to the Russian border. It's the perfect place to send some armed "separatists" to see how NATO responds.
My bet is that it'll happen sometime between 2029-2035, after UK, France and Germany have had their general elections, where populist parties with more pro-Russian stances are likely to gain power.
> Yep, if Russia wants to expand its conflict against Europe, Narva in Estonia is most likely place for it. Over 90% of its population is ethnic Russian, and it's located right next to the Russian border. It's the perfect place to send some armed "separatists" to see how NATO responds.
Fortunately while close, the border runs along a fairly wide river with just a single bridge across, so logistically somewhat complicated to supply with heavy equipment from the Russian side. At least covertly.
But definitely a scenario that needs to be considered.
> logistically somewhat complicated to supply with heavy equipment from the Russian side
Little green men. Crimea is an island.
Estonia has recently announced that they will implement a shoot-to-kill policy without warnings at the border.
Absolutely necessary. Unfortunate. Tragic. Avoidable. But given Moscow’s playbook, necessary.
An island with a Russian naval base.
There are 5 road bridges and 1 railway bridge in the vicinity of Narva.
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Narva is a bad spot, from there it would be a long trek South. Doing it just North of the Polish town of Suwalki would allow a pincer movement that cuts off 3 EU countries in one go from a land bridge. That's also why it is right now one of the heaviest militarized zones in Europe.
Narva is much less interesting in that sense.
Svalbard is another possible obvious target. It has a Russian population, is quite some distance from the mainland, and is essentially undefended.
It would be easy to set up a Russian military presence, and it would be hard to dislodge it from a distance without considerable effort and expense.
This doesn't seem that useful? Svalbard would require significant, continued supply. Unless the Russian navy is able to own the Barrents Sea, any force on Svalbard could just be waited out. Once the diesel is out, the defenses go down and they freeze. Not to mention that it is well in range for medium range ballistic misses from Greenland, Iceland and the Nordics.
In 2025+ you also need to count in deniable accident inducing naval drones - both surface and underwater types. So their position would be even more untenable
I honestly don't know much about warfare, but that seems like a pretty insane move to me.
First, it assumes the people of Belarus is willing to start a war with NATO and it's very grumpy neighbor to the south. There isn't a world in which the Suwałki gap it cut off without strikes and an invasion of Belarus. Lukashenko might want it, but given the last "election" there will likely be a 5th, 6th, and 7th column waiting for guns to be carried over the border from Poland and Ukraine.
Second, while Kaliningrad might be defensible (though I doubt that), the Baltic Sea is not. Sweden, Denmark, and Germany will shut down any ships entering and leaving the Baltic. Ukraine and Turkey cut off the Black Sea, and the Russian fleet is left in Murmansk (which is likely immediately destroyed), and Vladivostok... which as a single port as mostly useless, and can be mostly cut off in the Sea of Japan.
I just really don't see a way that Russia takes any NATO territory without the entire thing being a psyop against NATO not responding via far-right isolationists, and we're not there yet, or as an assist to help China take Taiwan, which likely means world war, and we're all fucked.
Invading Ukraine was also a pretty insane move, if insanity is a pre-requisite then that makes it more likely, not less...
>First, it assumes the people of Belarus is willing to start a war with NATO
I think there is a more than 50% chance that Belarus is reintegrated in some form into Russia within this century. It's very clear that there is no plan for sovereignty post-Lukashenko and all of the opposition(like in Russia) has been exiled(so powerless). This is probably the 2nd biggest miss of EU foreign policy in the 21st century after Ukraine, they basically put Lukashenko in the same basket as Putin even though up until 2020 he did everything he could to maintain his sovereignty and got hit with horrible sanctions. But IMO it's too late now.
>Second, while Kaliningrad might be defensible (though I doubt that)
Russian military doctrine is kind of nebulous, but the one thing it is extremely clear on is that Kaliningrad will be defended using nuclear weapons. Exactly because it's basically not defensible using conventional means.
The point is you don't have to attack Kaliningrad. A siege trivially collapses the place. The place is wildly vulnerable on all sides despite the short distance to Belarus. This isn't a "the Kerch Bridge is outside of missle range" situation. Literally every way in and out of the enclave can be exploded on a daily basis, even without striking the enclave itself.
So if the idea is to invade the Baltics, but "not allow an invasion of Kaliningrad, without nuclear retaliation"... well then we've going to have a nuclear war and everyone loses, simply because you can't retake the Baltics without Kaliningrad, and NATO isn't going to allow the Baltics to be lost.
> The point is you don't have to attack Kaliningrad. A siege trivially collapses the place.
This is hilarious as naval blockade by itself is an act of war.
What??? The entire point is that this would happen — in response — to a Russian invasion of the Suwałki gap.
Actually I think Lukasenko only plays dump & wants to wait it out, expecting Belarus to be left standing in a quite good position once Russia goes down the failed state route.
> I just really don't see a way that Russia takes any NATO territory without the entire thing being a psyop against NATO not responding via far-right isolationists, and we're not there yet, or as an assist to help China take Taiwan, which likely means world war, and we're all fucked.
I mean that's really the setup.
1. Get America to move towards a more isolationist setup / unwilling to help Europe or Taiwan. This is already in motion politically and via social media operations.
2. Get America stuck in a conflict with Iran. This is ramping up.
3. China takes Taiwan. Probably in the next 2-5 years.
4. Russia takes the Baltics and starts to carve further into Europe.
My further total crackpot theory on all of this is that most of this has been agreed upon by all the major powers involved.
1. Russia gets to claim over Europe in the future.
2. China gets Taiwan and control of Africa + APAC.
3. US gets control of North America and South America. This culminates in the annexation of Greenland once Russia takes Europe. This is the agreed upon transaction for America to back out of Russo-European affairs and China-Taiwan affairs. Canada and Mexico eventually are also merged into the US unwillingly but without any major allies left there isn't much to prevent it.
> 4. Russia takes the Baltics and starts to carve further into Europe.
They have chewed up their army and lost a navy to a country without ships. How will they fight another war?
Russia started the full scale invasion with 190 000 troops (out of 1 M total active military personnel). Today they have 700 000 deployed in Ukraine. Casualties are probably 200 000 killed and up to a 1 M injured. At the same time they now have 1.3 M total active military personnel. Estimate that 1/3 of the injured are bad enough that they aren’t effective as soldiers. That is 500k unrecoverable losses, and a military that is 300k larger, so they have recruited another 800k to be where they are today.
If they stop fighting actively, then it becomes easier to recruit again without mobilising. Give it a few years and they could have another go at some other location. They clearly don’t care about casualties. Maybe not against NATO, but Georgia, Azerbaijan etc. And so it could continue for a very long time.
”Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
Citations for numbers from Claude, that are all best estimates.
In your mind what does a “Russian claim over Europe” mean. Do you really imagine a country with one third the population of the EU is going to dominate the EU + UK?
It's not about what we think, it is about what they think. They got away with it for 50+ years and they want that back.
There are biggest protests in Iran in years & they lost a war with Israel recently - I don't see them being a problem in a long term & with a bit of luck their horrendous regime that regularly slaughters their own citizens might be gone.
The US somehow subjugating 180 million people is delusional. And tens of millions of current US citizens would probably side with Canada and Mexico.
Those citizens can't even side with the US, why should they side with foreign countries?
Maybe they do side with the US, just not with its ‘leader’?
<<side with Canada and Mexico>>
can confirm!
US annexing Greenland is just an excuse for US to leave NATO, Trump or Vance might do it if Putin attacks Europe, and he will when China attacks Taiwan.
With 10 undersea cables damaged in the Baltic 2023-2025, it’s obvious a different part of the government needs to become involved. Acting for your national security doesn’t need to (shouldn’t) mean there is no trial.
Don't even need to click to know it's the Russians.
That's what I said about nordstream.
Turns out it was the Ukrainians! I'm past even guessing at this point...
I never understand how people bought the propaganda on this. Why would anybody think Russia would blow up a pipeline that they spent years and billions of dollars building? It requires completely rejecting all logic. And then Western countries completely stonewalling calls for an independent international investigation at the UN - why would we do that?
I also very much doubt it was the Ukrainians in by themselves - as blowing up heavily reinforced pipes 80m under the water is a rather extreme task, but at least they would have had a reasonable motive. Russia was fueling the German economy, and Ukraine would have had a viable concern about Germany prioritizing their own economy over Ukraine. OTOH it seems somewhat obvious at this point that Russia would not have threatened to turn off the gas, so it was a terrible miscalculation by whoever did it.
It was ultimately caused by Russia either way.
I assumed it was China. They both enjoy this activity.
Yeah, but it's a bit far away for China. They prefer harassing their closer neighbors.
In 2023, Balticconnector gas pipeline between Estonia and Finland was broken by a Chinese ship Newnew Polar Bear dragging its anchor in the sea floor.
Every single ship in/out of St Petersburg goes via the Gulf of Finland. All those ships will be "Russian" (have stopped in Russia). It doesn't mean they're "Russian". Owner, charterer, flag, crew can all have very different nationalities.
Which part or combination makes them "Russian", in the sense of "the Russian state asked asked the ship to harm Finnish infrastructure, and they actually did it"?
You can lazily speculate about the aggressive, warmaking nation (that illegally annexed Crimea, is currently at war with Ukraine, is regularly sending submarines, ships, drones, jets into the territories of its neighbours) all you like... but if you want to be able to prosecute them, you need to be able to show evidence of the Russian state ordering this action, and that the cable damage was actually caused by that ship. Where is your evidence?
The crew on these ships are usually all Russians, the ship is often registered in Cayman, Panama or somewhere else. These ships often sail under a third nationality, but when the ships are seized, only complaints are filed from Russian lawyers. Take from that what you will.
Is every American carrying out American government policy? It's a big stretch.
Every American destroying submarine cables might be, yes.
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This is the court of public opinion, not a court or law. For better or worse, evidentiary standards are much lower.
The court of public opinion is a really shitty court to apply to potentially criminal damage that occurred well outside the area of interest and knowledge for 99.99% of said public. The standards are shit, the outcomes are shit (bad idea when the ramifications are huge).
If you don't declare war, you don't get those emergency powers. You only get peacetime powers.
Russia loves to go right up to the line, and then cross it a little bit, just to antagonise you. But unless you're willing to be the instigator of WW3, you'll stick to peacetime powers and peacetime courts with peacetime standards of evidence
>But unless you're willing to be the instigator of WW3, you'll stick to peacetime powers and peacetime courts with peacetime standards of evidence
Clearly this will need to change somewhat, if the other side wants to engage in hybrid war tactics. Nothing new, Cold War was a thing.
But what if the other side - Russia - does wartime tactics without having formally declared war with NATO? Why do they get to keep this privilege?
Because they're an authoritarian shithole with a strongman leader who openly murders dissenters, personally controls all branches of government, controls the military and has people arrested just for holding up blank sheets of paper. He can pretend the country is not at war when it clearly is, and suffer no consequence, because nobody can replace him or even censure him without the country completely collapsing. When he eventually dies, the ensuing power vacuum will make the entire country a basket case. It's a dead country walking.
Do you want to make your country such a nightmare country, so you can also cheat like they do?
No, I want my country to have democratic rule of law on the inside (including when dealing with normal criminals of any kind, including murderers).
But when dealing with an outside state-level aggressor, I want my country to be be a cunning, hypocritical, powerful strongman.
The distinction under what mode a certain event should be treated should be pretty straightforward and can be determined using democratic means, e.g. a normal judge ruling "I rule this cable cutting incident to be an act of state-sponsored aggression against our democracy" (which would allow the alphabet agencies, special ops etc to "do their thing" with no repercussions whatsoever.)
for example:
1) a murder happens between a husband and wife, two normies, after lengthy, normal court proceedings the proof who did it is not 100% conclusive, accused person goes free
2) a murder of an anti-russian political dissident happens, a russian ex speznas officer is caught in relation to the event -> he "disappears" one day and the case is closed
I believe this is the only way to "win" this cold war.
People in other places don't have rights, and lives, and deserve freedom? If they don't, you don't. If they can be ruled out, so can you. Freedom and rights only exist if they are fundamentally universal.
Which powerful countries abide by this?
Sadly, it seems a fiction.
Yes Trump was right about everything and Make America Great Again! I also want what Russia has! The biggest ball(room)!
No declarations of War has been needed for decades, internationally you only get disadvantages from doing that. Russia hasn't declared war to Ukraine, neither has Ukraine to Russia, so what.
People love this 'expediency' for what they want, but once you destroy the rule of law and reason generally, nothing protects you.
You're standing in a forest, lighting a forest fire to kill the other guy. There is lots of history about this most fundamental error.
Assuming it is state-sponsored sabotage…why? Whats the outcome they want? Is it just turning up the heat in the region?
Same reason they infiltrate airspace duringtraining, fly drones over airports, run submarines through ports.
Testing limits and tolerance, threatening what they could do in a real attack. Creating econocic pain in retaliation for support with a strong alibi to blame.
Boarding and detaining is a new escalation. How many cables cut before we consider military reaction? 3? 10? all of them?
Various parts of Europe keep announcing extraordinarily expensive new drone defense systems, so you'd hope so (or that the announcements are a bluff)
Government buying more fire trucks is a poor measure for increased incidence of actual fires. They might just be signaling, fall for marketing, and lots of other things. Governments are run by people, and they are as fallible as any rando on HN.
If you want to research this, the terms to look for is something like "Russian hybrid warfare goals and objectives in Europe" (can also try greyzone warfare).
Put simply, the goal is to add friction to anything NATO tries to do to aid Ukraine, and/or generally to improve its posture against Russia, while also trying to crack apart and erode both broad based and elite support for acting against Russia.
Scaring people, distraction, etc.
In the grand scheme, repairing the cables and supporting Ukraine will cost less and hurt Russia more than escalating tentions in the Baltic sea.
> Is it just turning up the heat in the region?
The EU and US were an unassailable bastion of freedom, peace, and prosperity, with arguably the most solid political foundations in history in democracy, and the most solid alliance in history in NATO.
How do you defeat such a place? You turn up the heat, to describe it very generally. It means, n a sense, radicalizing the population, a classic solution to Russia's problem. That's what terrorists do: How do you cause the US to shoot itself in the foot: terrorize people into thinking they are unsafe and overreacting (even though 9/11 affected on small area of one city).
One way they turn up the heat is to spread ethnic hatred, social distrust, embrace of violence, and abandonment of those things that prevent those maladies: universal human rights, democracy, rule of law, etc.
You can see it in this thread: People rooting for warfare, abandonment of the rule of law, etc. - all by some minor, cost-effective actions, like cutting a cable.
The expensive action and infinitely more consequential action - the invasion of Ukraine - remarkably doesn't create the same outrage. That outrage would trigger the obviously best solution: Guaranteeing unlimited material and political support for Ukraine until they win the war.
That is, it's remarkable if you don't appreciate information dominance, especially with social media companies either abandoning all responsibility or openly aiding the radicalization. Russia can create radicalization directly too.
> You turn up the heat
Agreed it's what they're doing but this looks more like "turning everyone against you". And you want your enemies to underestimate you (like Song or Kievan Rus' underestimated the Mongols) but the world doesn't underestimate Russia. Maybe it could have but WW2 and appeasement are still too fresh in memory.
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They want to test how quickly the cables get repaired and what vessels do the repairs etc.
Simple, they know there will be no consequences and Europe will keep buying their gas.
You realize that gas imports to Europe from Russia is down 80+% since pre invasion?
Russia is obviously having quite a hard time from sanctions caused by their actions.
Lock em up, sell thier property. Rinse and repeat.
Lock em up, sell thier property. Rinse and repeat.
Works for small and medium-sized private companies. Doesn't work for major nations like Russia.
Doing as you suggest is like writing parking tickets for delivery trucks. They don't care. It's just a cost of doing business.
Russia needs to work with the private sector to buy and crew the ships, and there is only so many ships they can buy and lose before it's not worth the money or hassle for either Russia or their private partners.
This assumes everyone agrees with sanctions. Various countries don’t and Russian exports are flowing.
It will be worth for Russia as long as the rust buckets they are using for the purpose are cheaper than cable repairs and knock-on effects from whatever downtime, and the uncertainty it brings to the West.
Why wouldn't it work? The oligarchs would certainly be a bit upset if they lost their yachts, mansions, sports teams, and everywhere else they keep their wealth away from Putin.
That’s all been confiscated already.
All?
That doesn’t seem likely.
It's been repeatedly demonstrated that the oligarchs are just as expendable as the ships.
Mine the Gulf of Finland, problem solved. This may create other problems but hey Finland is part of NATO now.
Maybe it's time to cut Russia out of the West's internet altogether.
I was thinking that too, but is it even possible? Russia must have interconnects via Belarus and other countries like Turkey. Maybe China?
The half that Russia hasn't already blocked, anyways.
Russians are blocked, Russia isn't.
Two other cable cuts/"damages" happened around the same dates. Two separate Arelion-owned cables between Sweden/Estonia and Finland/Estonia.
[...] two of their submarine cables – one between Sweden and Estonia and one between Estonia and Finland – have been damaged. The first cable was damaged on December 30th and the second on December 31st.
(Arelion is AS1299/formerly known as Telia Carrier. The name change happened because it's now owned by a Swedish government-managed infrastructure-focused pension fund.)
I wonder how the insurance works in this situation.
It's pretty obvious what's happening here.
The response needs to be forceful: seize and auction off the ships. There needs to be sufficient deterrent to actually stop this from happening.
> There needs to be sufficient deterrent to actually stop this from happening
One ship might be considered a reasonable pawn to sacrifice. I'd go further: require that any ships passing through the strait to be bonded at some eye-watering amount like 10x the price of the ship plus the repair costs of the cable. Make it so if the cable is cut, you make a profit.
Only works if you find someone to pay. I listened to a lengthy (German) podcast about international maritime law. To sum it up: you can’t do that much, because you won’t find the responsible person/company/state.
> German podcast
There was a Planet Money episode touching on Maritime law:
It was about Russian tankers breaking the sanctions, but with a well put explanation of why we can't just stop these ships even with extreme confidence in their fraudulency.
> why we can't just stop these ships
To be clear, why we don’t want to. Freedom of navigation makes all of us tremendously richer, even if it permits such fuckery.
Every great power has, at this point, rejected the notion in limited contexts. And if you’re not concerned about trashing trade, there is no incoherence to ignoring these rules.
In a hypothetical future where sailing under flags of convenience becomes untenable, all the legitimate merchant vessel owners would rush to register in the US or China. Those vessels would still be able to sail anywhere unmolested. Outside of a few pirate gangs, no one would be stupid enough to screw with them and risk kinetic retaliation. This might increase shipping costs by a few percent.
Russia can bluster and threaten but their navy is weak and shrinking. Most of their commissioned warships never venture far from port. Outside of their territorial waters they have minimal capability to protect their own merchant vessels or interdict anyone else's sea lines of communication.
> all the legitimate merchant vessel owners would rush to register in the US or China
The US can't afford to field the navy necessary to back this ams hasn't been able to for many decades
> US can't afford to field the navy necessary to back this ams hasn't been able to for many decades
This is nonsense. The U.S. Navy de facto guarantees freedom of navigation today. Globally.
If we switched to a national system, our Navy wouldn’t literally escort U.S.-flagged ships. Its military would just need to enforce the threat that you get bombed if you fuck with America.
We’d save money switching to a big-stick model. (I think we’d be poorer for it in the long run. But if you’re playing chess and your opponent machete, you’re not going to find any winning moves on the board.)
> Its military would just need to enforce the threat that you get bombed if you fuck with America.
Panting a Russian flag on the side of a crappy tanker is enough to get the US to back off.
Russia can do what it likes with current US leadership.
> Panting a Russian flag on the side of a crappy tanker is enough to get the US to back off
Has the White House rolled over?
I can’t see any update that says they have engaged.
So yes… I think.
> can’t see any update that says they have engaged. So yes… I think.
I wouldn't be suprised if Trump chickens out. But this logic is terrible.
The same pursuit that has been happening for days continues to happen. That the pattern has not changed in reaction to new stimulus isn't proof that the stimulus worked.
Just stumbled on the below link - Russia has directly asked the US to leave the ship alone. It’s going to be hard to duck this one.
> Russia has directly asked the US to leave the ship alone
Yes. I am aware. Flags are being painted, registries updated and sternely-worded letters sent. The ship sails on. So do its pursuers.
> It’s going to be hard to duck this one
It really shouldn't be.
Just board the ship. Putin makes noises about international law. A D.C. lawyer insists that no, the vessel was stateless when found. And assuming there isn't like fissile material or a senior IRGC liaison on board, everyone grumbles and moves on.
Trump and Putin have a complicated relationship. But about the single thing that this will not depend on will be what maritime law says the U.S. should do. (And I think the legal arguments for seizure are on America's side on this one.)
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I am formerly a Marine. This a rather silly notion and I think you should back your claim up with some evidence. Even with as much damage as Donald Trump has done to the US's military preparedness and hegemony around the globe no other fleet operates like the Marine Expeditionary Units. No other fleet can respond to any critical location in less than 24 hours. Add the Coast Guard for near-CONUS and partnered patrols and the US still maintains dominance both at home and abroad.
