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.
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.
However, this act would, in my understanding, give much more power to Finland and Estonia to detain these ships, and charge the crew for the crimes they have committed. Right now there seems to be a loophole in the legislation that Russia is actively exploiting for hybrid warfare purposes. If the strait rules would give Russia more ways to cause harm, some other way of dissuading Russia from making these acts should be done.
In general though, it feels stupid that we have to play by these rules, when the enemy makes a mockery of them and actively tries to exploit them to cause as much harm as possible. But that's the reality when bordering Russia.
That is what separates civilized from uncivilized people, and it is a curse we have to bear unless we want to join the uncivilized.
If the Allies had committed to this thinking, they would have lost the war. And make no mistake, Europe is at war with Russia, just not a kinetic one.
That is obviously insane, so I do wonder if there isn't something else going on beneath the surface
I’m far from a maritime law expert, but destroying cables doesn’t sound like innocent passage.
Damage was done in the waters of one country, detaining was done in the other.
Why didn’t Russia attack in international waters?
Would you like this passage: "Estonian and Finnish independence is purely the result of Soviet benevolence. Estonia and Finland clearly haven't acted in such way that they should enjoy these kinds of acts of benevolence"?
A little historical reminder:
"In Nystad, King Frederick I of Sweden formally recognized the transfer of Estonia, Livonia and Ingria to Russia"[0]
"According to the treaty Sweden ceded parts of the provinces Lappland and Västerbotten (east of Tornio River and Muonio River), Åland, and all provinces east thereof. The ceded territories came to constitute the Grand Duchy of Finland, to which also the Russian 18th century conquests of parts of Karelia and Savonia (later to be called Old Finland), were joined in 1812 as Viborg County." [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nystad
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Fredrikshamn#Terms
When you're a country as small and insignificant as Estonia is you're not doing anything out of "benevolence" towards a nuclear hyper-power, but what do I know?. maybe the Maja Kallas-types really do believe in their own word-blabber.
While your sentiment may be correct in 2010s it certainly was not when these things were being decided in early 90s. USSR and Russia which de facto ruled it was seen as a failed state that needs "western help" and on a path to democracy. While we (here in Poland) we're quite skeptical, having the Russian WW2 occupying force leave in 1991 (yes, we didn't get freedom after WW2 until 1991). There was still a lot of hope Russia will follow in the footsteps of other central/eastern European countries like Poland/Czech/The Baltics if only we help them. So yes, there was huge resentment, but also a huge benefit of hope and benevolence too.
Was some of this calculated? Sure. No doubt someone sat in Talin and Helsinki and thought: if we treat them like post WW1 Germany it will be easier for the extremists to take power. So let's not pour sand in their fuel tank as they are desperately trying to restart the engine of their economy.
I don't even think it was a mistake at the time. It was a decent way to behave. But the moment the tide has started turning in Russia towards autocracy the screw should've been tightened. No oil and gas should fund Russian army after at least their attack on Georgia. If not before when the atrocities of the Chechen war became known.
Unfortunately corrupt politicians (that are still in power in Europe and even in my country) have continued signing deals and making money by financing what was clearly a huge enemy in the making.
Russia wasn't an eny in 1993, but it certainly was one in 2008 when it invaded Goergia. If only we acted properly in early 2000s all of this could've been prevented.
I don't live in the West, I live in Romania.
> Anything else is betrayal. You are of course free to move to Moscow at anytime
Waiting for the Russians right here on the streets of Bucharest, like in August of 1944, thank you very much.
Superpowers don’t threaten to use their nuclear weapons, they don’t need to.
They make a big deal about having international waters that foreign navies can transit.
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.
These things can and do change.
Arguably it was actually Robespierre losing is head that had to happen to stop the madness (Terror) in France, or at least create the conditions for it to stop eventually.
I don't know what has to happen in Russia. It is possible for autocratic states, that have always been autocratic, to transition to liberal democracy. It did happen in France, but even after the end of the Terror it still went through a long phase of imperial autocracy. It takes time to develop institutions strong enough to resist autocracy.
“Russian liberalism stops at the border of Ukraine”
Western people don't speak Russian so they could never understand his speeches which were bland and stupid wishful thinking: "when I become president I'll make everyone happy, do all the good things, and not any bad thing, etc".
He and his cohort were sponsored by the West and the West clearly loves Russian people and wish us the best possible future, yeah, we believe.
Why do you not believe this? As someone who identifies as Western, I want for all people's to prosper. I don't think I've ever talked to anyone in Europe or the US who had it out for Russians. All resentment send exclusively be towards nationalists.
I find it hard to understand people still use this argument with the straight face. NATO is not an entity that expands itself - individual countries, like Sweden or Finland, request to join it to protect themselves from the situation when Russia attacks them and they have to fight alone like Ukraine. Of course Putin hates that as he cannot fulfill his dream of expanding Russia to the borders of Soviet Union, but this argument doesn't stand any scrutiny.
Contain yourself.
He was called worse names. Nevrtheless, he did something past Russian heroes did: voluntarily sacrificed his life. He knew Putin will kill him but decided to go back anyway. Yes, you may say it "dumb". But the mere existence of such a strong spirit gives me hope that someone else who actually cares for Russians, for their wellbeing, for their future, can actually undo all this mess Putin got Russia into.
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.
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.
OK, let's play this game. The logical fallacy here is the relationship between regime change in Ukraine and Russia. These are two distinct countries. It's like saying someone wanted to influence the outcome of the election in the USA to cause regime change in Canada. (I use this example because we know Russians were influencing the elections in the USA.)
A simply more unsettling conclusion from this narrative is that if there is a causal link indeed, and Ukraine taking a pro-EU direction can cause a regime change in Russia, it means that the basis of the latter is very weak - so weak it has to start the war to prevent its fall.
Would the US not be forced to react in some way if a pro-china party took over in Canada with the help of chinese influence? And China had the goal of integrating Canada into its military alliance?
That's your second strawman in this thread now by the way I think the legal limit is three so you're allowed one more.
I think it's just "people" (independent of website, nationality...)
The rest of your comment does not deserve an answer.
One can condemn the invasion while also considering what would happen if a US neighbor cozied up with its geopolitical rivals. How about the Soviet Union/Cuba? How did the US react to that?
We don't need fairytales, we have history and present day events to guide us.
Remember how mainstream media was reporting in 2003 that Powell is obviously lying? How the whole debacle about Iraqi WMDs was little more than a thinly veiled excuse to finish the war Bush Sr had started? Maybe that didn't happen in your country, but it was the reality in many Western countries.
Consider the business as usual in the EU. Whatever the EU is trying to do, there are always some countries that oppose it. Then there are negotiations, and some kind of compromise is ultimately reached, but nobody is truly happy about it. That's what decentralization does to you.
Or maybe consider Russia just before the invasion of Ukraine. Some countries and factions in the West considered Russia an important trading partners, while others saw it as an adversary and wanted to cut ties with it. There was no unified Western policy on anything related to Russia.
Even on internet, where russian trolls are common, an absolute insignificant minority of commenters talk in favor of that.
> Why they don't go to the streets and protest?
Because there's war, dumbass, and russia loves spending millions of dollars every night just to cause a dozen of civilian casualties. Imagine thousands of people getting together in a single place.
It is ZelensKY, comrade.
A) There's this small thing called constitution (something that clown you're rooting for wiped his ass with). Is ChatGPT/Gemini already blocked in your hellhole? Can't you use deepseek or something?
B) "peace agreement"? You mean capitulation, right?
> Why they don't go to the streets and protest?
4 years of daily bombardment, you buffoon. Keep up with the conversation, jesus, activate leftovers of your brain.
And here I thought his name is actually written in Cyrillic
I’m not sure we will ever know the complete answer, but some of this change seems to involve Russia too.
My feeling is that your perspective, likely shared by people like Bomber Harris or Netanyahu, does not match most peoples intuition nowadays.
So it doesn't matter if the Russian people is the enemy in the sense of supporting their mafia government. They're not doing anything you wouldn't have done. Condemning them is condemning yourself and does no one any good.
There were good Germans. There were also Germans that pretended not to notice and then there were bad Germans. The ones in the middle are collectively just as guilty because they allowed the bad ones to do their thing. You don't get to stand by while such stuff unfolds and then claim innocence.
Right now, inside Russia there are Russians who are putting their lives on the line to help stop this war before it consumes their country. Their the 'Good Russians'. And then there are those in the middle - and plenty who have fled abroad - who pretend this isn't their problem. But they're enabling the rest and should be rightly condemned for it.