Nations, like China, are catching up but largely because of two outsized factors:
- The US for some time has not been able to produce ships at home, at scale, and at cost. This is more of a slow burn because the fleet has been kept up to date for the most part. Eventually, new ships need to be built at home.
- Donald Trump has done damn near everything he can to install lackey's within the military, which reduces the military's top decision making acumen down to yes-men to a 79 year old geriatric patient.
Russia's fleet, on the other hand, is an aging joke. It is where we will be if we continue electing fascists that install Martians like Hegseth.
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As we are seeing, "can't" is a really strong word.
Yes. I meant it more as "can't _just_", we can do it but need to account for serious ramifications in doing so at scale.
> (German) podcast about international maritime law
Russia isn’t even pretending to follow international maritime law. China hasn’t for a decade. And now America is being creative with its interpretations.
> And now America is being creative with its interpretations.
The US follows the rules carefully when Russia encourages it to.
Most of the water isn't internal.. getting in and out of the baltic sea goes past Sweden/Denmark.
But we probably have promised not to blockade ships in some conventions. And little Denmark (or Sweden) do not benefit from setting a precedence that conventions can be broken.
Getting payback is easy though: support Ukraine.
There is no such convention as far as I can tell.
Most nations have either signed the UNCLOS to otherwise agreed to follow most of those rules. This includes the right of innocent passage through territorial waters. Of course if a vessel engages in hostile acts then they're no longer entitled to exercise that right.
So escort and inspect then.
There is. Its the treaty of Versailles. And it reaffirmed the Copenhagen Convention of 1857.
Or at least a responsible person with money to pay for it. There are plenty of cases of some poor sailor getting stuck with the bill and forced to live on the abandoned boat as a result.
You can always make the regulations such that they're actually effective. You could require the company providing the bond be from a reputable country, for example.
Still I don't see an issue - basically you either pay the armed coast gard cutter that stands in your way or you don't go through the straight. If you don't cause any trouble, the other cutter on the other end will pay you back. No money, no transit - unless you really like being boarded.
Regardless of what specific rules could be set you have to consider rules of engagement and potential escalation. What happens if a Russian merchant vessel (either legitimately flagged or shadow fleet) refuses to cooperate? Do you use force to stop them? What if they're being escorted by a Russian warship or combat aircraft?
You put mines and wait. We need to stop with “what if escalation” mantra when it was always Russians escalating.
Put mines where? How do you prevent neutral vessels from hitting them? What happens when they inevitably break loose in a storm and drift away? Naval mines are quite effective for closing down a body of water in an unrestricted hot war but we haven't reached that stage yet. EU and NATO countries still want to be able to use the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland for their own purposes.
You haven't really thought this plan through.
Smart mines. There are thousands of them deployed already.
Huh? What are you even talking about? Which models specifically? And how sure are you that they can reliably discriminate between Russian vessels versus others that look and sound identical?
You haven't really thought this plan through.
> And how sure are you that they can reliably discriminate between Russian vessels versus others that look and sound identical?
Based on recent events, even people struggle to tell what is Russian and what isn’t.
If these ships are independent operators being influenced by Russia, seizing the ship will be a significant consequence because the next time Russia will have a harder time convincing a crew to sabotage a cable.
> pretty obvious what's happening here
Good start. Then turn off Russia’s cable that runs via Finland [1] and make vague threats about (a) seizing shadow-fleet vessels in the Baltics and (b) how vulnerable Russia’s cable to Kaliningrad [2] would be to careless anchors.
All the while: start setting up non-cable based back-up bandwidth for if Russia severs these cables in advance of invasion.
That's fine. Let Russia escort ships that then break cables. It'll make it more obvious it's deliberate, and provide a reason for blockade and confrontation.
And then NATO will obliterate Russia's Baltic fleet before the sun rises.
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A hot NATO-Russia engagement ends with a few sunrises at 3am all over Europe, USA, and Russia. Not a thing to joke about or cheer.
I'm not sure the Motherland is really all that strong these days, Dmitry.
careful, Brigadier they can introduce a foriegn substance into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard core commie works.
You'd think their escalation threshold would be something a bit more existential than a few more rustbuckets at the bottom of the ocean.
Saber rattling and nuclear threats always benefits someone.. who?
Remember when invading Russian territory was a red line that could cause a nuclear retaliation? And then Ukraine went into Russia and Russia responded with a pretty bog standard conventional force?
Russia isn't gonna fling nukes if the West doesn't first. Putin and co have no interest in Moscow being glassed.
> And then Ukraine went into Russia and Russia responded with a pretty bog standard conventional force?
Standard North Koreans?
Your point stands but Russia is happy to drag in anyone it can. The US and EU letting Ukraine bleed out is shameful.
But Ukraine isn’t NATO.
Red line still pretty intact.
Well maybe the Russians should stop joking about it if it’s so serious. How many times do I have to hear from Medvedev about how Russia will rain nuclear hellfire on London?
Fuck around, you’ll find out. These guys are wimps. If they want to end the world, so be it. China would be destroyed too.
All the while his very own daughter lives in London. These threats are really just that, nothing to take overly serious.
“ If they want to end the world, so be it.”
This is not a way rational adults make decisions. I truly hope you are not a voter in any democratic nuclear-armed country.
You’re not thinking about things clearly. You can’t live as a hostage. Otherwise “do what we say or nukes” until you wind up a slave. Better off dead.
If Russia doesn’t like it they can stop with the dumb threats.
Happy to suggest some books on how cold War was actually navigated by both parties without destroying the planet. Not to spoil the ending, but at no point in time was "if we do this and then they blow us all up, so be it" a strategy
To be clear Russia is threatening to do things (blow us up) and the result would be them being blown up too (along with the commie Chinese).
So if that’s their strategy, I’ll call their bluff every time. No point in the human race existing if the result is “do what we say, else we nuke you”. Bet
If someone is threatening to end the world over every issue, then at some stage you need to call their bluff or you'll just be taken advantage of.
If the USA threatens to nuke Russia if they don't leave Ukraine tomorrow, would you be giving these same sage warnings to Russia?
The best way to avoid confrontation is to have an irrational adult at the helm, then all calculated escalation bets are off and you tend to just not play.
We’ve got one of those in the US but it turns out the tradeoffs are terrible.
Just bend over for Putins liberators then. There’s nothing that can be done. Let them take what they want? No thanks.
By definition anything is preferable to global nuclear holocaust, so I'm not sure where you want to go with your argument.
Can I have your house if I threaten to nuke you? Assume I have a nuke. How about your wife?
If the nuke threat isn't reasonable and proportional then you must ignore it.
Nukes are for existential risks. Which is 1) enemy nukes, and 2) invasion of the capital.
Anything else is bluster and coercion.
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I am glad you didn’t run the Cold War.
Edit: by that I mean, with that attitude we would just have never developed nukes, or given the nukes to the Russians preemptively, because who wants nuclear war, right? Anything is better than that.
If your plan is one that ends with the end of the world and billions dead, it's a bad plan. Attacking strawpersons doesn't make it better. You need a better plan.
> one that ends with the end of the world and billions dead
The point is it doesn’t. Ukraine is on its way to wiping out Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It’s pure posturing to pretend Moscow is stupid enough to end its existence over a naval battle, much less simply credible threats of one.
> The point is it doesn’t.
That statement doesn't really amount to much given the risk. I think we need something far more convincing; and many experts clearly think nuclear war is a risk.
> many experts clearly think nuclear war is a risk
Look up what they said would trigger a nuclear war at the start of the invasion. Many of those things have already happened.
Imagine Trump threatens to nuke Russia if they don't leave Ukraine tomorrow, according to your logic they shouldn't run the risk of a nuclear exchange and Russia should retreat.
Is this correct?
Spot on. Recognising Putin’s fake lines normalizes a nuclear response to conventional tactics. That path opens to a future where it would be irrational not to constantly threaten nuclear holocaust for minor military advantage. And in that world, someone will eventually miscalculate.
Sounds like your criticism is better leveled at the country threatening nuclear holocaust if someone sneezes at them.
It's not yet demonstrated Russia will make the jump from a limited conventional confrontation to an all out nuclear war, even as its territory is under daily attack from a non-nuclear country.
It's not demonstrated, sure, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. This isn't rolling out an update to the text editor.
I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed…
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There's literal war ongoing already, no extra excuse is needed, only political will.
There's a reason countries like to fight proxy wars over real wars, they cost money not (their own) lives.
That is...disturbing.
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I suspect the price of a ship compared to economic damages caused by the cut cable is negligible. This is what russia calls "assymetric war". The response should be more economic sanctions.
There's generally enough cables that cutting one doesn't completely shut down some area of web traffic, it just gets slower, so it's hard to say.
But yeah, if Russia keeps it up, just blockade the Baltic Sea for ships heading to Russian ports.
Economic sanctions won't prevent the FSB from paying off ship captains to do these things. Seizing ships and imprisoning captains might provide some amount of deterrent. Clearly only way economic sanctions will have a behavioral impact on Russia is if the effects are so bad it triggers revolution which has its own dangers. Direct consequences for the people in the sphere of these actions is more prudent.
Europe has always been known for being governed by the rule of law. If we now start breaking laws and rights, especially regarding property/ownership, this will strongly backfire in the future. This can quickly become a slippery slope towards Willkürsjustiz. It is exactly the same as with the Russian assets held in Belgium at Clearstream. Selling them is a no-no.
Russia has already carried out chemical attacks on UK soil, used radioactive poisoning in London, sabotaged rail infrastructure in Poland, and launched cyberattacks against German air traffic control.[1]
Russia supplied the Buk missile system that shot down MH17, killing 298 civilians, most of them Europeans. Putin eliminates political opponents, like Alexei Navalny, who died in custody days before a possible release.
European leaders may be passive and slow, but what is making the situation truly dangerous, is the dictator-jealousy fueled encouragement and indulgence of the current U.S. administration, and all its sycophants, which got to the point of publicly applauding a dictator on U.S. soil.
That behavior legitimizes aggression, emboldens Moscow, and directly undermines European security, and is making thinks really, really, sketchy right now.
> what is making the situation truly dangerous, is the dictator-jealousy fueled encouragement and indulgence of the current U.S. administration, and all its sycophants, which got to the point of publicly applauding a dictator on U.S. soil.
I personally think there's a more direct link between the US administration and Russia, in line with the rest of your points. I think it's more than "dictator-jealousy fueled encouragement", although what that "more" is I'm not entirely sure, and I'm not sure the differences between the possibilities matters in the end.
I really think it's hard not to read [about] Foundations of Geopolitics and the history of Viktor Yanukovych, the ties between the latter and Trump, and not conclude Russia's tendrils in the US, England, and elsewhere are far deeper than is generally acknowledged in the press.
I lost a lot of trust in most media to cover this issue appropriately when people in the UK started mysteriously dying and zipping themselves in body bags, and the coverage was a collective shrug. Why they would report something like that and then with a straight face conclude an article with "police say there's no evidence of foul play" is beyond me. But then again how the Mueller investigation got spun as an exoneration is also beyond me as well.
I know it's often seen as dismissive or shallow to blame the media for things, but I really do place a huge proportion of the blame for our current mess, at least in the US, on news outlets and media soft-pedaling what's been happening for the last 10 years. A lot of what people trust became propaganda, and a lot of the rest of it chased that audience around for clicks.
Regarding the spy in a bag -- the person involved was a GCHQ mathematician seconded to the SIS and studying Russia, whose "naked, decomposing remains were found in the bath of the main bedroom's en-suite bathroom, inside a red sports bag that was padlocked from the outside, with the keys inside the bag. [...] Inconclusive fragments of DNA components from at least two other individuals were found on the bag. A forensic examination of Williams's flat has concluded that there was no sign of forced entry or of DNA that pointed to a third party present at the time of his death.
Scotland Yard's inquiry also found no evidence of Williams's fingerprints on the padlock of the bag or the rim of the bath, which the coroner said supported her assertion of "third-party involvement" in the death. Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt said it was theoretically possible for Williams to lower himself into the bag without touching the rim of the bath. A key to the padlock was inside the bag, underneath his body"
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams)
It's absolutely mad, but remember this happened in 2010 -- before Russia did many of those bad things you mention. It wouldn't surprise me if a combination of political pressure and police incompetence made this go away.
I'm going to link this one again because I think it flew below the proverbial radar
But does it matter? 77 million Americans knowingly voted a convicted felon and court adjudicated sexual assaulter back into the presidency instead of a jail cell. From those, about 40 million were women, fully aware that a jury found him liable for sexual assault, and that multiple judges affirmed the verdict.
The majority of Americans saw criminality, sexual violence, and contempt for the law and decided that was acceptable leadership. :-))
Next election please let the Democratic Party campaign on tangible policies, not just ad hominem - even if true.
Did we watch the same debate?
Fuck that, the American people have shown they do not care about nerds citing policies. They care about narratives.
Run with the ad Homs if that’s the narrative needed to win, then use the power to implement policy. Anything less is bringing a book to a gun fight
That's true, though it might attribute too much intentionality to voter decisions.
My hunch is that a lot of Americans ticked 'Trump' because of brand recognition.
It's like buying laundry detergent. Most people know nothing about the chemistry or efficacy. They pick whatever package looks familiar, 'Tide' probably
I respectfully suggest a future campaign slogan that sets a simple yet high policy bar: make America good again.
Let that be the prism through which all future political action is seen. Let's be real. Let's be good. Let's strive to eliminate and replace this farcical hyperbole, self-agrandizement, this pyramid scheme of a pretense at government. Let's have some confidence and ambition: work to restore a real balance of power between our three branches. There is so much we could do in the near and long term if we just set out sights on a simple, positive goal.
We may never be great again. Maybe we never were. But we can be good.
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That's why I think Putin won't use nukes but would just load chemical weapons on drones to attack European cities and blame it on some terrorist organization. Trump might even support him in claiming that Russia is innocent and NATO shouldn't be involved. They already tested it on Poland with empty drones and said Russia didn't send any drones.
Any reasonable planning requires looking at the scenario your action creates - the range of outcomes. The range certainly includes Putin using nuclear weapons (which is part of Russia's military doctrine - see 'escalate to deescalate'). That needs to be part of your plan.
> range certainly includes Putin using nuclear weapons (which is part of Russia's military doctrine - see 'escalate to deescalate'). That needs to be part of your plan
If we had acted decisively at the beginning of the Ukraine war, the risk of nuclear war would be lower today.
Appeasement can work. But it can also increase risks. In this case, giving into a bully invites escalation itself, which increases the chances of a fuckup (e.g. a misfired drone taking out an early-warning radar) which legitimately calls for nuclear escalation.
The stereotypical warmonger rhetoric is (and not at all calling you one, just the extreme example), either you are hyper-aggressive or you are a cowardly appeaser. Think how binary that is; then think how literally one-dimensional even the critique is that it's as binary - the implication is there is a continuum between two poles, as if the field of options is a line, only one variable.
The true IR expertise - and you'll see this from the actual experts (and caveat: I am no more than a well-read amatuer) - is to neither escalate nor appease. The focus is on outcomes, not 'getting justice' (I can't think of a better term: reaction, emotional satisfaction, blame, fighting back, etc.). It endlessly frustrates many in the public, because of course they want emotional satisfaction; it also endlessly frustrates me because the leaders don't explain this.
It's like an engineering problem: You don't want to make decisions in anger; blame is terrible leadership; trying to hurt whoever caused your problem is absurd. It all would make your situation worse, even if you solve the original problem. Obviously, you think about the overall outcome for your organization and plan the best way to get there.
In sports, 'trash talk' is used to get that emotional reaction from people, because it takes them away from trying to win the game. The moment you get that response, you know you've won. Russia is working for that moment and is getting it from some.
> If we had acted decisively at the beginning of the Ukraine war, the risk of nuclear war would be lower today.
I agree completely - depending on what you mean (I certainly oppose direct combat between NATO and Russia). And we can still do it now: If NATO guarantees Ukraine unlimited material support until they win the war, no matter how long, not only would Ukraine win but when Russia was convinced of that (however that might happen), they would give up. The Europeans could do it themselves - they have ~~ 20x the economy of Russia. It would be much cheaper than the alternative of Russia gaining ground and fighting them later, and it would drain Russia's military and economy substantially.
Certainly that's not appeasing and it's barely escalatory: It's not a threat to Russian security - Ukraine obviously isn't invading - though it's eventually a threat to Putin's political standing, he may navigate it. And escalatory risk could be further decreased by offering Russia a permanent security treaty based on the old borders, with disarmament on both sides. That's the outcome NATO wants anyway.
> focus is on outcomes
Agree.
> Europeans could do it themselves - they have ~~ 20x the economy of Russia
Europe isn’t politically capable of decisive action. By design. Some European countries could, but I’m not seeing a proximate future where Europe is-and is treated as—a great power.
> escalatory risk could be further decreased by offering Russia a permanent security treaty based on the old borders, with disarmament on both sides
What do you mean by disarmament? Ukraine and Russia will obviously maintain arms after any peace. They just won’t be blowing each other up.
The preferred outcome is to further fragment the Russian Federation, leaving the rump successor state too small and weak to pose a significant threat. We did the same thing once before so let's just do it again.
How is that preferred to stable peace with Russia?
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Checks out. Trump would drool at the thought of cutting up not only Ukraine between him and Russia, but the rest of Europe too.
Trump drools anyway.
Europe believes that Russia is doing all sorts of bad things and there's also the belief that Moscow plans to invade the EU .
Isn't the logical action for EU to launch massive pre-emptive strikes on this big bad country that hates the western way of life ?
> Isn't the logical action for EU to launch massive pre-emptive strikes
To be clear, strikes wouldn't be "pre-emptive", Russia is already in a war, and it's entirely allowed for any nation to join the side of Ukraine. None of the rules of war prevent helping a friendly country by joining the fight.
EU makes plans to makes plans. Sounds like the usual strategy.
I take that over the US support for Putin.
I don’t believe the leadership sees Russia as an existential threat in Brussels. Baltics and Poland see it differently.
A pre-emptive strike would be expensive and immediately retcon into making Putin be the good guy - he’s long said NATO is the aggressor. Best to make invading EU to be too expensive to be worth it.
I think the bigger risk currently that Europe faces is the low and mid level corruption where Russian agents extend their tendrils into government structures in EU.
> making Putin be the good guy
Come on. Who cares what he pretend?
> Best to make invading EU to be too expensive to be worth it.
How do you propose to estimate how much it is worth doing it?
IMO, it is best is to make the kremlin government collapse by all mean necessary. Including sabotage, assassination, propaganda, confiscation, corruption/trahison. And preemptive strike if needs to be.
This worked great in every other country where some other country believed the situation will be more stable if you just topple the current regime, didn’t it?
This has already happened. Just as in the US, all of the far-right "movements" in the EU are Russian fronts.
The two biggest targets are the UK and France, because both have an independent nuclear deterrent. If those are captured by puppets, expect nuclear explosions over European capitals.
This is not hyperbole. Russian government insiders have made it absolutely, unambiguously clear that Europe must be "crushed."
As a direct quote.
The real tragedy is oligarch complicity. Oligarchs and aristocrats in the US, UK, and EU have decided they have more in common with their Russian counterparts than with the native populations of their respective countries.
Aristocrats pretty much always believed that.
How many armies in the world, have ever had a person in uniform demand that "the other army must be crushed" ? ok, is there any army that did not say that, to each other, or to an audience? Get a grip on the invective and do not blabber!
It's not about "hating the western way of life" or any such silliness. They can hate whatever they want within their internationally recognized borders.
War is best prevented by robust deterrents. When it comes to belligerent fascist regimes who want to see how far you can be pushed, not responding to provocations and aggression forcefully makes larger-scale war more likely in the future.
The logical thing to do is respond proportionally: if the ships are deliberately damaging property, seize the ships, and imprison the offenders.
Responding proportionally means you are always the one on the defensive and your opponent gets to decide the course of the conflict.
There should be a tit for tat response but the tit needs to be much larger than the tat to create the incentive for no longer attacking
That's simply not true. The US response to Pearl Harbor was proportional -- you attacked us, that's war, so now we're warring -- but that didn't mean staying on the defensive.
If it's known that Russia is using ships to attack Western infrastructure, blockading those ships is entirely proportional. A blockade, in this case, isn't so much an act of war, as it is a response to an act of war.
They shot some of our boats and we dropped portable suns onto two of their cities.
A proportional response would be to take out of one their fleets. We explicitly went disproportional when we conquered their entire nation and dismantled their empire.
Please stop pushing ahistorical claims
Hey, thats exactly what Ahmed al Ahmed was thinking. He ripped rifle out of Bondi Beach terrorist hands but didnt shoot him immediately because that would be "disproportional". Terrorist ran back to his friend, pulled another gun from the bag and killed several more innocent people.
We have functional democracies here. You'd have to convince the population this is the right course of action and then the politicians will do it.
Good luck with that, though.
No, pre-emptively starting another war is not a good idea. But yes, the West should work hard to make sure their enemy loses the war it has already started.
> Isn't the logical action for EU to launch massive pre-emptive strikes on this big bad country that hates the western way of life ?
Depending on the days, the priority changes, between Russia or attacking the US first, maybe with the help from Canada :-))
You have to deal with one threat at a time, and it seems the fight against chlorinated chicken will take priority for now... :-)
There's essentially nothing you can do to deter this sort of behavior short of starting a war
That's exactly the appeasement mentality that lets Russia get away with everything.