It took Germany a generation or more to really get it (and even now, some don't get it but that seems to be a factor just about everywhere, the bad will always attempt to take root again).
The country that I'm from still hasn't properly accepted the mountain of skulls and the rivers of blood that our wealth is founded on. In that sense Germany is now ahead, but with the afd it remains to be seen whether they can maintain that lead for much longer.
That said, this message shows terrible ignorance:
> They're not doing anything you wouldn't have done. Condemning them is condemning yourself and does no one any good.
The first part might be very well true. My grandparents and their siblings have been mostly perpetrators and bystanders, some where tagging-along, very few were opposed and none of them openly, just in 'inner exile'. I am lucky for the 'mercy of the late birth' that saved me from having to proof many of the virtues that I hold dearly under real pressure. But not condemning the wrongs my grandparents did, and not holding oneself to higher standards than I would hold others, doesn't do any good. Are you sure you are incapable of doing things in another place and another time that would make your today's self condemn you and your actions?
So yea, it's not just the government.
Crimea is a special situation. I won't reiterate its complex history here since there is plenty of written here, but I'd like to point out that one could have a view where Crimea is Russian and yet decry the invasion of Ukraine as illegitimate.
If anything for practical reasons: only 7% of its population is Ukrainian. It would be very a source of continuous ethnic tensions.
Hard Russian nationalism is much more than that
Such people claim that the entirety of Ukraine is just Russia and they mock them for otherwise being Polish. This narrative is an explicit outcome of an Imperial mindset
But that's the reason why using this "who does Crimea _belong to_" framing of the question is misleading. You will find many people who will say Russia and yet not necessarily subscribe to the imperialistic stance that Russia is employing.
Contradiction right there
Kruschcev transferred the crimean oblast as a symbolic gesture.
Pointing this fact out does not contradict one's desire to not have Russia acquire more territory and behave in an imperialistic manner today
I have a good dozen of friends from Crimea despite visiting Crimea just a few times as a little kid – thousands of young people were forced out of their homes.
The russian logic is very perverted, yet completely predictable. If you are a national minority (even if your 7% claim was true) surrounded by russians, you should leave, and all your belongings should be redistributed among russians. But if you are a russian minority surrounded by different nations, then everyone around you should learn russian language, respect russian culture, otherwise russian tanks will come. Or maybe they won't, but only for the sake of global stability (otherwise it's justified)
And that's why there is a problem with the mentality of the Russian population. Literally NONE is able to say Crimea belongs to Ukraine, NONE. And that while internationally, it is part of Ukraine.
So no, my question is not misleading. When at least some Russians would say that Crimea actually belongs to Ukraine, I might have some hope. But right now, sorry, no.
I posit that the crimean question will also unnecessarily put in the same cohort all those people who do recognize the distinct culture of Ukraine and their right of self determination but also consider the past and present situation of crimea to be more nuanced.
EDIT: some Russians may recognize that Ukrainians have right to self determination but they may also recognize that today Crimea is populated by a vast majority of Russians and thus there giving that land back to Ukraine would lead to further bloodshed. And yes I have heard actual Russians having that position (I'm not Russian fwiw)
You might think this is normal, I don't. And because of that, I don't agree with statements like "it's not the Russian people, only the Russian government".
You didn't mention any Russian that sees it differently, and you confirm everything what I say. Except for the fact that you think it's normal and I don't.
Edit: What I said above is not correct and I apologize for that. After the annexation of Crimea, there was a protest in Russia with thousands of protesters. Some prominent politicians also openly opposed it.
Perhaps it's because they are few of them (fair enough mine is just personal experience, not a poll)
Or perhaps it's because you consider everybody who believes that Crimea is now populated mostly by Russians (and thinks that giving it back now will create more trouble than solve) as people who CHEERED the annexation.
I don't think it logically follows.
But I understand your feeling since there are so many people (even outside of Russia) that literally cheer for Russia getting their empire back. Unfortunate their noise surpasses any ability to have a nuanced conversation about this.
I wished humanity headed towards a peaceful resolution of conflicts where people can seek self determination and autonomy (basque, Catalan, Kurds, Palestinians, ...) instead of resolving such issues with invasion and pandering to imperialistic visions
Reminds me a bit of another leader around that same period. He also made his countrymen feel superior. That one is not beloved today anymore, and maybe that's the reason why that population was able to transform into a normal democratic country.
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.
But it turns out a very militarized nation can become completely pacifist after suffering a complete utter defeat, suffering and destruction.
Culture can change, just like 1990s Russia was a break from past and future Russia. However the 1990s were a disaster and thus the culture changes went to the opposite side
And if you were willing to be utterly destroyed in order to utterly destroy Russia, then maybe this would work?
But at that point you've succumbed to exactly what you were trying to prevent. Ie - Your own destruction.
What we, at least we in the US, want is to figure out how to turn Russia towards peace without being utterly destroyed.
That's what the difficulty is.
We, on this side of the pond, prefer ideas that don’t involve national suicide.
My point is that culture can change, being aggressive in eastern europe is not the essence of Russia just like being aggressive in central europe turned out not to be the essence of Germany.
A fascist regime promises war, victory and glory, when that collapses the regime also collapses
The "eventually" you are referring to was nothing more than a polite "no", issued in the final statement of the summit as a consolation (one day we will invite you), after allies had made their negative decision.
Georgia and Ukraine hoped to receive an invitation to NATO and begin membership negotiations. Today, almost two decades later, they still haven't received an invitation nor started negotiations.
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.
E.g. Stalin's successors
Did not.
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.
And yes, this means that in a democracy, the opposition's voters are screwed because they share in the responsibility, even if they were right. Why? Because they were unable to convince the majority of the wrongness of the majority vote.
But it's not as a practical matter in the US, or even in legalistic practice. Most legalistic factions in the US plainly treat the constitution itself (and/or its authors) as the source of its own authority.
That is the literal first paragraph of the US constitution. I cannot imagine a valid legalistic argument that ignores that. When first establishing the constitution, it also didn't appear in a vacuum, the pre-existing states and confederation were already democratic for some time. So all authority/validity/legitimacy the US constitution has comes from the population, back then. And through continuing use, participation and broad acceptance until present.
And of course, as a practical matter in a representative democracy, between elections, the people do have far less of an influence. They can basically only voice their opinions, threaten to vote differently in the next election, or start a revolution. But that doesn't absolve them of their responsibility on election day.
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.
(In the US we have the same overall situation, but the propaganda seems to mostly be driven by rich people who own media companies...)
I completely disagree. I know anecdata is useless but since you are generalizing I can as well add that all Russians I met, without exception, are normal people who just want to live a normal life, not to kill. And then there is the smaller violent part that is happy to mug, beat, and kill others, including their own people. What I can agree is that Russia has quite a problem with this "pat B" of their population because of systemic issues. But generalizing it like this, on the whole nation, is just like saying that violence has gender, rich people are bad and so on.
It would be very hard to notice the difference between 10% and 9% by just meeting people. You'd have to meet and evaluate 1000s to measure it accurately enough. But you sure do notice the difference as a neighboring country when the tanks roll in.
So you do sometimes have to say things about nations despite it only reflecting a statistically small difference in people.
Next time you meet a Russian again ask about what they think about Russian Empire. Or who gets to keep Crimea.
Have a look what normal Russians are saying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuZEvNlpKxg
It's by a guy who works for BBC and basically translates bits of Russian papers on his channel everyday.
Whenever there's trouble, Russia's history demands a strong leader. When one arises, the strong leader soon becomes the trouble.
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’.
If you force a Tatar to somewhere close to the Chinese border he will be perceived as "Russian" by the indigenous community, and their rejection will eventually make him identify as "Russian" himself, to bond with his peer displacees from other corners of the empire, and with locals who accept the empire. The exact same mechanism works in all directions, e.g. when some of those locals are displaced to somewhere near the Finnish border. The most important weapon of the Russian empire isn't the tank or the AK-47 or hard winters or sheer distance or vast amounts of mineral resources, it's industrial scale deportation for eradication of regional identity.
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.
Unless of course doing so makes them far poorer and isolates them culturally/economically, and completely embarrasses their image of having a strong military.
> And militarily they're fighting a war against an endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies
By… employing endless stream of their own meat and paying them obscene (locally) money. Difference is that Ukraine fights for survival.
Reading your comment, I’m a bit confused about your moral compass. Would you also call Polish Armed Forces during WW2 “endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies” when they resisted numerically superior opponent?