"We don't want to start a war doncha know, so whenever Russia attacks us we'll just take it on the chin and not fight back too hard".
It appears the world has forgotten the lessons of the Sudetenland.
If Russia wasn't currently locked in a land war with Ukraine, that would largely be true (assuming that you were NATO and wanted to play by both the rules of being real democracies, and also respecting international law).
But since Russia IS locked in a land war with Ukraine, in a hypothetical world, you could retaliate by upping aid through Ukraine, OR (if you were being sneaky), laundering your actions through Ukraine.
could you cut russias undersea cables in a tit for tat?
there is internet in russia? :)
The war has already started.
They can use 30-year old handysize rust buckets that can be cheaper than some cable repairs.
Jailing crews in comfy Scandinavian prisons can hardly be a strong deterrent either.
Russia is all-in on this confrontation, Europe is much wealthier but won't commit anywhere near the effort or expense.
Many of the shadow fleet crew members aren't even Russians. Typically only the master and some officers are privy to the real mission. The other crew members are just random seamen hired from the usual poor countries so jailing them would be pointless.
Typically only the master and mates are liable for breaches like that? It's not that a boatswain, a C/E decides when to drop an anchor.
Russia has an immense capacity to endure suffering and sacrifice lives. It’s basically their secret weapon.
yup. RU will literally wait decades and then send their lil KGB/GRU agents all around the world to assassinate you, chop you up, or poison you. they play the long game and never forget.
It's geopolitical. They don't care if you seize the ships because they don't care about a return on investment.
Good, another reason to seize them
Even better life in prison for all on board. (This is extreme but I bet you that they'd think twice)
> life in prison for all on board
Honestly, give any Russian or shadow-vessel crew a bounty if they surrender. Turn Moscow’s fleet into a cheap source of intelligence and scrap.
That's not extreme. They destroyed a piece of expensive critical infrastructure. Prison and seizure should be the bare minimum. I just mean it's not enough to prevent it in the future.
The crew are probably living much better and safer lives in Finnish jail than they would out of jail in Russia.
Speaking of the joy of living in Russia, check out the hilarious story of racist right wing Finnish Flat Earther anti-immigrant anti-refugee pro-Russian criminal asshole Ano Turtiainen, now living as a refugee in Russia and threatening to fight against fellow Finns.
Ano Turtiainen is a former Finnish powerlifter turned far-right politician who managed to embarrass himself and others at every step:
He was banned for two years in 1998 for androgenic drug use -- perfect start to a "morally upright" career.
As an MP with the batshit crazy racist right-wing Finns Party, he posted a mocking tweet about George Floyd's murder ("Pink Floyd"), which was widely condemned as even too racist for the Finns Party, which got him expelled.
He set up his own splinter faction and then a tiny party, Power Belongs to the People (VKK), which became known for praising Russia and opposing sanctions and Finnish NATO membership, utterly at odds with mainstream Finnish views.
Turtiainen even refused to fire an assistant who posted racist content and had a parliamentary visitor do a Nazi salute (which he photographed himself!).
Instead of behaving like a responsible adult during the pandemic, he mocked public health measures, called them "neo-communism", refused masks, and threatened violence over mask mandates.
Meanwhile his own company manufactured masks: the ultimate hypocrisy.
Turtiainen failed to explain how he used over €30,000 in parliamentary group funds -- so the Finnish Parliament is trying to collect it back through debt enforcement.
Not only that: He's a Flat Earther, doesn't believe in space existing, and was convinced NASA interfered in the last election he was involved in so that he only got 7 votes.
Now the Ultimate Irony: the Anti-Immigrant Asshole Becomes a Hypocritical Refugee.
After losing his seat in the 2023 election (with only ~632 votes), Turtiainen moved to Russia, the country he celebrated, defended even during its invasion of Ukraine, and praised as a cultural "brother".
Russia granted him refugee status (yes, refugee status), despite his previous anti-immigrant posturing -- and he proudly accepts it.
In videos he’s now said he might fight for Russia -- even against Finns -- in the war in Ukraine. That’s right: the man who slammed refugees and immigrants is now a political asylum seeker in Russia, flirting with joining Russian troops and fighting his own countrymen.
Turtiainen's political life is a one-man case study in right-wing hypocrisy, racism, ignorance, self-harm, and irony: The guy who mocked others' suffering ends up dependent on another country’s goodwill -- the same country he championed in Finnish politics.
Former Finns Party MP granted refugee status in Russia:
The pro-Russian ex-lawmaker has claimed that he would be "ready to go to the front against the Finns" if necessary:
Fascist thugs aren't known for being ideologically consistent.
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Are these ships actually owned by the Russian state? I thought it was more Russia paying private operators to do some sabotage alongside legitimate business. In which case, ships being seized would absolutely be a huge deterrent to whoever owns or insures the ships.
But yes, imprisoning the crew (especially the captain) is also a good idea.
Mmm. You are assuming people have a choice about crewing on what you call a pos ship which you say is owned/controlled by russia.
Executing people for cutting cables is extreme and I'm sure illegal in any country worth living in
Hold them as POWs. Executing prisoners is barbaric.
I agree. However media has removed morality and ethics from people when it comes to this war.
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Russia commits acts of aggression against NATO states that straddle the line of ambiguity where a bad faith actor could call it accidental or at least unauthorized.
This makes invoking article 5 likewise somewhat difficult because it allowed other NATO members pressure the border states into "not overreacting". The point is to slowly escalate into outright hostility without ever having "the event" that makes it obvious article 5 must be invoked.
and the goal for this toeing the line is to spark discussion and disagreement between member states. Article 5 credibility is already at it's lowest point after Vance's speech and the new US security strategy, now isn't just the matter of sowing further disagreement.
Also a provocation that forces a reaction that is difficult to modulate. Activating Article 5 demonstrates NATO solidarity and that it means business, but it would be disastrous. Doing nothing demonstrates fecklessness and impotence of NATO. The reaction needs to be measured and proportionate.
But outright hostility is not necessarily the goal. Hybrid warfare is more “subtle”. Its targets are more diverse and the aim is less overt defeat and more war of attrition in a broad sense. You want to wear your enemy down.
I'm not sure what Russia had to gain from violating our (Finland) airspace with military aircraft countless of times before we joined NATO. Yet they kept doing it.
Russia is an imperialistic state that really doesn't like having neighbours that are not under its political and military control. Violating airspace, GPS jamming, cutting undersea cables is just their way of showing force, and damaging us, who they perceive as their enemies for not submitting to their rule.
I'm sure some bright spark will soon show up to say that it was actually NATO who was violating our airspace for decades
, just like they're claiming that NATO is the one cutting cables here
It's also a form of reconnaissance. In doing these acts they observe how different actors respond and look for potential weak points.
It’s literally well documented why this is being done. It’s intentional to cause disruptions and damage.
FSB is paying extra on New Year's?
Wow nobody even blamed Russia yet and you're jumping to their defense already. That is some top notch customer service.
> Some officials from Scandinavia, the Baltic states and the European Union have pointed the finger at Russia. They say the incidents appear to be part of what experts say is the Kremlin’s hybrid war on the West.
The only blame placed in the article is targeted at Russia. And I'd quite like to see some speculation on Russia's possible motive for this, it sounds pointless and risky for their shipping on the face of it.
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What good would a naval blockade of Russia do when they get the vast majority of their goods by land?
EDIT looking at your post history its very clear you have no intention of discussing this in good faith.
Probably to make sure it stays that way. Logistics by ship generally has a big advantage over logistics by land. There is a rough pattern over the last century or so of the big navel empires (UK, US, Japan) having a big military advantage. In the case of the UK and US their strategic policy has a big component that involves restricting their opponents access to resources water (eg, Germany around the world wars, China in the modern era or the way the US controls the sea-based routes out of Saudi Arabia and the land routes tend to be militarily unstable).
Preventing oil exports and increase insurance premiums for Russia's export economy, because Western sanctions clearly are unsuccessful in destroying the Russian economy.
My post history shows that I do support Russia's self defense against U.S./NATO threats. In my opinion Ukraine entering NATO is indeed an existential threat to Russia, because since (at least) the collapse of the UDSSR the U.S. and it's vassals openly communicated and pursued the goal of regime changing Russia (+ Belarus, Georgia).
Absolutely no one in NATO wants to invade Russia, my man.
How does Ukraine entering NATO constitute an existential threat to Russia? Do you think Ukraine + NATO is going to invade Russia?
What should NATO and the EU do to Russia, since Russia would like to break up NATO and the EU?
It's always astonishing to me how people here (mostly Americans) basically know nothing about the long history of U.S. proxy wars with Russia (historically USSR) and the long stated desire from U.S. to destroy or regime change the Russian federation.
To answer your question quickly: Ukraine entering NATO constitutes an existential threat to Russia for the same reason as China building military infrastructure in Mexico, Cuba or Canada would pose an existential threat to the U.S. (e.g. Cuban Missile Crisis).
The other side wants escalation of tension, otherwise they wouldn't do this. And they get to choose when and where and, to a degree, the means by which it happens - you can be sure it's a time and place and means that benefits them.
The fundamental of international relations in conflict is to deter without escalation, and to act in the time, place, and manner of your choosing. You'll see leaders cite that specifically: 'We have this problem; we will respond in the time, place, and in the way we think best.'
This sounds very nice but it's unclear to me what it is that you're suggesting. Who said the place isn't the Baltic sea, the time is now, and the way is to escalate? In other words, what's a better place/time/way according to you?
Just like Trump's tariff bs, I'm starting to think that for Putin's M.O. that we should be fighting fire with fire.
Why not send a couple ships to drag anchors across Russia's cables? "Oh we are but innocent fishermen" is still valid going the other way.
Then when Russia inevitably seizes and imprisons the crew, the international community can do the same for every Russian controlled ship with the bare minimum of suspicion.
Would be a pretty sucky mission though, so many risks of capture. But the Russian government does it because they don't care about their people and also the rest of the world is too toothless to do anything about it (until this occurrence at least, go Finland - but then they know Russia's tactics very well).
Russia has been doing a "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" to the world for too long, abusing the "nice" way we desperately try to see things, pretending even when it's obvious. Like they'll do something egregious and then when the West calls them out, suddenly their political mouthpieces are all "we can't believe that the West is making this shocking and provocative accusation which is of course completely false, EU are bullies!" and then the world responds by taking a step back, pretty much every single time.
-- Why not send a couple ships to drag anchors across Russia's cables? "Oh we are but innocent fishermen" is still valid going the other way.
-- Then when Russia inevitably seizes and imprisons the crew
Are you volunteering yourself for a vacation in a Russian gulag?
Hire some Russians to do it. Cruel, but…
Oh, not at all. I don't have the balls or the skills for that.
Though perhaps we could test some autonomous trawling vessels, you know, big tech company stuff. But as we know, software can sometimes be difficult and have...bugs... ;3
Just ask for some Ukrainian undersea drones to do the job, they will be happy to hurt Russia
The whole bug thing is interesting in the face of them spoofing gps so willingly.
the Ukrainian already destroyed a pipeline in the same region, is it worth an internet cable?
It's still not confirmed who did that. Self sabotage by some European nation or even Russian is still up in the air.
Destroying that pipeline pushed Germany to act more against Russia (being officially unable to continue buying gas).
Historically anti russian states like Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Estonia or even NATO would have liked that.
Russia could have blown it up themselves to pin it on Ukraine to decrease support, but that doesn't seem to be the outcome.
Even germany could have blown it up to pivot their own politics.
It's a massive game of clue. It may become declassified in 20 years by whoever did it.
Would you say there are material differences between Nordstream and this?
He who fights monsters should take care not to become one in the process.
That you guys had presidents that didn’t fall into this trap is the reason you and I are ariund today.
William Inboden, The Peacemaker:
> In America’s last fight against totalitarianism, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the unconditional surrender of both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In the context of total war, against implacable dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender made strategic sense. Such a demand did not fit the Cold War. Much as Reagan looked to Roosevelt and World War II as a model for how the free world should confront dictatorships in thrall to evil ideologies, in the case of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, calling for “unconditional surrender” from Moscow would have been delusional and foolhardy—especially since Reagan remained desperate to prevent the Cold War from turning hot and ending in nuclear apocalypse.
Effin' Russian govt, the rest of the world is too easy on them. They'll break ceasefires, they'll target non-military sites, they'll interfere with elections, they'll spread misinformation on social media, they'll lie to everyone and especially to their own citizens.
To be fair every gouvernement does that.
Scale changes quality.
Let's play war game. Here's a life-like scenario:
- Russian ship damages another cable
- EU deploys military ships and planes on Baltic/North sea
- Russia deploys military ships and planes of their own
- EU tries to stop and seize another RU shadow fleet vessel
- EU vessel denies EU demands
- EU attack a vessel, trying to immobilize it
- RU ships and planes attacks EU ships and planes
- casualties from both sides
- RU drops 10-15 MRBMs with conventional (non-nuclear) warheads onto key EU naval bases
- orange clown in the White House says "this is not our war"
There needs to be a blockade for these rogue ships. That's the only thing they'll understand, short of being sunk.
Just seize the ships and auction them off. Damaging one cable isn't gonna be worth losing a whole ship, generally speaking.
nah just sink them instead imo. they arent worth much.
Given the state some of these ships are starting to be in they might just be worth scrap..
Often the cost to scrap a ship exceedes the value of the raw materials. Depends the ship as well but things like asbestos can drive costs up
Who controls these ships and what is their perspective? I don't understand how we know what they 'understand' or not?
Also, how do you identify the ships? Do you blockade all maritime traffic in the Baltic Sea? All too and from Russia? The first would destroy our own economy, the second is a certain act of war.
Likely Russia. Their idea is to engage in war under pretense that it's not a war.
What I mean is that they will only understand counter measures that you'd take in a war, like blockade or sink them for instance.
I.e. they are already engaging in the acts of war, so it's late to worry about that, the question is what is anyone doing about it.
Ukraine sinks their fleet in the Black Sea, and they understood it very well - they don't leave their ports.
> What I mean is that they will only understand counter measures that you'd take in a war, like blockade or sink them for instance.
Likely that is what they want. Do you think Russian planners are ignorant, and can't foresee that? This sort of game is long played in international relations.
It's chess: You try to cause your opponent to put themselves in a bad position. Provocations are manipulation - it's obvious what Russia is trying to provoke.
I doubt they want that. Blockade will undermine their war efforts which strongly depend on their oil and other exports.
More likely they think countries around Baltic Sea are too scared to offer strong resistance, so they can engage in such activity with impunity. And they won't limit it to Baltic Sea either, they'll do it anywhere they feel they can.
It's a mobster mentality. As I said, the only language they understand is response with force, nothing else.
Russia wants to show global south that the West is evil and aggressive and wants to encroach on and break up Russia. Provoking a European nation into military action first is the way to do that.
Global south cares for Russia as much as Russia is paying (giving discounts) anyone to care for it, not a barrel of oil more.
The most obvious reason here is simply mobster style intimidation. I.e. "You are helping Ukraine? We'll get back at you by damaging cables and what not".
I'd say the proper response to such incidents is to increase military help for Ukraine and blockade / confiscate / sink Russian ships wherever they do this stuff. Ships which engage in that should be treated as hostile military vessels.
> Blockade
That is not an option. They might as well bomb St. Petersburg - it's a seige, an act of war.
> the only language they understand is response with force, nothing else
I see no evidence of that.
Putin is in fact a political operator at a high level, and understands politics exceptionally well. Warfare is merely politics by other means, one tool in the toolchest (for people like him).
That's the only option, because otherwise you are saying that Russia can engage in acts of war against Europe and Europe can't respond. That's not how it should work. And what they do with cables is totally acts of war.
> I see no evidence of that.
Their Black Sea fleet hides in their ports, because they know the moment they'll try to roam, Ukraine will sink them. What other evidence do you need? It works.
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it's like Putin decided his job is to test the limits of modern international politics
It is: Look up the theory of status quo and 'revisionist* powers, and how they interact. Russia is acting as the revisionist, very predictably in many ways. And many in the West act predictably as status quo - including not being able to fathom why anyone would revise their happy power structure (with them on top).
You can see the same thing in many areas, such as race relations. The status quo is outraged and can't believe that other groups may be unhappy - after all, things work well in the status quo person's experience!
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Yeah sure, we keep cutting our own telecoms cables multiple times per year, using Russian-operated ships as a front.
The Eagle S (I think it was?) case was brought to court here in Finland and they even admitted to dragging heir anchor but steadfastly maintained that it was due to their own incompetence (which the judge unfortunately believed.)
I suppose that was also a NATO ploy?
The US is blowing up Venezuelan boats, and according to Seymour Hersh, blew up Nord Stream. Why would a few cables be beyond US/NATO capabilities if it drums up popular support for US extra-judicial interdiction of other countries' maritime activity?
Do you understand that this has been going on for much longer than the US's Venezuelan murder spree, and longer than Trump has been president (this time around)?
Also, as I said, we have a crew of a Russian-operated ship on the record admitting to cutting a cable by dragging their anchor, and all the previous cases have also been traced to other Russian-operated ships (well, I think one was Chinese though) using AIS and radar data, and this has been done by OSINT folks in addition to the local authorities here around the Baltic. Are all of these people being controlled by NATO and the US?
Pro-Russian people like you assume that other countries will always just let the US or "NATO" do whatever they want and have absolutely zero autonomy at all, and you're absolute experts at ignoring everything that doesn't fit your insanely simplistic narrative that's predicated on the idea that Russia is just a perpetual victim and a spooky spooky NATO CIA USA cabal is actually doing everything bad that the Russians get up to.
Nowhere in this article does it say anything about Russians admitting to cutting the cable, let alone doing it on purpose with malicious intent, so you are just making things up now.
The list of US acts of terrorism goes beyond the Trump presidency; it's convenient for liberals to blame everything on Trump but the bombing of Nord Stream occurred under Biden; Obama was droning weddings while Hilary Clinton was setting fire to Libya (using NATO, the "defensive" alliance that strikes first!)
All the previous cases of cable cutting, alleged by Western news papers without any shred of evidence, is a good way of beating the war drums. The war propaganda and hysteria this time is more intense than the Iraq war, which I think you are too young to remember. It is unclear what material advantage Russia would get from cutting cables, but with hysteria, reason is not required.
"Pro-Russian people" like me .. well I'm pro-peace actually rather than pro-Russian and have seen that the Russians offered negotiations with the US and Europe multiple times that were rejected. Negotiations that might have averted bloodshed. It's interesting that a "non-binary" person like you (according to your Github) wants to view people in a binary category as pro/anti-Russian rather than perhaps having a different perspective.
As to the substance of your last point: I remember Europe actually arguing against the US during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and now seeing Europe being a bunch of kept poodles that would prefer to commit economic, moral and geopolitical suicide rather than stand up for themselves.
> The war propaganda and hysteria this time is more intense than the Iraq war, which I think you are too young to remember.
This feels like falling into a time warp back to February 2022 when the same sentiments were expressed vis-a-vis the imminent invasion. I see a lot of whataboutism, but not a whole lot of reasoning for why this isn't likely to be more of the same?
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> Negotiations that might have averted bloodshed.
I mean they could have simply not invaded Ukraine. Seems like that's the thing a peace advocate such as yourself would endorse.
It sounds like the court will just throw it out again as not having jurisdiction over the case.
The court threw out the previous case since there was no proof of sabotage. I understood the court ruled that they have no jurisdiction over accident cases under international law.
As far as I understand, it is totally different case if they find any proof of intent.
I don't understand how we arrived at letting "random nation crew drags their anchor making the boat extremely slow and loud and breaks $100M+ critical infrastructure" get off scot free including their boat but it clearly can't continue to go on. If not a court then government must step in, nothing less is acceptable to any voting person.
Then countries should be able to bomb these ships and go unpunished as well.
That would pass the right message if courts keep refusing to make things right.
Sinking the ships and then denying knowing anything about it would probably be the best course of action. That's what Russians would do, if the roles were reversed.
Unfortunately too many Western leaders still think that it's possible to negotiate in good faith with Russians. In reality they respect only force, and see European rules based order and "fair play" as weakness. If Baltic states didn't belong to NATO and Finland didn't have such a big army, Russians would be already doing a lot worse things than cutting cables.
Over here in Finland, even during the "good" years between collapse of the Soviet Union and invasion of Crimea, Russian businessmen kept buying property that made absolutely no economic sense, but was located next to critical infrastructure. Better relations between West and Russia were largely an illusion, especially since Putin took over.
We should just silently turn up support for Ukraine, that's where it hurts. Everything else is a distraction.
"Sinking the ships and then denying knowing anything about it would probably be the best course of action. That's what Russians would do, if the roles were reversed."
You mean like NATO did off the coast of Spain a year ago?
I didn't remember that case, very interesting. But yes, silently torpedoing a Russian ship transporting military technology to another hostile rogue state is exactly what NATO should be doing.
Did I miss NATO declaring war on Russia and N. Korea? Or are we OK with the Chinese silently torpedoing the next batch of military equipment to Taiwan (a rouge province under intl law)?
Your argument, taken to its limit, is might makes right. Which, fine; but we're just not that strong anymore. Certainly not the EUpeeans.
What's the point of declaring war in a war?
Russia invaded Ukraine just fine without ever declaring war.
As long as the EUpeans don't drag me, my loved ones, or my taxes into a war with Russia I couldn't care less if any this is declared or not nor do I care if they torpedo Russian ships.
However, I also couldn't care less if the Russians Oreshniks Liverpool or Marseille.
Fair enough, you do you.
Meanwhile, we'll be protecting your loved ones.
Pray, from what?
And please don't flatter yourself. Europe couldn't field an army of a 100 000 riflemen if you put all of the EU countries together.
Honestly, neither can Russia, unless you count 100 000 random men + 90 000 rusty rifles as "riflemen".
All I can see there before "Este contenido es exclusivo para suscriptores" is conjecture that (translating and emphasizing) "a torpedo may have pierced the hull of the vessel". Is there any evidence?
The hull is bent inward in a manner characteristic of a torpedo.
They can. They don't want to yet. Europe always assumes too much good faith on the part of other countries.
The countries that the ships are registered in are not going to do anything if they are seized and scrapped.
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Too many warmongering, aggressive people in the comments. This is not how we get the good ending. Cooler heads prevail. You don't understand this. That's okay. It's not your fault.
Yes, we must submit and capitulate to Russia at every turn, or face war. Good plan.
Russia would deny any involvement, right? So throwing the crew in prison for a few decades and scrapping the ship aren't actions against Russia. They're not a party to this at all.
That's the classic warmonger argument: Call people who disagree 'chicken' and 'coward', like high school taunts.
There are many other solutions, and if you read the experts, that's what rational governments pursue. It's not as emotionally satisfying as starting a war, but it's far more satisfying than what comes after that start.
Warfare, as anyone who has experienced it, is a catastrophe win or lose or stalemate. The victors of WWII put extraordinary effort into preventing future wars, including outlawing it, creating the UN and EU, rebuilding their former enemy's economies, etc.
What do you know about warfare that they don't? Were they cowards? Naive or innocent about evil?
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I'm not sure where you got the 'chicken' business from, but regardless, folks who want everyone to bend the knee to Putin are usually acting out of malice, not fear.
Is it really warmongering to suggest a country should police it's own territory, or defend it's own interests from aggression aimed at them? And, how is that aggression towards them not warmongering? If Russia isn't responsible for these attacks on infrastructure, then no one should have a problem with the crew being tossed in prison and the boat being chopped up and turned into patio furniture or repurposed as a reef. If they are responsible, then they're the warmongers; only a fundamentally dishonest person would suggest a measured response to or self defense against an attack is warmongering.
btw
i'm not even suggesting anyone go to war with russia. But more than likely capitulation is going to fail and russia will cross a line with their acts of sabotage and terrorism in Europe (or they'll just move on to whoever is next after Ukraine.) Since you brought up WWII, remind me, how did capitulating to Hitler in 1938 work out in the long run?
> I'm not sure where you got the 'chicken' business from
Implying that people are cowardly for not pursuing aggression is like high schoolers calling each other 'chicken' for not doing something.
> folks who want everyone to bend the knee to Putin are usually acting out of malice, not fear.
I don't necessarily agree - people do feel fear. Regardless, who wants capitulation? Could you point out some leader? Or even a comment on this long page?
Not agreeing with aggression != supporting capitulation. There are infinitely more solutions. The question is, what outcome do you want and what acts are most likely to get you there? Aggression is emotionally satisfying, in the short term, but usually results in bad outcomes.
> Is it really warmongering to suggest a country should police it's own territory, or defend it's own interests from aggression aimed at them?
If the proposed solution is warfare, then it's warmongering. The point is that are many other solutions. And self-righteousness is irrelevant - it doesn't make the outcome better or worse; it's therefore a dangerous distraction, likely to cause sub-optimal outcomes (usually bad ones). Using it as a reason to pursue warfare is a hallmark of warmongering.
> they're the warmongers
They are, in a sense, but that doesn't change what you do. Again, it's an argument from self-righteousness - 'they started it'. That doesn't matter; what matters is the outcome and warfare is one option that provides one range of outcomes (almost all horrible, almost universally different than what was expected when the decision was made - think of Ukraine, Iraq, etc. etc.).
Russia is not a warmonger, in an important sense: They deliberately use 'grey zone' tactics, actions short of being sufficient to provoke war. It's fundamental to their strategy and therefore essential to understand:
They intend to cause political change, not warfare. You can see their effectiveness in the emotional responses on this page. They disregard outcomes - you can bet that while some have temporary emotional satisfaction, the outcomes will be Russia's.
This is...not true. Attacking key infrastructure is an act of war. Just because they try to do it secretly doesn't change that fact. 'Grey zone' tactics doesn't make any difference here. Green men, intel services, etc. are still government entities acting at the behest of the leadership to commit acts of war.
The argument here is about appeasement or not. If you allow continued acts of war to pass without response, you get more of them. This is the lesson of bullies from the playground to WW2. I'm more than willing to have a conversation about what sort of response is the best, but saying that Russia is not a warmonger is incorrect - they are committing acts of war. Just because no one has called them on it yet doesn't make it not warmongering.
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>Cooler heads prevail. You don't understand this. That's okay. It's not your fault.
You don't understand that your comment is incredibly aggressive and insulting? That's ok. You just don't understand that. Might not even be your fault you don't.
we have winston churchill, specialist of international relation and war here
Russia is already in a state of armed aggression against Ukraine, and committing sabotage against other countries throughout Europe.
Cooler heads in this case are idiotic heads. It doesn’t take two partners to start a war, it only takes one and Russia already decided.
Someone in the other comments linked an article stating that Europe was doing the “unthinkable” of planning to retaliate and I was agog reading it if true. Not because Europe was going to retaliate but that they hadn’t even come up with plans over the past decade of increasing aggression from Russia.
You don’t have war plans for every crazy situation your analysts and strategists can conceive of because you’re excited to use them. You have them so your state apparatus is prepared and ready to go in an unlikely emergency instead of needing to take the months to years that any large bureaucracy needs to be ready to take action.
That seems to contradict itself? Cooler heads plan carefully; hotheads act out - seek immediate emotional satisfaction without thinking of the consequences.
> It doesn’t take two partners to start a war, it only takes one and Russia already decided.
Wars are not acts, but the conseuqences of long chains - large graphs - of decisions often lasting decades or more. Wars come from situations where there is no other choice.
The main goal of international relations policy is to create optimal scenarios, to not get caught in a situation where you have bad options or no options. Russia's 'grey zone' actions, including of course online propaganda campaigns (seriously, why wouldn't they?), are trying to create the scenarios that suit Russia best. They are preparing the political ground, and warfare is fundamentally politics (the most widely accepted maxim of warfare - see Clausewitz).
For an example, people emotionally and aggressively advocating for warfare, like on this page, if widespread can set the political ground.
It takes two (or more) to get into that position. It's a game of chess - checkmate isn't the result of one move.
> That seems to contradict itself? Cooler heads plan carefully; hotheads act out - seek immediate emotional satisfaction without thinking of the consequences.
No, because “cooler heads” are advocating for not retaliating. I’d accept the opinion of “cooler heads” if it was things like “we’re not ready yet and need to build up our military before being able to risk active conflict” vs “we should never fight back, war is bad :(“
> Wars are not acts, but the conseuqences of long chains - large graphs - of decisions often lasting decades or more. Wars come from situations where there is no other choice.
I have no idea how that is a response to what I said instead of just waxing poetic. If another nation decides they are at war with your nation, then guess what buddy, you’re at war. Even with your head in the sand.
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> I’d accept the opinion of “cooler heads” if it was things like “we’re not ready yet and need to build up our military before being able to risk active conflict” vs “we should never fight back, war is bad :(“
I agree, essentially, and would say that your example is not one of a cooler head; it's just a different emotional response.
But who is saying “we should never fight back, war is bad :(“ ? Could you name someone? I haven't heard it at all. Do you see it even on this HN page, even once? I haven't heard any leader say anything of the sort.
> If another nation decides they are at war with your nation, then guess what buddy, you’re at war. Even with your head in the sand.
I'm just repeating a fundamental consensus of experts.
That's not how wars happen - the leader of a country doesn't just decide to do it one day, other than perhaps 'wars' against helpless targets like the US invading Grenada.
Warfare is very complicated. A 'nation' can't decide something, though the leadership can. But that doesn't mean they can execute it - that the nation and its internal powers will follow them sufficiently to carry it out. If Trump actually decided to invade Canada, obviously that would be the end of Trump's term in office.
Then, even if they get support, that doesn't at all mean they will be successful. Look at the US wars since WWII: Mostly failed, only one clear victory of any significance (the Gulf War), even those most were against substantially weaker foes.
So what is necessary to 'succeed' in warfare?
The most respected maxim of warfare is Clausewitz's, 'war is the continuation of politics, by other means' (not exact, and Clausewitz wrote in German of course). That is, it's politics, but by means of organized violence rather than by economic or diplomatic means (though those are involved too).
Wars start with politics; and leaders are very limited politically by the situation. They can't just do anything at all. They need political options, to create suppport and sustain it, etc.
Wars only end with effective political solutions. For example, in Afghanistan, the US lacked an effective political solution; then the US ran out of political will and withdrew. The war ended when the Taliban provided a stable political solution, for good or ill.
It's politics, and Russia's leadership knows that well. If they just start a war without considering politics, they'll fail badly. Instead, they are creating the political ground where they have the best options and their targets have bad ones.
You are the one saying we shouldn’t fight back war is bad :(
> Too many warmongering, aggressive people in the comments. This is not how we get the good ending. Cooler heads prevail. You don't understand this. That's okay. It's not your fault.
And ah, four month old account making incomprehensible statements that seem almost human but don’t quite make it, pushing a political view and trying to gaslight everyone into thinking that this account isn’t doing so.
How much fucking time in our life are we going to have to waste responding to bots.
Edit: wait, I confused `mosst with `mmooss who is also from a post AI era account and pushing the same narrative. These aren’t just bots but sock puppet bots boosting each other
It honestly starts to sound like they just botched the design and placement of these cables - placing them in shallow and exposed passages, with no proper defense against dragged anchors.
Real shades of "that cable shouldn't have been dressed like that, in a dark and narrow channel, clearly marked on navigation charts(to mitigate exactly this scenario, from good captains at least)" energy.
If only they had had you in the design team back then when the cables were put in place.
I'm sorry I have no snark-free way to respond to this.
Unfortunately the Baltic is pretty shallow and fairly featureless - the gulf of Finland - between Finland, Estonia, and Russia averages 38 metres deep
Yeah, why don't they lower the floor of the entire Baltic Sea??
Obviously, you're joking.
But how hard could it be to get a Cat 395 excavator in there? Dig a little trench and bury it.
Sounds like a weekend project to me. Has someone told the telecoms this?
I think they could just drag a suitable hook behind a ship to carve out decent trench.
Geez, how are we so much better at this than the actual engineers?
Edit: to parent comment, I think people missed your joke.
I can't tell whether this is dumb or genius.
Fun fact! Near the shore they actually do bury the cables with a plow[1]
The fact that this area where the incident happened, Gulf of Finland, is not fully part Finnish/Estonian territorial waters, is only because of a bilateral Finnish-Estonian agreement. This was done in the 1990's purely for benevolence towards Russia.
Russia clearly hasn't acted in such way that they should enjoy these kinds of acts of benevolence. Finland and Estonia should seriously consider retreating from this agreement.
I don't think it's just benevolence. Territorial waters also doesn't mean what many think it means - unlike planes, ships have the almost-universally recognized right to cross territorial waters (innocent passage).
But what's more relevant here are rules about straits - territorial waters that fully enclose a section of someone else's territorial waters. My understanding is that that is a big part of the reason why the two countries restrict their claim of territorial waters to leave a corridor of international waters: They want to avoid the area falling under the straits rules (transit passage), which would give Russia more rights than it has now inside the territorial waters.
> ships have the almost-universally recognized right to cross territorial waters (innocent passage).
I’m far from a maritime law expert, but destroying cables doesn’t sound like innocent passage.
That's why they detained the ship...
You saying the Finland and Estonia are guilty of russia cutting their cables because they signed an agreement?!
No, he's saying that the area is international waters because Finland and Estonia agreed it was not either's territorial waters. It doesn't have to be international waters.
NATO probably doesn't want to play that game with China's stance on the seas around them.
They make a big deal about having international waters that foreign navies can transit.
The fight in and around China's sea claims is they encroach into what the rest of the world generally agrees are other countries waters not international waters. The US would still insist it could travel through the Taiwanese or Phillipine waters China wants to claim as their own. It doesn't seem to map at all on to the situation between Finland and Estonia.
The US just doesn’t recognize China’s claims to areas (eg, Taiwan or ASEAN sea islands), so doesn’t regard those as Chinese territorial waters in the first place.
The point of US freedom of navigation exercises is to assert free transit of allied and international waters, despite Chinese claims, rather than to transit Chinese territorial waters. US warships generally avoid areas which the US views as Chinese territorial waters.
Pretty sure they are saying "more vulnerable to" not "guilty".
That narrow passage is becoming a war zone. Look at a map. It's one of Russia's few outlets to the sea. Look at the history of Russia vs. Finland and Russia vs. Estonia. This is one of the world's most hostile choke points.
I will never understand why it has to be this way and Russia cannot be a normal country that has the goal to join the EU and be prosperous instead of doing nonsense for over a hundred years now.
A thousand years almost. As a Pole I have no faith in Russia ever becoming anything other than a savage hostile wart on this planet. It's not just their leadership. It's the nation. More accurately their culture. Their malice is a result of a rare combination of ineptitude and megalomania all in one package.
France had almost a thousand years of autocratic and aggressive tradition. Prussia/Germany too. There’s many more examples.
These things can and do change.
Your enemy is not the people of the country you hate, it’s the government. If you believe it’s the people then you are a victim to propaganda, or some other source of highly biased information.
Think about what war really is, it’s almost always a bunch of powerful people who have a disagreement with a bunch of other powerful people, who then have to trick a bunch of less powerful people to fight on their behalf. If you feel like fighting you’ve been tricked. When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.
No, it can be both the government, and the people.
The government for all of the reasons you say.
The people because they have fallen for and accepted propaganda. Thereby leading them to support the government and its toxic narratives.
I base this opinion mostly on seeing how Russian propaganda has poisoned my mother-in-law's mind. Many media reports and various other sources have verified that she is not an isolated example, most Russians accept the same propaganda narratives.
To add to this, culture can be changed significantly in a short period. See how the USA has changed in the past 20 years, the culture has changed 2 or 3 times now with vastly different values & attitudes between each. What does each period have in common? Thick gobs of propaganda being push in every nook & cranny. And lack of critical thinking on the individual level. If country X wants to change, it is very possible, its just a matter of time, persistence & brain washing. Brain washing the youth is the easiest path, especially if in the opposite direction than what their parents/elderly want.
> See how the USA has changed in the past 20 years
I’m not sure we will ever know the complete answer, but some of this change seems to involve Russia too.
Ask any Russian if Crimea belongs to Ukraine. None of them will give you the internationally accepted answer.
So yea, it's not just the government.
As a German, I must insist that your statement is absolutely wrong. The people of a country can be your enemy. A Government like Nazi-Germany or current day Russia cannot exist without plenty of support by its people in the first place.
It's a combination. Here in the US, a large chunk of the population supported Trump, knowing full well what kind of things he would do. And another large chunk of the population are trying to stop him.
You can't blame the population as a whole. But I suspect it's uncommon for the government to be completely disconnected from (some portion of) the population's sentiments.
> But I suspect it's uncommon for the government to be completely disconnected from (some portion of) the population's sentiments.
However, that sentiment is shaped by the media available to the citizens, and in places like Russia, that means primarily by the government itself. So it's not so clear cut what the sentiment would have been had it not been for the governments propaganda.
Russia has behaved the same way under 4 radically different forms of government.
I have to admit, I've never been persuaded by this western idea that if you get rid of Putin, everything will be better.
I'm not sure what part of Russian history, or contemporary Russian society, gives people confidence in this idea?
I'm not being anti-Russian here either. I feel the same way about our nation here in the US. Even if we were to rid ourselves of Trump for instance, we would still have serious issues with a large body of people who support Trump-like policies. A wise Europe would still be obliged to be on guard against us.
Every nation has belligerent elements. Russia is no different. While, say, Putin, may be an expression of that belligerent element, I'm unconvinced that he is the belligerent element itself. I think it's foolish, potentially fatal, to make that assumption.
> I have to admit, I've never been persuaded by this western idea that if you get rid of Putin, everything will be better.
I’m mangling a quote from someone, but extreme environments breed extreme leaders.
To rise, Putin had to be better than his rivals. Presumably they were ruthless, clever, calculating etc.
I’m not sure we want to hear from his successor.
In the last 125 years Russia has been through monarchy, liberal communism (Kerensky), dictatorial communism (Lenin, Stalin), bureaucratic communism (Khrushchev to Gorbachev), liberal capitalism, oligarchy, and now dictatorship. None of them worked very well.
Whenever there's trouble, Russia's history demands a strong leader. When one arises, the strong leader soon becomes the trouble.
> Whenever there's trouble, Russia's history demands a strong leader.
By ‘strong’, do you mean violent dictator?
Maybe some of the provinces that are held by force should be allowed self determination. Maybe less violence would then be ‘needed’.
Nations make their own Logic. The US has to control or befriend the oil producing countries to maintain the petrodollar (which really maintains the dollar, which is the lynchpin of the global economy). This leads to “wars for oil” where the US doesn’t take any oil (it just needs the country to return to the dollar market - so price their oil in dollars).
Russia is a continental state so it requires its Neighbors to be weak so they cant threaten Russia. As much as it tries to escape this logic, it can’t. Russia’s core interest is to dominate and subjugate its near abroad. It has to. It’s the only way for it to become a global power.
> It has to. It’s the only way for it to become a global power.
Unless of course doing so makes them far poorer and isolates them culturally/economically, and completely embarrasses their image of having a strong military.
What is your logic or rationale for this view? I think the contrary view is easy to argue - Russia is one of the head states in BRICS which is the largest international union in the world both by population, and which has also economically surpassed the G7 as well. And militarily they're fighting a war against an endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies being armed and funded by the entirety of NATO, Europe, and a few odd balls -- and they're winning, at a cost of < 10% GDP. What other countries could match that?
I think you mean they're obstinately continuing the invasion they thought would be over in three days. Sending an endless stream of regulars, conscripts, and prisoners against people defending their homeland with drones and secondhand cold war gear.
A million casualties for a territorial stalemate is certainly one kind of winning.
They are only doing ok because of Trump’s support for Russia. Europe badly needs to get its shit together but if the US actually engaged, it could end the war promptly.
It’s a pity Putin was gifted Crimea by the west.
What are they winning?
The peace treaty will clarify that, but I think the more important thing is the establishment of a multipolar world order. That, in and of itself, can lead to conflict, but I also have some optimism that it might bring in a paradoxical peace in the same way that nuclear weapons did. The reason nukes have been good is because it makes it clear that war is unwinnable which effectively ended direct conflict between world powers. Yet of course proxy wars are alive and well with Ukraine being the king of them all. And the US may be unable to defeat Russia in this war, but it's also equally unlikely that Russia could defeat the US in a similar scenario. So, "The only winning move is not to play."
Of course this says nothing at all about relatively small regional conflicts, but in the grand scheme of things I'm far more concerned about WW3 than I am about these. That's not to understate the impact of what can (and is) happening in these sort of conflicts, but at the end of the day I don't think humanity will ever 'evolve' beyond war, and so in the mean time I think the goal should be to not end our species over something that will inevitably look like a pointless waste of life in a few decades. Keep in mind that WW1 was unironically called 'The War to End All Wars' before we started attaching an ordinal to it.
The peace treaty? What peace treaty? Multipolar world order is a buzzword that failed states like Russia certainly like to spout on their media channels to try and prove that they are not complete failures, and that in fact losing a million people to barely advance a frontline over 3 years is just and necessary. At this point they should be really worried about China just waltzing in on Siberia and taking whatever they need.
Because then they’d have to recognise their failures. It’s like an alcoholic that keeps drinking in order to keep pushing back the reckoning of reality.
Look at the map. It's huge. In order to maintain its territorial integrity it has to act like a super power, or it has no reason to exist in its current form.
And yet somehow Canada manages to get by without all the drama. Brazil as well.
A nation state's values should align with EU for them to be part of the group. I don't think Russia would ever choose to join the union considering that even UK(which is culturally closer to Europe) left it.
For individuals, a person might ask "Why can't Rodney just behave himself" without accepting that Rodney is violently anti-social and likes to throw liquidy turds at everyone. And for species, a person might ask "Why can't spider monkeys just behave themselves" without accepting that spider monkeys are dumb animals and that's what they do.
But if I point out that this same thing applies to the Russians as a whole, then suddenly I'm racist.
When I think about this, I often come back to thinking that the societies that underwent some conflict or difficult times, absolutely cannot have a member of an older generation in charge, because the only thing they do is to continue that conflict, completely manufacturing it again if needed, just to get their "revenge". Current Russian attempt at genociding Ukrainians is all the more tragic in that the generations, that remember the previous hostilities, were almost all gone by now. Alas, that corner of the world is again poisoned for several generations ahead.