As for people voluntarily fighting for a country - I think that's certainly a noble cause. Not only the cause itself, but because it exemplifies that the leaders of that country have shaped a system that people are willing to die, and kill, over. It's a validation of a society. Of course it can also be a proxy for desperation - as you mention Russian enlistment offerings are rather extremely generous, but at least it remains a system that people opt into knowing full well what it entails.
But on the other hand I find forced conscription barbaric. You are taking people who do not believe something is worth dying over, and forcing them to die, and kill, over it. I think it will be something looked upon in the future like we look upon slavery today. Is it a necessary evil? Maybe, but people argued the exact same of slavery in the past as well.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1412425/gdp-ppp-share-wo...
A million casualties for a territorial stalemate is certainly one kind of winning.
The war also isn't a stalemate by any interpretation. In the nominal sense Russian forces are making steady progress, most recently having entered into Pokrovosk [2]. But beyond that - war is rarely, if ever, a real stalemate when there are still large scale combat operations playing out. Rather it transforms into a war of attrition, where progress becomes non-linear. Ukraine is in the midst of a severe manpower shortage, but they still have enough forces to competently hold their defensive lines. But at the point that their manpower gets stretched just beyond that point, everything will collapse rapidly. In a way it's vaguely akin to a siege, except the resource under pressure tends to be manpower instead of e.g. food or water.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...
I would argue that is inaccurate: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60562240
I am basing this on the blitz attack on Kyiv, not anyone's rhetoric. I guess in your mind those paratroopers at Hostomel and armor column from Belarus were going to Amazon Prime their food, ammunition, fuel.
There's also the post-invasion rounds of conscription, recruitment from prisons, and the infamous Prigozhin videos where he tells the MoD to stop sending so much ammunition because Wagner was too well-supplied on account of a multiyear war being totally the thing that the Kremlin planned for.
> including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Who, in this conflict, have a much better reputation for calling Russia's strategy than Russia or you. And they'd probably show you the receipts if you engaged them directly.
> it transforms into a war of attrition
Okay I stopped caring, everything from here on out seems like you giving a lecture at a military academy but I have no reason to believe you know the first thing about the subject. Based on your another commentary it seems more like you are trying to make the Russian invasion seem to be proceeding normally by changing what normal is.
2. I remember media sphere prior/at the time of invasion rather well. The general consensus was that Ukraine would fall in less than two weeks. The invasion itself started on the Fatherhood Defender's Day and I believe was supposed to be completed before the International Women's Day to make a good picture of Russian soldiers gifting flowers to Ukrainian women.
But as you try to make more sophisticated drones, to the point of aiming to fully replace men on the front, they start to become more and more expensive. You want them to be resistant to electronic warfare and you probably don't want to rely on fiber optics so you need some sort of fully autonomous processing unit on board, capable of generalized scenario processing. And you want them to be able to fly for a really long time, so you don't have to have deployment points front close to the front. And so on. You are gradually just reinventing the MQ-9 Reapers and their $30million+ price tag. And suddenly you've lost all the benefit of drones.
---
Russia started peace negotiations with Ukraine 4 days after invading. If you genuinely expect complete capitulation within 2 weeks, you don't start negotiating for peace after 4 days when the enemy would be in a relative position of strength. For that matter, a lot of their early maneuvers were clearly more performative than military in style, like the endless convoys which looked imposing but served no purpose and imposed logistical issues that Russia clearly was not prepared to deal with.
In reality I think Russia did expect there was a high probability that Ukraine would rapidly agree to a settlement, and absent Western involvement that probably would have been correct. And similarly I think the US was probably expecting that Russian forces would just scatter and run at the first sight of Western arms. In reality the optimistic view of both sides ended up not panning and so everybody ended up with a much more real war than they probably expected.
---
4 days is exactly the time frame to understand that initial calculations have gone wrong and it is time for damage control (try to pull out, initiate peace negotiations, etc).
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.
> multipolar world
> nuclear rhetoric
> proxy war
Typical Russian schizophrenia to justify another conquest. How much are you getting per comment? 40 rubles?
Not looking forward to being your proxywar or small regional conflict. It’s amazingly frustrating to be dragged into this without any provocation or possibility to actually affect the situation. Just unfortunate geography I guess.
I don’t think nukes stopped the direct conflict between world powers. They made it possible for the first time. There is no reach to US without them.
War in Europe or parts of Asia is easy the old fashioned way and seems to happen on a regular basis.
It’s a pity Putin was gifted Crimea by the west.