Russia did inquire about joining NATO multiple times, as far back as the 50s as the USSR, in the 90s after USSR collapsed, and then again by Putin in the 2000s. It was rebuffed each time.
Joining the EU would be somewhat nonsensical as they would gain very little from it and cede substantial sovereignty in exchange. It's the same reason places like Norway have no interest in joining the EU.
(0) GP didn't mention NATO, (1) NATO exists primarily to defend against Russian aggression, so obviously they're not allowed to join, and (2) besides the incidental details added for flavor, the actual question is why Russia insists on being broadly hostile to the world rather than broadly cooperative.
The logic of 'No of course you can't join us - we're organizing to fight you!' is a good way to create a self fulfilling prophecy. Beyond that, one of the big practical reasons NATO exists is to stop its members from fighting against each other. Europe had centuries of never-ending and ever deadlier warfare eventually culminating in WW2. NATO largely stopped that by putting them under a common umbrella. Of course a practical reality is that history has shown alliances need an external enemy, or they start to turn on themselves. If the US had foreseen had powerful China would be today, I expect Russia would have been 'enlisted' into NATO.
And I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world. They cofounded BRICS which comprises near to a majority of the world's population, and also a greater share of the world's economy than e.g. the G7. Rather the "problem", and one that applies to China too, is that they will never behave in a submissive fashion to the US. They want a multipolar world, whereas the political establishment in the US still dreams of a hegemonic world order, akin to what we had after the USSR collapsed. This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict, and as the saying goes - when two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
> 'No of course you can't join us - we're organizing to fight you!'
If only this had a more complicated explanation than something akin to schoolyard drama.
> NATO largely stopped that by putting them under a common umbrella.
You're thinking of democratization, the end of imperialism, and the elimination of aggressive regimes. Helped along by the financial devastation caused by the war.
> I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world.
Sure, unless you listen to all of their broadly hostile rhetoric or are on a Malaysian or Azerbaijani airliner or something.
> This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict
This your way of saying Russia needs to cut undersea cables and invade neighbors?
>Russia did inquire about joining NATO multiple times, as far back as the 50s as the USSR,
But Russia never inquired in good faith. It was only ever sarcastically. And had it joined NATO (perhaps because the west was stupid, which it is), then right now we'd be in the pickle of trying to reconcile one NATO member invading another (likely) NATO member, and wondering what to do about it. Russia doesn't honor its treaties, neither according to the spirit of the law nor to the letter.
Now that there's no longer any point in hiding it, we should expand NATO to include everyone that is marginally adjacent to Russia. Japan, South Korea, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan. Hell, why not throw Taiwan in.
There’s a Russian joke that Russia’s mission in the world is to show other countries how not to be.
Or if we get more serious: it's mix of imperial ambitions, feeling of been humiliated by west and desire of revenge, (cultural level) aggression, arrogance, ignorance and been sure that Russia is a special country with special pathway and superior culture and one of world superpowers (that been ignored and this is not "fair")
A couple of days after russia started war, on it's official news agency site was auto published article that was supposed to be victory lap (after all it was supposed to be 3 day special operation). It was promptly removed but not before it was archived. You can read decent translation here and it will show you some glimpses of what I wrote above https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t2vz4v/ria_news_ac...
For reference: I was born back in USSR and lived there till my early teen years. Been closely following russian media, discussion platforms, etc ever since.
Because that wouldn't benefit Putin personally as much as the status quo? And he's the decision maker. Dictators routinely make decisions where they hurt their country to keep a much bigger slice of the pie for themselves...
A “normal country” like the UK or Hungary or Switzerland?
Really though it’s because Russia mostly has nothing going for its millions of people except petrochemical exports.
The short, uncouth but Occam’s Razor answer is because Putin has a micropenis and/or his parents were incredibly abusive towards him.
Russia would first have to be a "normal country". It would need an educated populace and a non-extractive (manufacturing or services) economy. It suffers from both a resource curse and Dutch disease. It is difficult to form a middle class that's independent of state institutions and employment. It has poor demographics and brain drain. It has no independent elites (academics, journalists, judges, business people), so the only restorative force in the society is brutal punishment for non-alignment with a cult of personal power.
Even if Putin wanted to join the E.U., the economy, social structures and institutions, and uneducated voting populace wouldn't allow it to be stable enough to join.
Russia at this point can't even be a successful authoritarian state like China. It's hard to say that it will never be a democracy, but those with a memory of the 1990's find that idea traumatic. Looking far forward in time, eventually global oil independence and demographic decline may force economic reform.
It would need an educated populace
How do you measure that?
It's not just literacy, although that's nearly required to engage in the public discourse. It's really more like indoctrination. The voting populace has to have an implicit belief in public institutions, believe that attempting to vote or losing a vote is not cataclysmic (not a great reason for violence or retribution), and have patience that the system will gradually correct with future votes rather than require a authoritarian to restore order. I think you can also add a distaste for cults of personalities, and a willingness to vote in disagreement with religious leaders. Lastly, voters have to have a shared delusion that their vote matters, which it practically does not (economic value of voting is negative for the individual).
Russia likely doesn't meet these requirements, and the U.S. has had many failed democratic experiments in places like Afghanistan where this culture is missing.
I think the reason Russia today is relentless anti-West is rooted the post-Soviet era in many ways characterized by (the alcoholic) Boris Yeltsin. Wikipedia gives the summary: "Yeltsin oversaw the transition of Russia's command economy into a capitalist market economy by implementing economic shock therapy, market exchange rate of the ruble, nationwide privatization, and lifting of price controls. Economic downturn, volatility, and inflation ensued. Amid the economic shift, a small number of oligarchs obtained most of the national property and wealth, while international monopolies dominated the market." and I'd add millions of people died (not an exageration).
The Putin regime began with Putin using military force to arrest any disloyal oligarchs while formulating his anti-Western ideology. But sequence of event explains why most Russians today have zero faith/interest in joining the Western World.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin
Yes: Notice that without the Baltic Sea, which is effectively closed, and the Crimean region of Ukraine, Russia is not a European naval power, and experts have long argued (afaik) not much of a European power.
Similarly, notice how much they invested in their naval base in Syria on the Mediterranean (though I'm not sure of its status now, and they oddly seemed to abandon Assad, who provided it to them).
More critically, think of a war: How do they trade by sea by sea? Their economy could be choked off, restricted to Pacific trade and trains across Asia to the population centers. They are in a corner.
That or the Suwalki gap. They're both flashpoints.
Yep, if Russia wants to expand its conflict against Europe, Narva in Estonia is most likely place for it. Over 90% of its population is ethnic Russian, and it's located right next to the Russian border. It's the perfect place to send some armed "separatists" to see how NATO responds.
My bet is that it'll happen sometime between 2029-2035, after UK, France and Germany have had their general elections, where populist parties with more pro-Russian stances are likely to gain power.
> Yep, if Russia wants to expand its conflict against Europe, Narva in Estonia is most likely place for it. Over 90% of its population is ethnic Russian, and it's located right next to the Russian border. It's the perfect place to send some armed "separatists" to see how NATO responds.
Fortunately while close, the border runs along a fairly wide river with just a single bridge across, so logistically somewhat complicated to supply with heavy equipment from the Russian side. At least covertly.
But definitely a scenario that needs to be considered.
> logistically somewhat complicated to supply with heavy equipment from the Russian side
Little green men. Crimea is an island.
Estonia has recently announced that they will implement a shoot-to-kill policy without warnings at the border.
Absolutely necessary. Unfortunate. Tragic. Avoidable. But given Moscow’s playbook, necessary.
An island with a Russian naval base.
There are 5 road bridges and 1 railway bridge in the vicinity of Narva.
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Narva is a bad spot, from there it would be a long trek South. Doing it just North of the Polish town of Suwalki would allow a pincer movement that cuts off 3 EU countries in one go from a land bridge. That's also why it is right now one of the heaviest militarized zones in Europe.
Narva is much less interesting in that sense.
Svalbard is another possible obvious target. It has a Russian population, is quite some distance from the mainland, and is essentially undefended.
It would be easy to set up a Russian military presence, and it would be hard to dislodge it from a distance without considerable effort and expense.
This doesn't seem that useful? Svalbard would require significant, continued supply. Unless the Russian navy is able to own the Barrents Sea, any force on Svalbard could just be waited out. Once the diesel is out, the defenses go down and they freeze. Not to mention that it is well in range for medium range ballistic misses from Greenland, Iceland and the Nordics.
In 2025+ you also need to count in deniable accident inducing naval drones - both surface and underwater types. So their position would be even more untenable
I honestly don't know much about warfare, but that seems like a pretty insane move to me.
First, it assumes the people of Belarus is willing to start a war with NATO and it's very grumpy neighbor to the south. There isn't a world in which the Suwałki gap it cut off without strikes and an invasion of Belarus. Lukashenko might want it, but given the last "election" there will likely be a 5th, 6th, and 7th column waiting for guns to be carried over the border from Poland and Ukraine.
Second, while Kaliningrad might be defensible (though I doubt that), the Baltic Sea is not. Sweden, Denmark, and Germany will shut down any ships entering and leaving the Baltic. Ukraine and Turkey cut off the Black Sea, and the Russian fleet is left in Murmansk (which is likely immediately destroyed), and Vladivostok... which as a single port as mostly useless, and can be mostly cut off in the Sea of Japan.
I just really don't see a way that Russia takes any NATO territory without the entire thing being a psyop against NATO not responding via far-right isolationists, and we're not there yet, or as an assist to help China take Taiwan, which likely means world war, and we're all fucked.
Invading Ukraine was also a pretty insane move, if insanity is a pre-requisite then that makes it more likely, not less...
>First, it assumes the people of Belarus is willing to start a war with NATO
I think there is a more than 50% chance that Belarus is reintegrated in some form into Russia within this century. It's very clear that there is no plan for sovereignty post-Lukashenko and all of the opposition(like in Russia) has been exiled(so powerless). This is probably the 2nd biggest miss of EU foreign policy in the 21st century after Ukraine, they basically put Lukashenko in the same basket as Putin even though up until 2020 he did everything he could to maintain his sovereignty and got hit with horrible sanctions. But IMO it's too late now.
>Second, while Kaliningrad might be defensible (though I doubt that)
Russian military doctrine is kind of nebulous, but the one thing it is extremely clear on is that Kaliningrad will be defended using nuclear weapons. Exactly because it's basically not defensible using conventional means.
The point is you don't have to attack Kaliningrad. A siege trivially collapses the place. The place is wildly vulnerable on all sides despite the short distance to Belarus. This isn't a "the Kerch Bridge is outside of missle range" situation. Literally every way in and out of the enclave can be exploded on a daily basis, even without striking the enclave itself.
So if the idea is to invade the Baltics, but "not allow an invasion of Kaliningrad, without nuclear retaliation"... well then we've going to have a nuclear war and everyone loses, simply because you can't retake the Baltics without Kaliningrad, and NATO isn't going to allow the Baltics to be lost.
> The point is you don't have to attack Kaliningrad. A siege trivially collapses the place.
This is hilarious as naval blockade by itself is an act of war.
What??? The entire point is that this would happen — in response — to a Russian invasion of the Suwałki gap.
Actually I think Lukasenko only plays dump & wants to wait it out, expecting Belarus to be left standing in a quite good position once Russia goes down the failed state route.
> I just really don't see a way that Russia takes any NATO territory without the entire thing being a psyop against NATO not responding via far-right isolationists, and we're not there yet, or as an assist to help China take Taiwan, which likely means world war, and we're all fucked.
I mean that's really the setup.
1. Get America to move towards a more isolationist setup / unwilling to help Europe or Taiwan. This is already in motion politically and via social media operations.
2. Get America stuck in a conflict with Iran. This is ramping up.
3. China takes Taiwan. Probably in the next 2-5 years.
4. Russia takes the Baltics and starts to carve further into Europe.
My further total crackpot theory on all of this is that most of this has been agreed upon by all the major powers involved.
1. Russia gets to claim over Europe in the future.
2. China gets Taiwan and control of Africa + APAC.
3. US gets control of North America and South America. This culminates in the annexation of Greenland once Russia takes Europe. This is the agreed upon transaction for America to back out of Russo-European affairs and China-Taiwan affairs. Canada and Mexico eventually are also merged into the US unwillingly but without any major allies left there isn't much to prevent it.
> 4. Russia takes the Baltics and starts to carve further into Europe.
They have chewed up their army and lost a navy to a country without ships. How will they fight another war?
Russia started the full scale invasion with 190 000 troops (out of 1 M total active military personnel). Today they have 700 000 deployed in Ukraine. Casualties are probably 200 000 killed and up to a 1 M injured. At the same time they now have 1.3 M total active military personnel. Estimate that 1/3 of the injured are bad enough that they aren’t effective as soldiers. That is 500k unrecoverable losses, and a military that is 300k larger, so they have recruited another 800k to be where they are today.
If they stop fighting actively, then it becomes easier to recruit again without mobilising. Give it a few years and they could have another go at some other location. They clearly don’t care about casualties. Maybe not against NATO, but Georgia, Azerbaijan etc. And so it could continue for a very long time.
”Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
Citations for numbers from Claude, that are all best estimates.
In your mind what does a “Russian claim over Europe” mean. Do you really imagine a country with one third the population of the EU is going to dominate the EU + UK?
It's not about what we think, it is about what they think. They got away with it for 50+ years and they want that back.
There are biggest protests in Iran in years & they lost a war with Israel recently - I don't see them being a problem in a long term & with a bit of luck their horrendous regime that regularly slaughters their own citizens might be gone.
The US somehow subjugating 180 million people is delusional. And tens of millions of current US citizens would probably side with Canada and Mexico.
Those citizens can't even side with the US, why should they side with foreign countries?
Maybe they do side with the US, just not with its ‘leader’?
<<side with Canada and Mexico>>
can confirm!
US annexing Greenland is just an excuse for US to leave NATO, Trump or Vance might do it if Putin attacks Europe, and he will when China attacks Taiwan.
With 10 undersea cables damaged in the Baltic 2023-2025, it’s obvious a different part of the government needs to become involved. Acting for your national security doesn’t need to (shouldn’t) mean there is no trial.
Don't even need to click to know it's the Russians.
That's what I said about nordstream.
Turns out it was the Ukrainians! I'm past even guessing at this point...
I never understand how people bought the propaganda on this. Why would anybody think Russia would blow up a pipeline that they spent years and billions of dollars building? It requires completely rejecting all logic. And then Western countries completely stonewalling calls for an independent international investigation at the UN - why would we do that?
I also very much doubt it was the Ukrainians in by themselves - as blowing up heavily reinforced pipes 80m under the water is a rather extreme task, but at least they would have had a reasonable motive. Russia was fueling the German economy, and Ukraine would have had a viable concern about Germany prioritizing their own economy over Ukraine. OTOH it seems somewhat obvious at this point that Russia would not have threatened to turn off the gas, so it was a terrible miscalculation by whoever did it.
It was ultimately caused by Russia either way.
I assumed it was China. They both enjoy this activity.
Yeah, but it's a bit far away for China. They prefer harassing their closer neighbors.
In 2023, Balticconnector gas pipeline between Estonia and Finland was broken by a Chinese ship Newnew Polar Bear dragging its anchor in the sea floor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balticconnector#2023_damage_in...
In 2024, another Chinese ship damaged telecom cables in the Baltic Sea area between Sweden and the Baltic countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Baltic_Sea_submarine_cabl...
They prefer to bankroll Russia.
Every single ship in/out of St Petersburg goes via the Gulf of Finland. All those ships will be "Russian" (have stopped in Russia). It doesn't mean they're "Russian". Owner, charterer, flag, crew can all have very different nationalities.
Which part or combination makes them "Russian", in the sense of "the Russian state asked asked the ship to harm Finnish infrastructure, and they actually did it"?
You can lazily speculate about the aggressive, warmaking nation (that illegally annexed Crimea, is currently at war with Ukraine, is regularly sending submarines, ships, drones, jets into the territories of its neighbours) all you like... but if you want to be able to prosecute them, you need to be able to show evidence of the Russian state ordering this action, and that the cable damage was actually caused by that ship. Where is your evidence?
The crew on these ships are usually all Russians, the ship is often registered in Cayman, Panama or somewhere else. These ships often sail under a third nationality, but when the ships are seized, only complaints are filed from Russian lawyers. Take from that what you will.
Is every American carrying out American government policy? It's a big stretch.
Every American destroying submarine cables might be, yes.
This is the court of public opinion, not a court or law. For better or worse, evidentiary standards are much lower.
The court of public opinion is a really shitty court to apply to potentially criminal damage that occurred well outside the area of interest and knowledge for 99.99% of said public. The standards are shit, the outcomes are shit (bad idea when the ramifications are huge).
It clearly worked very poorly in the case of the recent "Russian drone interference" panic, many of which turned out to not even be drones, never mind Russian ones. https://www.dronewatch.eu/61-european-drone-sightings-analys...
Or the "UFOs" over Pennsylvania.
Sorry but in times of war, the regular "proof beyond reasonable doubt" cannot apply anymore, or you lose said war.
If you're at war then declare war. You get sweeping powers to deal with existential threats. Go ahead and declare your country is at war. Is it?
If you declare war without there being a bona fide casus belli, you'll be whisked out of power so fast your head will spin. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_South_Korean_martial_law_...
If you don't declare war, you don't get those emergency powers. You only get peacetime powers.
Russia loves to go right up to the line, and then cross it a little bit, just to antagonise you. But unless you're willing to be the instigator of WW3, you'll stick to peacetime powers and peacetime courts with peacetime standards of evidence
>But unless you're willing to be the instigator of WW3, you'll stick to peacetime powers and peacetime courts with peacetime standards of evidence
Clearly this will need to change somewhat, if the other side wants to engage in hybrid war tactics. Nothing new, Cold War was a thing.
But what if the other side - Russia - does wartime tactics without having formally declared war with NATO? Why do they get to keep this privilege?
Because they're an authoritarian shithole with a strongman leader who openly murders dissenters, personally controls all branches of government, controls the military and has people arrested just for holding up blank sheets of paper. He can pretend the country is not at war when it clearly is, and suffer no consequence, because nobody can replace him or even censure him without the country completely collapsing. When he eventually dies, the ensuing power vacuum will make the entire country a basket case. It's a dead country walking.
Do you want to make your country such a nightmare country, so you can also cheat like they do?
No, I want my country to have democratic rule of law on the inside (including when dealing with normal criminals of any kind, including murderers).
But when dealing with an outside state-level aggressor, I want my country to be be a cunning, hypocritical, powerful strongman.
The distinction under what mode a certain event should be treated should be pretty straightforward and can be determined using democratic means, e.g. a normal judge ruling "I rule this cable cutting incident to be an act of state-sponsored aggression against our democracy" (which would allow the alphabet agencies, special ops etc to "do their thing" with no repercussions whatsoever.)
for example:
1) a murder happens between a husband and wife, two normies, after lengthy, normal court proceedings the proof who did it is not 100% conclusive, accused person goes free
2) a murder of an anti-russian political dissident happens, a russian ex speznas officer is caught in relation to the event -> he "disappears" one day and the case is closed
I believe this is the only way to "win" this cold war.
People in other places don't have rights, and lives, and deserve freedom? If they don't, you don't. If they can be ruled out, so can you. Freedom and rights only exist if they are fundamentally universal.
Which powerful countries abide by this?
Sadly, it seems a fiction.
Yes Trump was right about everything and Make America Great Again! I also want what Russia has! The biggest ball(room)!
No declarations of War has been needed for decades, internationally you only get disadvantages from doing that. Russia hasn't declared war to Ukraine, neither has Ukraine to Russia, so what.
People love this 'expediency' for what they want, but once you destroy the rule of law and reason generally, nothing protects you.
You're standing in a forest, lighting a forest fire to kill the other guy. There is lots of history about this most fundamental error.
Assuming it is state-sponsored sabotage…why? Whats the outcome they want? Is it just turning up the heat in the region?
Same reason they infiltrate airspace duringtraining, fly drones over airports, run submarines through ports.
Testing limits and tolerance, threatening what they could do in a real attack. Creating econocic pain in retaliation for support with a strong alibi to blame.
Boarding and detaining is a new escalation. How many cables cut before we consider military reaction? 3? 10? all of them?
Is there a real drone issue at all? https://www.dronewatch.eu/61-european-drone-sightings-analys...
Various parts of Europe keep announcing extraordinarily expensive new drone defense systems, so you'd hope so (or that the announcements are a bluff)
Government buying more fire trucks is a poor measure for increased incidence of actual fires. They might just be signaling, fall for marketing, and lots of other things. Governments are run by people, and they are as fallible as any rando on HN.
If you want to research this, the terms to look for is something like "Russian hybrid warfare goals and objectives in Europe" (can also try greyzone warfare).
For example, here's a CSIS (American think tank) report: https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-shadow-war-against-wes...
Put simply, the goal is to add friction to anything NATO tries to do to aid Ukraine, and/or generally to improve its posture against Russia, while also trying to crack apart and erode both broad based and elite support for acting against Russia.
Scaring people, distraction, etc.
In the grand scheme, repairing the cables and supporting Ukraine will cost less and hurt Russia more than escalating tentions in the Baltic sea.
> Is it just turning up the heat in the region?
The EU and US were an unassailable bastion of freedom, peace, and prosperity, with arguably the most solid political foundations in history in democracy, and the most solid alliance in history in NATO.
How do you defeat such a place? You turn up the heat, to describe it very generally. It means, n a sense, radicalizing the population, a classic solution to Russia's problem. That's what terrorists do: How do you cause the US to shoot itself in the foot: terrorize people into thinking they are unsafe and overreacting (even though 9/11 affected on small area of one city).
One way they turn up the heat is to spread ethnic hatred, social distrust, embrace of violence, and abandonment of those things that prevent those maladies: universal human rights, democracy, rule of law, etc.
You can see it in this thread: People rooting for warfare, abandonment of the rule of law, etc. - all by some minor, cost-effective actions, like cutting a cable.
The expensive action and infinitely more consequential action - the invasion of Ukraine - remarkably doesn't create the same outrage. That outrage would trigger the obviously best solution: Guaranteeing unlimited material and political support for Ukraine until they win the war.
That is, it's remarkable if you don't appreciate information dominance, especially with social media companies either abandoning all responsibility or openly aiding the radicalization. Russia can create radicalization directly too.
> You turn up the heat
Agreed it's what they're doing but this looks more like "turning everyone against you". And you want your enemies to underestimate you (like Song or Kievan Rus' underestimated the Mongols) but the world doesn't underestimate Russia. Maybe it could have but WW2 and appeasement are still too fresh in memory.
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They want to test how quickly the cables get repaired and what vessels do the repairs etc.
Simple, they know there will be no consequences and Europe will keep buying their gas.
You realize that gas imports to Europe from Russia is down 80+% since pre invasion?
Russia is obviously having quite a hard time from sanctions caused by their actions.
Related, posted a day ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445484
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46443925
Lock em up, sell thier property. Rinse and repeat.
Lock em up, sell thier property. Rinse and repeat.
Works for small and medium-sized private companies. Doesn't work for major nations like Russia.
Doing as you suggest is like writing parking tickets for delivery trucks. They don't care. It's just a cost of doing business.
Russia needs to work with the private sector to buy and crew the ships, and there is only so many ships they can buy and lose before it's not worth the money or hassle for either Russia or their private partners.
This assumes everyone agrees with sanctions. Various countries don’t and Russian exports are flowing.
It will be worth for Russia as long as the rust buckets they are using for the purpose are cheaper than cable repairs and knock-on effects from whatever downtime, and the uncertainty it brings to the West.
Why wouldn't it work? The oligarchs would certainly be a bit upset if they lost their yachts, mansions, sports teams, and everywhere else they keep their wealth away from Putin.
That’s all been confiscated already.
All?
That doesn’t seem likely.
It's been repeatedly demonstrated that the oligarchs are just as expendable as the ships.
Mine the Gulf of Finland, problem solved. This may create other problems but hey Finland is part of NATO now.
Maybe it's time to cut Russia out of the West's internet altogether.
I was thinking that too, but is it even possible? Russia must have interconnects via Belarus and other countries like Turkey. Maybe China?
The half that Russia hasn't already blocked, anyways.
Russians are blocked, Russia isn't.
Two other cable cuts/"damages" happened around the same dates. Two separate Arelion-owned cables between Sweden/Estonia and Finland/Estonia.
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/JOow58/kabelbrott-mella... (Swedish)
[...] two of their submarine cables – one between Sweden and Estonia and one between Estonia and Finland – have been damaged. The first cable was damaged on December 30th and the second on December 31st.
(Arelion is AS1299/formerly known as Telia Carrier. The name change happened because it's now owned by a Swedish government-managed infrastructure-focused pension fund.)
I wonder how the insurance works in this situation.
It's pretty obvious what's happening here.
The response needs to be forceful: seize and auction off the ships. There needs to be sufficient deterrent to actually stop this from happening.
> There needs to be sufficient deterrent to actually stop this from happening
One ship might be considered a reasonable pawn to sacrifice. I'd go further: require that any ships passing through the strait to be bonded at some eye-watering amount like 10x the price of the ship plus the repair costs of the cable. Make it so if the cable is cut, you make a profit.
Only works if you find someone to pay. I listened to a lengthy (German) podcast about international maritime law. To sum it up: you can’t do that much, because you won’t find the responsible person/company/state.
> German podcast
There was a Planet Money episode touching on Maritime law:
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/17/nx-s1-5577076/shadow-fleet-ru...
It was about Russian tankers breaking the sanctions, but with a well put explanation of why we can't just stop these ships even with extreme confidence in their fraudulency.
> why we can't just stop these ships
To be clear, why we don’t want to. Freedom of navigation makes all of us tremendously richer, even if it permits such fuckery.
Every great power has, at this point, rejected the notion in limited contexts. And if you’re not concerned about trashing trade, there is no incoherence to ignoring these rules.
In a hypothetical future where sailing under flags of convenience becomes untenable, all the legitimate merchant vessel owners would rush to register in the US or China. Those vessels would still be able to sail anywhere unmolested. Outside of a few pirate gangs, no one would be stupid enough to screw with them and risk kinetic retaliation. This might increase shipping costs by a few percent.
Russia can bluster and threaten but their navy is weak and shrinking. Most of their commissioned warships never venture far from port. Outside of their territorial waters they have minimal capability to protect their own merchant vessels or interdict anyone else's sea lines of communication.
> all the legitimate merchant vessel owners would rush to register in the US or China
The US can't afford to field the navy necessary to back this ams hasn't been able to for many decades
> US can't afford to field the navy necessary to back this ams hasn't been able to for many decades
This is nonsense. The U.S. Navy de facto guarantees freedom of navigation today. Globally.
If we switched to a national system, our Navy wouldn’t literally escort U.S.-flagged ships. Its military would just need to enforce the threat that you get bombed if you fuck with America.
We’d save money switching to a big-stick model. (I think we’d be poorer for it in the long run. But if you’re playing chess and your opponent machete, you’re not going to find any winning moves on the board.)
> Its military would just need to enforce the threat that you get bombed if you fuck with America.
Panting a Russian flag on the side of a crappy tanker is enough to get the US to back off.
Russia can do what it likes with current US leadership.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/us/politics/russia-oil-ta...
> Panting a Russian flag on the side of a crappy tanker is enough to get the US to back off
Has the White House rolled over?
I can’t see any update that says they have engaged.
So yes… I think.
> can’t see any update that says they have engaged. So yes… I think.
I wouldn't be suprised if Trump chickens out. But this logic is terrible.
The same pursuit that has been happening for days continues to happen. That the pattern has not changed in reaction to new stimulus isn't proof that the stimulus worked.
Just stumbled on the below link - Russia has directly asked the US to leave the ship alone. It’s going to be hard to duck this one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/us/politics/russia-oil-ta...
> Russia has directly asked the US to leave the ship alone
Yes. I am aware. Flags are being painted, registries updated and sternely-worded letters sent. The ship sails on. So do its pursuers.
> It’s going to be hard to duck this one
It really shouldn't be.
Just board the ship. Putin makes noises about international law. A D.C. lawyer insists that no, the vessel was stateless when found. And assuming there isn't like fissile material or a senior IRGC liaison on board, everyone grumbles and moves on.
Trump and Putin have a complicated relationship. But about the single thing that this will not depend on will be what maritime law says the U.S. should do. (And I think the legal arguments for seizure are on America's side on this one.)
I am formerly a Marine. This a rather silly notion and I think you should back your claim up with some evidence. Even with as much damage as Donald Trump has done to the US's military preparedness and hegemony around the globe no other fleet operates like the Marine Expeditionary Units. No other fleet can respond to any critical location in less than 24 hours. Add the Coast Guard for near-CONUS and partnered patrols and the US still maintains dominance both at home and abroad.
Nations, like China, are catching up but largely because of two outsized factors:
- The US for some time has not been able to produce ships at home, at scale, and at cost. This is more of a slow burn because the fleet has been kept up to date for the most part. Eventually, new ships need to be built at home.
- Donald Trump has done damn near everything he can to install lackey's within the military, which reduces the military's top decision making acumen down to yes-men to a 79 year old geriatric patient.
Russia's fleet, on the other hand, is an aging joke. It is where we will be if we continue electing fascists that install Martians like Hegseth.
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As we are seeing, "can't" is a really strong word.
Yes. I meant it more as "can't _just_", we can do it but need to account for serious ramifications in doing so at scale.
> (German) podcast about international maritime law
Russia isn’t even pretending to follow international maritime law. China hasn’t for a decade. And now America is being creative with its interpretations.
> And now America is being creative with its interpretations.
The US follows the rules carefully when Russia encourages it to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/us/politics/russia-oil-ta...
Most of the water isn't internal.. getting in and out of the baltic sea goes past Sweden/Denmark.
But we probably have promised not to blockade ships in some conventions. And little Denmark (or Sweden) do not benefit from setting a precedence that conventions can be broken.
Getting payback is easy though: support Ukraine.
There is no such convention as far as I can tell.
Most nations have either signed the UNCLOS to otherwise agreed to follow most of those rules. This includes the right of innocent passage through territorial waters. Of course if a vessel engages in hostile acts then they're no longer entitled to exercise that right.
So escort and inspect then.
There is. Its the treaty of Versailles. And it reaffirmed the Copenhagen Convention of 1857.
Or at least a responsible person with money to pay for it. There are plenty of cases of some poor sailor getting stuck with the bill and forced to live on the abandoned boat as a result.
You can always make the regulations such that they're actually effective. You could require the company providing the bond be from a reputable country, for example.
Still I don't see an issue - basically you either pay the armed coast gard cutter that stands in your way or you don't go through the straight. If you don't cause any trouble, the other cutter on the other end will pay you back. No money, no transit - unless you really like being boarded.
Regardless of what specific rules could be set you have to consider rules of engagement and potential escalation. What happens if a Russian merchant vessel (either legitimately flagged or shadow fleet) refuses to cooperate? Do you use force to stop them? What if they're being escorted by a Russian warship or combat aircraft?
You put mines and wait. We need to stop with “what if escalation” mantra when it was always Russians escalating.
Put mines where? How do you prevent neutral vessels from hitting them? What happens when they inevitably break loose in a storm and drift away? Naval mines are quite effective for closing down a body of water in an unrestricted hot war but we haven't reached that stage yet. EU and NATO countries still want to be able to use the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland for their own purposes.
You haven't really thought this plan through.
Smart mines. There are thousands of them deployed already.
Huh? What are you even talking about? Which models specifically? And how sure are you that they can reliably discriminate between Russian vessels versus others that look and sound identical?
You haven't really thought this plan through.
> And how sure are you that they can reliably discriminate between Russian vessels versus others that look and sound identical?
Based on recent events, even people struggle to tell what is Russian and what isn’t.
These smart mines might solve that?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/us/politics/russia-oil-ta...
The Outlaw Sea, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865477223/theoutlawsea/ , is a book about all of the ways international water is essentially lawless.
If these ships are independent operators being influenced by Russia, seizing the ship will be a significant consequence because the next time Russia will have a harder time convincing a crew to sabotage a cable.
> pretty obvious what's happening here
Good start. Then turn off Russia’s cable that runs via Finland [1] and make vague threats about (a) seizing shadow-fleet vessels in the Baltics and (b) how vulnerable Russia’s cable to Kaliningrad [2] would be to careless anchors.
All the while: start setting up non-cable based back-up bandwidth for if Russia severs these cables in advance of invasion.
[1] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/bcs-north-...
[2] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/kingisepp-...
Russia started convoying some of those vessels, especially with more advanced operation bases than cable cuts [1].
They won't be able to seize those without opening fire.
https://ioplus.nl/en/posts/how-seven-students-unmasked-russi...
That's fine. Let Russia escort ships that then break cables. It'll make it more obvious it's deliberate, and provide a reason for blockade and confrontation.
And then NATO will obliterate Russia's Baltic fleet before the sun rises.
A hot NATO-Russia engagement ends with a few sunrises at 3am all over Europe, USA, and Russia. Not a thing to joke about or cheer.
I'm not sure the Motherland is really all that strong these days, Dmitry.
careful, Brigadier they can introduce a foriegn substance into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard core commie works.
You'd think their escalation threshold would be something a bit more existential than a few more rustbuckets at the bottom of the ocean.
Saber rattling and nuclear threats always benefits someone.. who?
Remember when invading Russian territory was a red line that could cause a nuclear retaliation? And then Ukraine went into Russia and Russia responded with a pretty bog standard conventional force?
Russia isn't gonna fling nukes if the West doesn't first. Putin and co have no interest in Moscow being glassed.
> And then Ukraine went into Russia and Russia responded with a pretty bog standard conventional force?
Standard North Koreans?
Your point stands but Russia is happy to drag in anyone it can. The US and EU letting Ukraine bleed out is shameful.
But Ukraine isn’t NATO.
Red line still pretty intact.
Well maybe the Russians should stop joking about it if it’s so serious. How many times do I have to hear from Medvedev about how Russia will rain nuclear hellfire on London?
Fuck around, you’ll find out. These guys are wimps. If they want to end the world, so be it. China would be destroyed too.
All the while his very own daughter lives in London. These threats are really just that, nothing to take overly serious.
“ If they want to end the world, so be it.”
This is not a way rational adults make decisions. I truly hope you are not a voter in any democratic nuclear-armed country.
You’re not thinking about things clearly. You can’t live as a hostage. Otherwise “do what we say or nukes” until you wind up a slave. Better off dead.
If Russia doesn’t like it they can stop with the dumb threats.
Happy to suggest some books on how cold War was actually navigated by both parties without destroying the planet. Not to spoil the ending, but at no point in time was "if we do this and then they blow us all up, so be it" a strategy
To be clear Russia is threatening to do things (blow us up) and the result would be them being blown up too (along with the commie Chinese).
So if that’s their strategy, I’ll call their bluff every time. No point in the human race existing if the result is “do what we say, else we nuke you”. Bet
If someone is threatening to end the world over every issue, then at some stage you need to call their bluff or you'll just be taken advantage of.
If the USA threatens to nuke Russia if they don't leave Ukraine tomorrow, would you be giving these same sage warnings to Russia?
The best way to avoid confrontation is to have an irrational adult at the helm, then all calculated escalation bets are off and you tend to just not play.
We’ve got one of those in the US but it turns out the tradeoffs are terrible.
Just bend over for Putins liberators then. There’s nothing that can be done. Let them take what they want? No thanks.
By definition anything is preferable to global nuclear holocaust, so I'm not sure where you want to go with your argument.
Can I have your house if I threaten to nuke you? Assume I have a nuke. How about your wife?
If the nuke threat isn't reasonable and proportional then you must ignore it.
Nukes are for existential risks. Which is 1) enemy nukes, and 2) invasion of the capital. Anything else is bluster and coercion.
I am glad you didn’t run the Cold War.
Edit: by that I mean, with that attitude we would just have never developed nukes, or given the nukes to the Russians preemptively, because who wants nuclear war, right? Anything is better than that.
If your plan is one that ends with the end of the world and billions dead, it's a bad plan. Attacking strawpersons doesn't make it better. You need a better plan.
> one that ends with the end of the world and billions dead
The point is it doesn’t. Ukraine is on its way to wiping out Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It’s pure posturing to pretend Moscow is stupid enough to end its existence over a naval battle, much less simply credible threats of one.
> The point is it doesn’t.
That statement doesn't really amount to much given the risk. I think we need something far more convincing; and many experts clearly think nuclear war is a risk.
> many experts clearly think nuclear war is a risk
Look up what they said would trigger a nuclear war at the start of the invasion. Many of those things have already happened.
Imagine Trump threatens to nuke Russia if they don't leave Ukraine tomorrow, according to your logic they shouldn't run the risk of a nuclear exchange and Russia should retreat.
Is this correct?
Spot on. Recognising Putin’s fake lines normalizes a nuclear response to conventional tactics. That path opens to a future where it would be irrational not to constantly threaten nuclear holocaust for minor military advantage. And in that world, someone will eventually miscalculate.
Sounds like your criticism is better leveled at the country threatening nuclear holocaust if someone sneezes at them.
It's not yet demonstrated Russia will make the jump from a limited conventional confrontation to an all out nuclear war, even as its territory is under daily attack from a non-nuclear country.
It's not demonstrated, sure, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. This isn't rolling out an update to the text editor.
I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed…
There's literal war ongoing already, no extra excuse is needed, only political will.
There's a reason countries like to fight proxy wars over real wars, they cost money not (their own) lives.
That is...disturbing.
I suspect the price of a ship compared to economic damages caused by the cut cable is negligible. This is what russia calls "assymetric war". The response should be more economic sanctions.
There's generally enough cables that cutting one doesn't completely shut down some area of web traffic, it just gets slower, so it's hard to say.
But yeah, if Russia keeps it up, just blockade the Baltic Sea for ships heading to Russian ports.
Economic sanctions won't prevent the FSB from paying off ship captains to do these things. Seizing ships and imprisoning captains might provide some amount of deterrent. Clearly only way economic sanctions will have a behavioral impact on Russia is if the effects are so bad it triggers revolution which has its own dangers. Direct consequences for the people in the sphere of these actions is more prudent.
Europe has always been known for being governed by the rule of law. If we now start breaking laws and rights, especially regarding property/ownership, this will strongly backfire in the future. This can quickly become a slippery slope towards Willkürsjustiz. It is exactly the same as with the Russian assets held in Belgium at Clearstream. Selling them is a no-no.
Russia has already carried out chemical attacks on UK soil, used radioactive poisoning in London, sabotaged rail infrastructure in Poland, and launched cyberattacks against German air traffic control.[1]
The Associated Press has documented 59 Russian hybrid operations across Europe. A systematic campaign of intimidation, sabotage, and violence: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-europe-hybrid-...
Russia supplied the Buk missile system that shot down MH17, killing 298 civilians, most of them Europeans. Putin eliminates political opponents, like Alexei Navalny, who died in custody days before a possible release.
European leaders may be passive and slow, but what is making the situation truly dangerous, is the dictator-jealousy fueled encouragement and indulgence of the current U.S. administration, and all its sycophants, which got to the point of publicly applauding a dictator on U.S. soil.
That behavior legitimizes aggression, emboldens Moscow, and directly undermines European security, and is making thinks really, really, sketchy right now.
Germany accuses Russia of air traffic control cyber-attack: [1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgrrnylzzyo
> what is making the situation truly dangerous, is the dictator-jealousy fueled encouragement and indulgence of the current U.S. administration, and all its sycophants, which got to the point of publicly applauding a dictator on U.S. soil.
I personally think there's a more direct link between the US administration and Russia, in line with the rest of your points. I think it's more than "dictator-jealousy fueled encouragement", although what that "more" is I'm not entirely sure, and I'm not sure the differences between the possibilities matters in the end.
I really think it's hard not to read [about] Foundations of Geopolitics and the history of Viktor Yanukovych, the ties between the latter and Trump, and not conclude Russia's tendrils in the US, England, and elsewhere are far deeper than is generally acknowledged in the press.
I lost a lot of trust in most media to cover this issue appropriately when people in the UK started mysteriously dying and zipping themselves in body bags, and the coverage was a collective shrug. Why they would report something like that and then with a straight face conclude an article with "police say there's no evidence of foul play" is beyond me. But then again how the Mueller investigation got spun as an exoneration is also beyond me as well.
I know it's often seen as dismissive or shallow to blame the media for things, but I really do place a huge proportion of the blame for our current mess, at least in the US, on news outlets and media soft-pedaling what's been happening for the last 10 years. A lot of what people trust became propaganda, and a lot of the rest of it chased that audience around for clicks.
Regarding the spy in a bag -- the person involved was a GCHQ mathematician seconded to the SIS and studying Russia, whose "naked, decomposing remains were found in the bath of the main bedroom's en-suite bathroom, inside a red sports bag that was padlocked from the outside, with the keys inside the bag. [...] Inconclusive fragments of DNA components from at least two other individuals were found on the bag. A forensic examination of Williams's flat has concluded that there was no sign of forced entry or of DNA that pointed to a third party present at the time of his death.
Scotland Yard's inquiry also found no evidence of Williams's fingerprints on the padlock of the bag or the rim of the bath, which the coroner said supported her assertion of "third-party involvement" in the death. Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt said it was theoretically possible for Williams to lower himself into the bag without touching the rim of the bath. A key to the padlock was inside the bag, underneath his body" (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams)
It's absolutely mad, but remember this happened in 2010 -- before Russia did many of those bad things you mention. It wouldn't surprise me if a combination of political pressure and police incompetence made this go away.
I'm going to link this one again because I think it flew below the proverbial radar
The exhibits are short and worth looking at
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d...
Those connections go back as far as 2016...
But does it matter? 77 million Americans knowingly voted a convicted felon and court adjudicated sexual assaulter back into the presidency instead of a jail cell. From those, about 40 million were women, fully aware that a jury found him liable for sexual assault, and that multiple judges affirmed the verdict.
The majority of Americans saw criminality, sexual violence, and contempt for the law and decided that was acceptable leadership. :-))
"Kushner Companies and Russian individuals exchanged suspicious money transfers at the height of the 2016 race, ex-Deutsche Bank employee says" - https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-russia-2016-mo...
Next election please let the Democratic Party campaign on tangible policies, not just ad hominem - even if true.
Did we watch the same debate?
Fuck that, the American people have shown they do not care about nerds citing policies. They care about narratives.
Run with the ad Homs if that’s the narrative needed to win, then use the power to implement policy. Anything less is bringing a book to a gun fight
That's true, though it might attribute too much intentionality to voter decisions.
My hunch is that a lot of Americans ticked 'Trump' because of brand recognition.
It's like buying laundry detergent. Most people know nothing about the chemistry or efficacy. They pick whatever package looks familiar, 'Tide' probably
I respectfully suggest a future campaign slogan that sets a simple yet high policy bar: make America good again.
Let that be the prism through which all future political action is seen. Let's be real. Let's be good. Let's strive to eliminate and replace this farcical hyperbole, self-agrandizement, this pyramid scheme of a pretense at government. Let's have some confidence and ambition: work to restore a real balance of power between our three branches. There is so much we could do in the near and long term if we just set out sights on a simple, positive goal.
We may never be great again. Maybe we never were. But we can be good.
That's why I think Putin won't use nukes but would just load chemical weapons on drones to attack European cities and blame it on some terrorist organization. Trump might even support him in claiming that Russia is innocent and NATO shouldn't be involved. They already tested it on Poland with empty drones and said Russia didn't send any drones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Russian_drone_incursion_i...
> I think Putin won't use nukes
Any reasonable planning requires looking at the scenario your action creates - the range of outcomes. The range certainly includes Putin using nuclear weapons (which is part of Russia's military doctrine - see 'escalate to deescalate'). That needs to be part of your plan.
> range certainly includes Putin using nuclear weapons (which is part of Russia's military doctrine - see 'escalate to deescalate'). That needs to be part of your plan
If we had acted decisively at the beginning of the Ukraine war, the risk of nuclear war would be lower today.
Appeasement can work. But it can also increase risks. In this case, giving into a bully invites escalation itself, which increases the chances of a fuckup (e.g. a misfired drone taking out an early-warning radar) which legitimately calls for nuclear escalation.
The stereotypical warmonger rhetoric is (and not at all calling you one, just the extreme example), either you are hyper-aggressive or you are a cowardly appeaser. Think how binary that is; then think how literally one-dimensional even the critique is that it's as binary - the implication is there is a continuum between two poles, as if the field of options is a line, only one variable.
The true IR expertise - and you'll see this from the actual experts (and caveat: I am no more than a well-read amatuer) - is to neither escalate nor appease. The focus is on outcomes, not 'getting justice' (I can't think of a better term: reaction, emotional satisfaction, blame, fighting back, etc.). It endlessly frustrates many in the public, because of course they want emotional satisfaction; it also endlessly frustrates me because the leaders don't explain this.
It's like an engineering problem: You don't want to make decisions in anger; blame is terrible leadership; trying to hurt whoever caused your problem is absurd. It all would make your situation worse, even if you solve the original problem. Obviously, you think about the overall outcome for your organization and plan the best way to get there.
In sports, 'trash talk' is used to get that emotional reaction from people, because it takes them away from trying to win the game. The moment you get that response, you know you've won. Russia is working for that moment and is getting it from some.
> If we had acted decisively at the beginning of the Ukraine war, the risk of nuclear war would be lower today.
I agree completely - depending on what you mean (I certainly oppose direct combat between NATO and Russia). And we can still do it now: If NATO guarantees Ukraine unlimited material support until they win the war, no matter how long, not only would Ukraine win but when Russia was convinced of that (however that might happen), they would give up. The Europeans could do it themselves - they have ~~ 20x the economy of Russia. It would be much cheaper than the alternative of Russia gaining ground and fighting them later, and it would drain Russia's military and economy substantially.
Certainly that's not appeasing and it's barely escalatory: It's not a threat to Russian security - Ukraine obviously isn't invading - though it's eventually a threat to Putin's political standing, he may navigate it. And escalatory risk could be further decreased by offering Russia a permanent security treaty based on the old borders, with disarmament on both sides. That's the outcome NATO wants anyway.
> focus is on outcomes
Agree.
> Europeans could do it themselves - they have ~~ 20x the economy of Russia
Europe isn’t politically capable of decisive action. By design. Some European countries could, but I’m not seeing a proximate future where Europe is-and is treated as—a great power.
> escalatory risk could be further decreased by offering Russia a permanent security treaty based on the old borders, with disarmament on both sides
What do you mean by disarmament? Ukraine and Russia will obviously maintain arms after any peace. They just won’t be blowing each other up.
The preferred outcome is to further fragment the Russian Federation, leaving the rump successor state too small and weak to pose a significant threat. We did the same thing once before so let's just do it again.
How is that preferred to stable peace with Russia?
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Checks out. Trump would drool at the thought of cutting up not only Ukraine between him and Russia, but the rest of Europe too.
Trump drools anyway.
Europe believes that Russia is doing all sorts of bad things and there's also the belief that Moscow plans to invade the EU .
Isn't the logical action for EU to launch massive pre-emptive strikes on this big bad country that hates the western way of life ?
> Isn't the logical action for EU to launch massive pre-emptive strikes
To be clear, strikes wouldn't be "pre-emptive", Russia is already in a war, and it's entirely allowed for any nation to join the side of Ukraine. None of the rules of war prevent helping a friendly country by joining the fight.
"Europe thinks the unthinkable: Retaliating against Russia" - https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-thinks-the-unthinkabl...
EU makes plans to makes plans. Sounds like the usual strategy.
I take that over the US support for Putin.
I don’t believe the leadership sees Russia as an existential threat in Brussels. Baltics and Poland see it differently.
A pre-emptive strike would be expensive and immediately retcon into making Putin be the good guy - he’s long said NATO is the aggressor. Best to make invading EU to be too expensive to be worth it.
I think the bigger risk currently that Europe faces is the low and mid level corruption where Russian agents extend their tendrils into government structures in EU.
> making Putin be the good guy
Come on. Who cares what he pretend?
> Best to make invading EU to be too expensive to be worth it.
How do you propose to estimate how much it is worth doing it?
IMO, it is best is to make the kremlin government collapse by all mean necessary. Including sabotage, assassination, propaganda, confiscation, corruption/trahison. And preemptive strike if needs to be.
This worked great in every other country where some other country believed the situation will be more stable if you just topple the current regime, didn’t it?
This has already happened. Just as in the US, all of the far-right "movements" in the EU are Russian fronts.
The two biggest targets are the UK and France, because both have an independent nuclear deterrent. If those are captured by puppets, expect nuclear explosions over European capitals.
This is not hyperbole. Russian government insiders have made it absolutely, unambiguously clear that Europe must be "crushed."
As a direct quote.
The real tragedy is oligarch complicity. Oligarchs and aristocrats in the US, UK, and EU have decided they have more in common with their Russian counterparts than with the native populations of their respective countries.
Aristocrats pretty much always believed that.
How many armies in the world, have ever had a person in uniform demand that "the other army must be crushed" ? ok, is there any army that did not say that, to each other, or to an audience? Get a grip on the invective and do not blabber!
It's not about "hating the western way of life" or any such silliness. They can hate whatever they want within their internationally recognized borders.
War is best prevented by robust deterrents. When it comes to belligerent fascist regimes who want to see how far you can be pushed, not responding to provocations and aggression forcefully makes larger-scale war more likely in the future.
The logical thing to do is respond proportionally: if the ships are deliberately damaging property, seize the ships, and imprison the offenders.
Responding proportionally means you are always the one on the defensive and your opponent gets to decide the course of the conflict.
There should be a tit for tat response but the tit needs to be much larger than the tat to create the incentive for no longer attacking
That's simply not true. The US response to Pearl Harbor was proportional -- you attacked us, that's war, so now we're warring -- but that didn't mean staying on the defensive.
If it's known that Russia is using ships to attack Western infrastructure, blockading those ships is entirely proportional. A blockade, in this case, isn't so much an act of war, as it is a response to an act of war.
They shot some of our boats and we dropped portable suns onto two of their cities.
A proportional response would be to take out of one their fleets. We explicitly went disproportional when we conquered their entire nation and dismantled their empire.
Please stop pushing ahistorical claims
Hey, thats exactly what Ahmed al Ahmed was thinking. He ripped rifle out of Bondi Beach terrorist hands but didnt shoot him immediately because that would be "disproportional". Terrorist ran back to his friend, pulled another gun from the bag and killed several more innocent people.
We have functional democracies here. You'd have to convince the population this is the right course of action and then the politicians will do it.
Good luck with that, though.
No, pre-emptively starting another war is not a good idea. But yes, the West should work hard to make sure their enemy loses the war it has already started.
> Isn't the logical action for EU to launch massive pre-emptive strikes on this big bad country that hates the western way of life ?
Depending on the days, the priority changes, between Russia or attacking the US first, maybe with the help from Canada :-))
You have to deal with one threat at a time, and it seems the fight against chlorinated chicken will take priority for now... :-)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/12/17/trump-demands...
There's essentially nothing you can do to deter this sort of behavior short of starting a war
That's exactly the appeasement mentality that lets Russia get away with everything.
"We don't want to start a war doncha know, so whenever Russia attacks us we'll just take it on the chin and not fight back too hard".
It appears the world has forgotten the lessons of the Sudetenland.
If Russia wasn't currently locked in a land war with Ukraine, that would largely be true (assuming that you were NATO and wanted to play by both the rules of being real democracies, and also respecting international law).
But since Russia IS locked in a land war with Ukraine, in a hypothetical world, you could retaliate by upping aid through Ukraine, OR (if you were being sneaky), laundering your actions through Ukraine.
could you cut russias undersea cables in a tit for tat?
there is internet in russia? :)
The war has already started.
They can use 30-year old handysize rust buckets that can be cheaper than some cable repairs.
Jailing crews in comfy Scandinavian prisons can hardly be a strong deterrent either.
Russia is all-in on this confrontation, Europe is much wealthier but won't commit anywhere near the effort or expense.
Many of the shadow fleet crew members aren't even Russians. Typically only the master and some officers are privy to the real mission. The other crew members are just random seamen hired from the usual poor countries so jailing them would be pointless.
Typically only the master and mates are liable for breaches like that? It's not that a boatswain, a C/E decides when to drop an anchor.
Russia has an immense capacity to endure suffering and sacrifice lives. It’s basically their secret weapon.
yup. RU will literally wait decades and then send their lil KGB/GRU agents all around the world to assassinate you, chop you up, or poison you. they play the long game and never forget.
It's geopolitical. They don't care if you seize the ships because they don't care about a return on investment.
Good, another reason to seize them
Even better life in prison for all on board. (This is extreme but I bet you that they'd think twice)
> life in prison for all on board
Honestly, give any Russian or shadow-vessel crew a bounty if they surrender. Turn Moscow’s fleet into a cheap source of intelligence and scrap.
That's not extreme. They destroyed a piece of expensive critical infrastructure. Prison and seizure should be the bare minimum. I just mean it's not enough to prevent it in the future.
Nothing burger incoming. Previously Finland let go of Eagle S despite evidence of cutting cables https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/world/europe/finland-tank...
The crew are probably living much better and safer lives in Finnish jail than they would out of jail in Russia.
Speaking of the joy of living in Russia, check out the hilarious story of racist right wing Finnish Flat Earther anti-immigrant anti-refugee pro-Russian criminal asshole Ano Turtiainen, now living as a refugee in Russia and threatening to fight against fellow Finns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ano_Turtiainen
Ano Turtiainen is a former Finnish powerlifter turned far-right politician who managed to embarrass himself and others at every step:
He was banned for two years in 1998 for androgenic drug use -- perfect start to a "morally upright" career.
As an MP with the batshit crazy racist right-wing Finns Party, he posted a mocking tweet about George Floyd's murder ("Pink Floyd"), which was widely condemned as even too racist for the Finns Party, which got him expelled.
He set up his own splinter faction and then a tiny party, Power Belongs to the People (VKK), which became known for praising Russia and opposing sanctions and Finnish NATO membership, utterly at odds with mainstream Finnish views.
Turtiainen even refused to fire an assistant who posted racist content and had a parliamentary visitor do a Nazi salute (which he photographed himself!).
Instead of behaving like a responsible adult during the pandemic, he mocked public health measures, called them "neo-communism", refused masks, and threatened violence over mask mandates.
Meanwhile his own company manufactured masks: the ultimate hypocrisy.
Turtiainen failed to explain how he used over €30,000 in parliamentary group funds -- so the Finnish Parliament is trying to collect it back through debt enforcement.
Not only that: He's a Flat Earther, doesn't believe in space existing, and was convinced NASA interfered in the last election he was involved in so that he only got 7 votes.
Now the Ultimate Irony: the Anti-Immigrant Asshole Becomes a Hypocritical Refugee.
After losing his seat in the 2023 election (with only ~632 votes), Turtiainen moved to Russia, the country he celebrated, defended even during its invasion of Ukraine, and praised as a cultural "brother".
Russia granted him refugee status (yes, refugee status), despite his previous anti-immigrant posturing -- and he proudly accepts it.
In videos he’s now said he might fight for Russia -- even against Finns -- in the war in Ukraine. That’s right: the man who slammed refugees and immigrants is now a political asylum seeker in Russia, flirting with joining Russian troops and fighting his own countrymen.
Turtiainen's political life is a one-man case study in right-wing hypocrisy, racism, ignorance, self-harm, and irony: The guy who mocked others' suffering ends up dependent on another country’s goodwill -- the same country he championed in Finnish politics.
Former Finns Party MP granted refugee status in Russia: The pro-Russian ex-lawmaker has claimed that he would be "ready to go to the front against the Finns" if necessary:
https://yle.fi/a/74-20201812
Former Finnish MP and his wife granted refugee status in Russia: Turtiainen founded and leads the political party "Power belongs to the people":
https://fakti.bg/en/world/1024214-former-finnish-mp-and-his-...
Ano Turtiainen: the PS doesn’t love me, I love the PS – watch me now eat my words:
https://migranttales.net/ano-turtiainen-the-ps-doesnt-love-m...
Ano Turtiainen Flat Earth Anti-NASA Views:
https://murha.info/rikosfoorumi/viewtopic.php?p=1866262#:~:t...
Fascist thugs aren't known for being ideologically consistent.
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Are these ships actually owned by the Russian state? I thought it was more Russia paying private operators to do some sabotage alongside legitimate business. In which case, ships being seized would absolutely be a huge deterrent to whoever owns or insures the ships.
But yes, imprisoning the crew (especially the captain) is also a good idea.
Mmm. You are assuming people have a choice about crewing on what you call a pos ship which you say is owned/controlled by russia.
Many international ships are crewed by what is essentially slave labor. Too many google links to share them all, but try this to start: https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/thats-slavery-seafarers-s...
What do you mean by eliminate?
You know exactly what they mean
Executing people for cutting cables is extreme and I'm sure illegal in any country worth living in
Hold them as POWs. Executing prisoners is barbaric.
I agree. However media has removed morality and ethics from people when it comes to this war.
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Russia commits acts of aggression against NATO states that straddle the line of ambiguity where a bad faith actor could call it accidental or at least unauthorized.
This makes invoking article 5 likewise somewhat difficult because it allowed other NATO members pressure the border states into "not overreacting". The point is to slowly escalate into outright hostility without ever having "the event" that makes it obvious article 5 must be invoked.
and the goal for this toeing the line is to spark discussion and disagreement between member states. Article 5 credibility is already at it's lowest point after Vance's speech and the new US security strategy, now isn't just the matter of sowing further disagreement.
Also a provocation that forces a reaction that is difficult to modulate. Activating Article 5 demonstrates NATO solidarity and that it means business, but it would be disastrous. Doing nothing demonstrates fecklessness and impotence of NATO. The reaction needs to be measured and proportionate.
But outright hostility is not necessarily the goal. Hybrid warfare is more “subtle”. Its targets are more diverse and the aim is less overt defeat and more war of attrition in a broad sense. You want to wear your enemy down.
I'm not sure what Russia had to gain from violating our (Finland) airspace with military aircraft countless of times before we joined NATO. Yet they kept doing it.
Russia is an imperialistic state that really doesn't like having neighbours that are not under its political and military control. Violating airspace, GPS jamming, cutting undersea cables is just their way of showing force, and damaging us, who they perceive as their enemies for not submitting to their rule.
I'm sure some bright spark will soon show up to say that it was actually NATO who was violating our airspace for decades , just like they're claiming that NATO is the one cutting cables here
It's also a form of reconnaissance. In doing these acts they observe how different actors respond and look for potential weak points.
It’s literally well documented why this is being done. It’s intentional to cause disruptions and damage.
FSB is paying extra on New Year's?
Wow nobody even blamed Russia yet and you're jumping to their defense already. That is some top notch customer service.
> Some officials from Scandinavia, the Baltic states and the European Union have pointed the finger at Russia. They say the incidents appear to be part of what experts say is the Kremlin’s hybrid war on the West.
The only blame placed in the article is targeted at Russia. And I'd quite like to see some speculation on Russia's possible motive for this, it sounds pointless and risky for their shipping on the face of it.
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What good would a naval blockade of Russia do when they get the vast majority of their goods by land?
EDIT looking at your post history its very clear you have no intention of discussing this in good faith.
Probably to make sure it stays that way. Logistics by ship generally has a big advantage over logistics by land. There is a rough pattern over the last century or so of the big navel empires (UK, US, Japan) having a big military advantage. In the case of the UK and US their strategic policy has a big component that involves restricting their opponents access to resources water (eg, Germany around the world wars, China in the modern era or the way the US controls the sea-based routes out of Saudi Arabia and the land routes tend to be militarily unstable).
Preventing oil exports and increase insurance premiums for Russia's export economy, because Western sanctions clearly are unsuccessful in destroying the Russian economy.
My post history shows that I do support Russia's self defense against U.S./NATO threats. In my opinion Ukraine entering NATO is indeed an existential threat to Russia, because since (at least) the collapse of the UDSSR the U.S. and it's vassals openly communicated and pursued the goal of regime changing Russia (+ Belarus, Georgia).
Absolutely no one in NATO wants to invade Russia, my man.
How does Ukraine entering NATO constitute an existential threat to Russia? Do you think Ukraine + NATO is going to invade Russia?
What should NATO and the EU do to Russia, since Russia would like to break up NATO and the EU?
It's always astonishing to me how people here (mostly Americans) basically know nothing about the long history of U.S. proxy wars with Russia (historically USSR) and the long stated desire from U.S. to destroy or regime change the Russian federation.
To answer your question quickly: Ukraine entering NATO constitutes an existential threat to Russia for the same reason as China building military infrastructure in Mexico, Cuba or Canada would pose an existential threat to the U.S. (e.g. Cuban Missile Crisis).
Further reading: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
They only know how to follow the manual
Escalation is a classic trap to fall into:
The other side wants escalation of tension, otherwise they wouldn't do this. And they get to choose when and where and, to a degree, the means by which it happens - you can be sure it's a time and place and means that benefits them.
The fundamental of international relations in conflict is to deter without escalation, and to act in the time, place, and manner of your choosing. You'll see leaders cite that specifically: 'We have this problem; we will respond in the time, place, and in the way we think best.'
This sounds very nice but it's unclear to me what it is that you're suggesting. Who said the place isn't the Baltic sea, the time is now, and the way is to escalate? In other words, what's a better place/time/way according to you?
Just like Trump's tariff bs, I'm starting to think that for Putin's M.O. that we should be fighting fire with fire.
Why not send a couple ships to drag anchors across Russia's cables? "Oh we are but innocent fishermen" is still valid going the other way.
Then when Russia inevitably seizes and imprisons the crew, the international community can do the same for every Russian controlled ship with the bare minimum of suspicion.
Would be a pretty sucky mission though, so many risks of capture. But the Russian government does it because they don't care about their people and also the rest of the world is too toothless to do anything about it (until this occurrence at least, go Finland - but then they know Russia's tactics very well).
Russia has been doing a "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" to the world for too long, abusing the "nice" way we desperately try to see things, pretending even when it's obvious. Like they'll do something egregious and then when the West calls them out, suddenly their political mouthpieces are all "we can't believe that the West is making this shocking and provocative accusation which is of course completely false, EU are bullies!" and then the world responds by taking a step back, pretty much every single time.
-- Why not send a couple ships to drag anchors across Russia's cables? "Oh we are but innocent fishermen" is still valid going the other way.
-- Then when Russia inevitably seizes and imprisons the crew
Are you volunteering yourself for a vacation in a Russian gulag?
Hire some Russians to do it. Cruel, but…
Oh, not at all. I don't have the balls or the skills for that.
Though perhaps we could test some autonomous trawling vessels, you know, big tech company stuff. But as we know, software can sometimes be difficult and have...bugs... ;3
Just ask for some Ukrainian undersea drones to do the job, they will be happy to hurt Russia
The whole bug thing is interesting in the face of them spoofing gps so willingly.
the Ukrainian already destroyed a pipeline in the same region, is it worth an internet cable?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
It's still not confirmed who did that. Self sabotage by some European nation or even Russian is still up in the air.
Destroying that pipeline pushed Germany to act more against Russia (being officially unable to continue buying gas).
Historically anti russian states like Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Estonia or even NATO would have liked that.
Russia could have blown it up themselves to pin it on Ukraine to decrease support, but that doesn't seem to be the outcome.
Even germany could have blown it up to pivot their own politics.
It's a massive game of clue. It may become declassified in 20 years by whoever did it.
Would you say there are material differences between Nordstream and this?
He who fights monsters should take care not to become one in the process.
That you guys had presidents that didn’t fall into this trap is the reason you and I are ariund today.
William Inboden, The Peacemaker:
> In America’s last fight against totalitarianism, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the unconditional surrender of both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In the context of total war, against implacable dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender made strategic sense. Such a demand did not fit the Cold War. Much as Reagan looked to Roosevelt and World War II as a model for how the free world should confront dictatorships in thrall to evil ideologies, in the case of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, calling for “unconditional surrender” from Moscow would have been delusional and foolhardy—especially since Reagan remained desperate to prevent the Cold War from turning hot and ending in nuclear apocalypse.
Effin' Russian govt, the rest of the world is too easy on them. They'll break ceasefires, they'll target non-military sites, they'll interfere with elections, they'll spread misinformation on social media, they'll lie to everyone and especially to their own citizens.
To be fair every gouvernement does that.
Scale changes quality.
Let's play war game. Here's a life-like scenario:
- Russian ship damages another cable - EU deploys military ships and planes on Baltic/North sea - Russia deploys military ships and planes of their own - EU tries to stop and seize another RU shadow fleet vessel - EU vessel denies EU demands - EU attack a vessel, trying to immobilize it - RU ships and planes attacks EU ships and planes - casualties from both sides - RU drops 10-15 MRBMs with conventional (non-nuclear) warheads onto key EU naval bases - orange clown in the White House says "this is not our war"
Your move.
my moves
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/25/russian-cargo-...
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-h...
There needs to be a blockade for these rogue ships. That's the only thing they'll understand, short of being sunk.
Just seize the ships and auction them off. Damaging one cable isn't gonna be worth losing a whole ship, generally speaking.
nah just sink them instead imo. they arent worth much.
Given the state some of these ships are starting to be in they might just be worth scrap..
Often the cost to scrap a ship exceedes the value of the raw materials. Depends the ship as well but things like asbestos can drive costs up
Who controls these ships and what is their perspective? I don't understand how we know what they 'understand' or not?
Also, how do you identify the ships? Do you blockade all maritime traffic in the Baltic Sea? All too and from Russia? The first would destroy our own economy, the second is a certain act of war.
Likely Russia. Their idea is to engage in war under pretense that it's not a war.
What I mean is that they will only understand counter measures that you'd take in a war, like blockade or sink them for instance.
I.e. they are already engaging in the acts of war, so it's late to worry about that, the question is what is anyone doing about it.
Ukraine sinks their fleet in the Black Sea, and they understood it very well - they don't leave their ports.
> What I mean is that they will only understand counter measures that you'd take in a war, like blockade or sink them for instance.
Likely that is what they want. Do you think Russian planners are ignorant, and can't foresee that? This sort of game is long played in international relations.
It's chess: You try to cause your opponent to put themselves in a bad position. Provocations are manipulation - it's obvious what Russia is trying to provoke.
I doubt they want that. Blockade will undermine their war efforts which strongly depend on their oil and other exports.
More likely they think countries around Baltic Sea are too scared to offer strong resistance, so they can engage in such activity with impunity. And they won't limit it to Baltic Sea either, they'll do it anywhere they feel they can.
It's a mobster mentality. As I said, the only language they understand is response with force, nothing else.
Russia wants to show global south that the West is evil and aggressive and wants to encroach on and break up Russia. Provoking a European nation into military action first is the way to do that.
Global south cares for Russia as much as Russia is paying (giving discounts) anyone to care for it, not a barrel of oil more.
The most obvious reason here is simply mobster style intimidation. I.e. "You are helping Ukraine? We'll get back at you by damaging cables and what not".
I'd say the proper response to such incidents is to increase military help for Ukraine and blockade / confiscate / sink Russian ships wherever they do this stuff. Ships which engage in that should be treated as hostile military vessels.
> Blockade
That is not an option. They might as well bomb St. Petersburg - it's a seige, an act of war.
> the only language they understand is response with force, nothing else
I see no evidence of that.
Putin is in fact a political operator at a high level, and understands politics exceptionally well. Warfare is merely politics by other means, one tool in the toolchest (for people like him).
That's the only option, because otherwise you are saying that Russia can engage in acts of war against Europe and Europe can't respond. That's not how it should work. And what they do with cables is totally acts of war.
> I see no evidence of that.
Their Black Sea fleet hides in their ports, because they know the moment they'll try to roam, Ukraine will sink them. What other evidence do you need? It works.
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it's like Putin decided his job is to test the limits of modern international politics
It is: Look up the theory of status quo and 'revisionist* powers, and how they interact. Russia is acting as the revisionist, very predictably in many ways. And many in the West act predictably as status quo - including not being able to fathom why anyone would revise their happy power structure (with them on top).
You can see the same thing in many areas, such as race relations. The status quo is outraged and can't believe that other groups may be unhappy - after all, things work well in the status quo person's experience!
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Yeah sure, we keep cutting our own telecoms cables multiple times per year, using Russian-operated ships as a front.
The Eagle S (I think it was?) case was brought to court here in Finland and they even admitted to dragging heir anchor but steadfastly maintained that it was due to their own incompetence (which the judge unfortunately believed.)
I suppose that was also a NATO ploy?
The US is blowing up Venezuelan boats, and according to Seymour Hersh, blew up Nord Stream. Why would a few cables be beyond US/NATO capabilities if it drums up popular support for US extra-judicial interdiction of other countries' maritime activity?
Do you understand that this has been going on for much longer than the US's Venezuelan murder spree, and longer than Trump has been president (this time around)?
Also, as I said, we have a crew of a Russian-operated ship on the record admitting to cutting a cable by dragging their anchor, and all the previous cases have also been traced to other Russian-operated ships (well, I think one was Chinese though) using AIS and radar data, and this has been done by OSINT folks in addition to the local authorities here around the Baltic. Are all of these people being controlled by NATO and the US?
Pro-Russian people like you assume that other countries will always just let the US or "NATO" do whatever they want and have absolutely zero autonomy at all, and you're absolute experts at ignoring everything that doesn't fit your insanely simplistic narrative that's predicated on the idea that Russia is just a perpetual victim and a spooky spooky NATO CIA USA cabal is actually doing everything bad that the Russians get up to.
Nowhere in this article does it say anything about Russians admitting to cutting the cable, let alone doing it on purpose with malicious intent, so you are just making things up now.
The list of US acts of terrorism goes beyond the Trump presidency; it's convenient for liberals to blame everything on Trump but the bombing of Nord Stream occurred under Biden; Obama was droning weddings while Hilary Clinton was setting fire to Libya (using NATO, the "defensive" alliance that strikes first!)
All the previous cases of cable cutting, alleged by Western news papers without any shred of evidence, is a good way of beating the war drums. The war propaganda and hysteria this time is more intense than the Iraq war, which I think you are too young to remember. It is unclear what material advantage Russia would get from cutting cables, but with hysteria, reason is not required.
"Pro-Russian people" like me .. well I'm pro-peace actually rather than pro-Russian and have seen that the Russians offered negotiations with the US and Europe multiple times that were rejected. Negotiations that might have averted bloodshed. It's interesting that a "non-binary" person like you (according to your Github) wants to view people in a binary category as pro/anti-Russian rather than perhaps having a different perspective.
As to the substance of your last point: I remember Europe actually arguing against the US during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and now seeing Europe being a bunch of kept poodles that would prefer to commit economic, moral and geopolitical suicide rather than stand up for themselves.
> The war propaganda and hysteria this time is more intense than the Iraq war, which I think you are too young to remember.
This feels like falling into a time warp back to February 2022 when the same sentiments were expressed vis-a-vis the imminent invasion. I see a lot of whataboutism, but not a whole lot of reasoning for why this isn't likely to be more of the same?
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> Negotiations that might have averted bloodshed.
I mean they could have simply not invaded Ukraine. Seems like that's the thing a peace advocate such as yourself would endorse.
It sounds like the court will just throw it out again as not having jurisdiction over the case.
The court threw out the previous case since there was no proof of sabotage. I understood the court ruled that they have no jurisdiction over accident cases under international law.
As far as I understand, it is totally different case if they find any proof of intent.
I don't understand how we arrived at letting "random nation crew drags their anchor making the boat extremely slow and loud and breaks $100M+ critical infrastructure" get off scot free including their boat but it clearly can't continue to go on. If not a court then government must step in, nothing less is acceptable to any voting person.
Then countries should be able to bomb these ships and go unpunished as well.
That would pass the right message if courts keep refusing to make things right.
Sinking the ships and then denying knowing anything about it would probably be the best course of action. That's what Russians would do, if the roles were reversed.
Unfortunately too many Western leaders still think that it's possible to negotiate in good faith with Russians. In reality they respect only force, and see European rules based order and "fair play" as weakness. If Baltic states didn't belong to NATO and Finland didn't have such a big army, Russians would be already doing a lot worse things than cutting cables.
Over here in Finland, even during the "good" years between collapse of the Soviet Union and invasion of Crimea, Russian businessmen kept buying property that made absolutely no economic sense, but was located next to critical infrastructure. Better relations between West and Russia were largely an illusion, especially since Putin took over.
We should just silently turn up support for Ukraine, that's where it hurts. Everything else is a distraction.
"Sinking the ships and then denying knowing anything about it would probably be the best course of action. That's what Russians would do, if the roles were reversed."
You mean like NATO did off the coast of Spain a year ago?
I didn't remember that case, very interesting. But yes, silently torpedoing a Russian ship transporting military technology to another hostile rogue state is exactly what NATO should be doing.
Did I miss NATO declaring war on Russia and N. Korea? Or are we OK with the Chinese silently torpedoing the next batch of military equipment to Taiwan (a rouge province under intl law)?
Your argument, taken to its limit, is might makes right. Which, fine; but we're just not that strong anymore. Certainly not the EUpeeans.
What's the point of declaring war in a war?
Russia invaded Ukraine just fine without ever declaring war.
As long as the EUpeans don't drag me, my loved ones, or my taxes into a war with Russia I couldn't care less if any this is declared or not nor do I care if they torpedo Russian ships.
However, I also couldn't care less if the Russians Oreshniks Liverpool or Marseille.
Fair enough, you do you.
Meanwhile, we'll be protecting your loved ones.
Pray, from what?
And please don't flatter yourself. Europe couldn't field an army of a 100 000 riflemen if you put all of the EU countries together.
Honestly, neither can Russia, unless you count 100 000 random men + 90 000 rusty rifles as "riflemen".
Then y'all don't need us to come over.
Link?
https://www.laverdad.es/murcia/cartagena/barco-ruso-hundido-...
All I can see there before "Este contenido es exclusivo para suscriptores" is conjecture that (translating and emphasizing) "a torpedo may have pierced the hull of the vessel". Is there any evidence?
The hull is bent inward in a manner characteristic of a torpedo.
They can. They don't want to yet. Europe always assumes too much good faith on the part of other countries.
The countries that the ships are registered in are not going to do anything if they are seized and scrapped.
Too many warmongering, aggressive people in the comments. This is not how we get the good ending. Cooler heads prevail. You don't understand this. That's okay. It's not your fault.
Yes, we must submit and capitulate to Russia at every turn, or face war. Good plan.
Russia would deny any involvement, right? So throwing the crew in prison for a few decades and scrapping the ship aren't actions against Russia. They're not a party to this at all.
That's the classic warmonger argument: Call people who disagree 'chicken' and 'coward', like high school taunts.
There are many other solutions, and if you read the experts, that's what rational governments pursue. It's not as emotionally satisfying as starting a war, but it's far more satisfying than what comes after that start.
Warfare, as anyone who has experienced it, is a catastrophe win or lose or stalemate. The victors of WWII put extraordinary effort into preventing future wars, including outlawing it, creating the UN and EU, rebuilding their former enemy's economies, etc.
What do you know about warfare that they don't? Were they cowards? Naive or innocent about evil?
I'm not sure where you got the 'chicken' business from, but regardless, folks who want everyone to bend the knee to Putin are usually acting out of malice, not fear.
Is it really warmongering to suggest a country should police it's own territory, or defend it's own interests from aggression aimed at them? And, how is that aggression towards them not warmongering? If Russia isn't responsible for these attacks on infrastructure, then no one should have a problem with the crew being tossed in prison and the boat being chopped up and turned into patio furniture or repurposed as a reef. If they are responsible, then they're the warmongers; only a fundamentally dishonest person would suggest a measured response to or self defense against an attack is warmongering.
btw
i'm not even suggesting anyone go to war with russia. But more than likely capitulation is going to fail and russia will cross a line with their acts of sabotage and terrorism in Europe (or they'll just move on to whoever is next after Ukraine.) Since you brought up WWII, remind me, how did capitulating to Hitler in 1938 work out in the long run?
> I'm not sure where you got the 'chicken' business from
Implying that people are cowardly for not pursuing aggression is like high schoolers calling each other 'chicken' for not doing something.
> folks who want everyone to bend the knee to Putin are usually acting out of malice, not fear.
I don't necessarily agree - people do feel fear. Regardless, who wants capitulation? Could you point out some leader? Or even a comment on this long page?
Not agreeing with aggression != supporting capitulation. There are infinitely more solutions. The question is, what outcome do you want and what acts are most likely to get you there? Aggression is emotionally satisfying, in the short term, but usually results in bad outcomes.
> Is it really warmongering to suggest a country should police it's own territory, or defend it's own interests from aggression aimed at them?
If the proposed solution is warfare, then it's warmongering. The point is that are many other solutions. And self-righteousness is irrelevant - it doesn't make the outcome better or worse; it's therefore a dangerous distraction, likely to cause sub-optimal outcomes (usually bad ones). Using it as a reason to pursue warfare is a hallmark of warmongering.
> they're the warmongers
They are, in a sense, but that doesn't change what you do. Again, it's an argument from self-righteousness - 'they started it'. That doesn't matter; what matters is the outcome and warfare is one option that provides one range of outcomes (almost all horrible, almost universally different than what was expected when the decision was made - think of Ukraine, Iraq, etc. etc.).
Russia is not a warmonger, in an important sense: They deliberately use 'grey zone' tactics, actions short of being sufficient to provoke war. It's fundamental to their strategy and therefore essential to understand:
They intend to cause political change, not warfare. You can see their effectiveness in the emotional responses on this page. They disregard outcomes - you can bet that while some have temporary emotional satisfaction, the outcomes will be Russia's.
This is...not true. Attacking key infrastructure is an act of war. Just because they try to do it secretly doesn't change that fact. 'Grey zone' tactics doesn't make any difference here. Green men, intel services, etc. are still government entities acting at the behest of the leadership to commit acts of war.
The argument here is about appeasement or not. If you allow continued acts of war to pass without response, you get more of them. This is the lesson of bullies from the playground to WW2. I'm more than willing to have a conversation about what sort of response is the best, but saying that Russia is not a warmonger is incorrect - they are committing acts of war. Just because no one has called them on it yet doesn't make it not warmongering.
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>Cooler heads prevail. You don't understand this. That's okay. It's not your fault.
You don't understand that your comment is incredibly aggressive and insulting? That's ok. You just don't understand that. Might not even be your fault you don't.
we have winston churchill, specialist of international relation and war here
Russia is already in a state of armed aggression against Ukraine, and committing sabotage against other countries throughout Europe.
Cooler heads in this case are idiotic heads. It doesn’t take two partners to start a war, it only takes one and Russia already decided.
Someone in the other comments linked an article stating that Europe was doing the “unthinkable” of planning to retaliate and I was agog reading it if true. Not because Europe was going to retaliate but that they hadn’t even come up with plans over the past decade of increasing aggression from Russia.
You don’t have war plans for every crazy situation your analysts and strategists can conceive of because you’re excited to use them. You have them so your state apparatus is prepared and ready to go in an unlikely emergency instead of needing to take the months to years that any large bureaucracy needs to be ready to take action.
That seems to contradict itself? Cooler heads plan carefully; hotheads act out - seek immediate emotional satisfaction without thinking of the consequences.
> It doesn’t take two partners to start a war, it only takes one and Russia already decided.
Wars are not acts, but the conseuqences of long chains - large graphs - of decisions often lasting decades or more. Wars come from situations where there is no other choice.
The main goal of international relations policy is to create optimal scenarios, to not get caught in a situation where you have bad options or no options. Russia's 'grey zone' actions, including of course online propaganda campaigns (seriously, why wouldn't they?), are trying to create the scenarios that suit Russia best. They are preparing the political ground, and warfare is fundamentally politics (the most widely accepted maxim of warfare - see Clausewitz).
For an example, people emotionally and aggressively advocating for warfare, like on this page, if widespread can set the political ground.
It takes two (or more) to get into that position. It's a game of chess - checkmate isn't the result of one move.
> That seems to contradict itself? Cooler heads plan carefully; hotheads act out - seek immediate emotional satisfaction without thinking of the consequences.
No, because “cooler heads” are advocating for not retaliating. I’d accept the opinion of “cooler heads” if it was things like “we’re not ready yet and need to build up our military before being able to risk active conflict” vs “we should never fight back, war is bad :(“
> Wars are not acts, but the conseuqences of long chains - large graphs - of decisions often lasting decades or more. Wars come from situations where there is no other choice.
I have no idea how that is a response to what I said instead of just waxing poetic. If another nation decides they are at war with your nation, then guess what buddy, you’re at war. Even with your head in the sand.
> I’d accept the opinion of “cooler heads” if it was things like “we’re not ready yet and need to build up our military before being able to risk active conflict” vs “we should never fight back, war is bad :(“
I agree, essentially, and would say that your example is not one of a cooler head; it's just a different emotional response.
But who is saying “we should never fight back, war is bad :(“ ? Could you name someone? I haven't heard it at all. Do you see it even on this HN page, even once? I haven't heard any leader say anything of the sort.
> If another nation decides they are at war with your nation, then guess what buddy, you’re at war. Even with your head in the sand.
I'm just repeating a fundamental consensus of experts.
That's not how wars happen - the leader of a country doesn't just decide to do it one day, other than perhaps 'wars' against helpless targets like the US invading Grenada.
Warfare is very complicated. A 'nation' can't decide something, though the leadership can. But that doesn't mean they can execute it - that the nation and its internal powers will follow them sufficiently to carry it out. If Trump actually decided to invade Canada, obviously that would be the end of Trump's term in office.
Then, even if they get support, that doesn't at all mean they will be successful. Look at the US wars since WWII: Mostly failed, only one clear victory of any significance (the Gulf War), even those most were against substantially weaker foes.
So what is necessary to 'succeed' in warfare?
The most respected maxim of warfare is Clausewitz's, 'war is the continuation of politics, by other means' (not exact, and Clausewitz wrote in German of course). That is, it's politics, but by means of organized violence rather than by economic or diplomatic means (though those are involved too).
Wars start with politics; and leaders are very limited politically by the situation. They can't just do anything at all. They need political options, to create suppport and sustain it, etc.
Wars only end with effective political solutions. For example, in Afghanistan, the US lacked an effective political solution; then the US ran out of political will and withdrew. The war ended when the Taliban provided a stable political solution, for good or ill.
It's politics, and Russia's leadership knows that well. If they just start a war without considering politics, they'll fail badly. Instead, they are creating the political ground where they have the best options and their targets have bad ones.
You are the one saying we shouldn’t fight back war is bad :(
> Too many warmongering, aggressive people in the comments. This is not how we get the good ending. Cooler heads prevail. You don't understand this. That's okay. It's not your fault.
And ah, four month old account making incomprehensible statements that seem almost human but don’t quite make it, pushing a political view and trying to gaslight everyone into thinking that this account isn’t doing so.
How much fucking time in our life are we going to have to waste responding to bots.
Edit: wait, I confused `mosst with `mmooss who is also from a post AI era account and pushing the same narrative. These aren’t just bots but sock puppet bots boosting each other
It honestly starts to sound like they just botched the design and placement of these cables - placing them in shallow and exposed passages, with no proper defense against dragged anchors.
Real shades of "that cable shouldn't have been dressed like that, in a dark and narrow channel, clearly marked on navigation charts(to mitigate exactly this scenario, from good captains at least)" energy.
If only they had had you in the design team back then when the cables were put in place.
I'm sorry I have no snark-free way to respond to this.
Unfortunately the Baltic is pretty shallow and fairly featureless - the gulf of Finland - between Finland, Estonia, and Russia averages 38 metres deep
Yeah, why don't they lower the floor of the entire Baltic Sea??
Obviously, you're joking.
But how hard could it be to get a Cat 395 excavator in there? Dig a little trench and bury it.
Sounds like a weekend project to me. Has someone told the telecoms this?
I think they could just drag a suitable hook behind a ship to carve out decent trench.
Geez, how are we so much better at this than the actual engineers?
Edit: to parent comment, I think people missed your joke.
I can't tell whether this is dumb or genius.
Fun fact! Near the shore they actually do bury the cables with a plow[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQVzU_YQ3IQ&t=50s [2]
[2] There are far better videos that show this, but I'm on mobile and not going to find it right now.