From that lens, loosing a few millions in a "pre-emptive strike" to save the bulk of population looks reasonable. Don't ask me how they ended up with this picture of reality.
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.
But if I point out that this same thing applies to the Russians as a whole, then suddenly I'm racist.
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.
How do you measure that?
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.
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.
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.
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?
You're right, a democratic country would never do anything like that.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/13...
Can you point to the place I said this? Does the US shooting down an Iranian airliner somehow make Russia not hostile to the world? These seem like independent things.
What does this have to do with both of them repeatedly instigating territorial disputes with their neighbors? Granted the US certainly isn't a saint in that regard but its been quite a while since the Mexico stuff.
Annexing pieces of neighbors and defying US economic interests seem like fairly disjoint activities to me.
There’s a weird fetishism across Russia: everything is centered around gay sex. There’s no cooperation in the world, either you take it and become “petukh” (cock) or you give it and become “pakhan” (shot caller).
Lol no, they would not have sabotaged their defensive alliance against a very real, belligerent, immediate enemy for the sake of defending against a potential enemy decades in the future. In any fantasy where the West has that much foresight, they have lots of better options.
Russia doesn't need to be submissive. All Russia has to do is stop starting violence with its neighbors and around the world. Don't mess with Ukraine. Don't mess with Syria. Try actually making their people's lives better instead. (I can already hear you complaining "but the US--" stop. Tu quoque is a fallacy.)
The bar is embarrassingly low. Even after they annexed Crimea, the rest of the world was willing to pretend Russia was a reasonable actor. But it wasn't enough for Russia, mostly for Putin himself I suspect.
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.
What asymmetry are we talking about here? The Warsaw Pact disintegrated because it was held together by force by the Soviet Union and as that had ceased to exist, the Warsaw Pact had no reason to exist either (ask yourself if you think for example Poland would be in a military alliance with Russia if it could choose freely; the same for Czechoslovakia (invaded 1968-1991) and Hungary (1956)). Maybe if Russia sincerely tried to become part of the Western World, many things would look different now, buth we both know it did not.
> Western states chose to expand and entrench NATO
Well if the russians could once think about other peoples as having free agency it would help them immensely to get out of their eternal (and of course false) victim status. Why exactly do you think the Central European states jumped onto the chance to get into NATO as fast as possible? By whom are they feeling threatened? Of course since at least 2008 (Georgia) everyone knows the feeling was right and Russia will continue mass killings of their neigbours unless they meet a stronger enemy.
It should be mentioned that Russia's attempt at "We don't need NATO, we have our own NATO at home" (CSTO) is hilariously awful and failed to keep the peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan just recently.
The Warsaw Pact ceased to exist because it always was a joke and Russia/SU has never had any true desire or ability to protect these other countries... they merely want to discourage them in any way possible from "joining the other team".
Until Russia stops being Russia, they will always be the problem.
Really though it’s because Russia mostly has nothing going for its millions of people except petrochemical exports.
It's a government comprised of people that weren't elected that destroys countries it supposed to govern by forcing non-rational choices that people hate but too afraid to openly criticize.
The level of life in EU is declining, while rising in Russia.
What EU can offer us? Nothing.
Look at any chart that shows any useful economic metric or things like life expectancy of eastern/central European countries before and after they joined the EU. It's almost to good to be true.
> The level of life in EU is declining, while rising in Russia.
That's quite easy when your GDP per capita is behind Trinidad & Tobago or even Cuba.
Russians are essentially a european people and has a lot more in common with the EU than BRICS.
Also, both are headed full-throttle towards a demographic disaster so might as well do it together
And of course your comment about unelected officials acting irrationally that people cannot criticize surely reminds you of home
Stop forcing that bs.
russians see themselves as a unique unicorn high above any other nation on the planet (because of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, and the physiological ability to drink 1L of vodka without getting sick).
Citations, please.
> What EU can offer us? Nothing.
Right, what is clear from your messages in this thread is that Russia only sees value in other things it can take over / steal / destroy. May I ask what Russia has to offer to the rest of the world?
Maybe this could offer more insight:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/vladim...
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.
Country was destroyed, markets were destroyed, industries were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands died in ethnical conflicts, hundreds of thousands died from hunger. It was all a huge mistake and I hope we'll never repeat it.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Georgian_demonstrations
Glasnost and Perestroika under Gorbachev were not benevolence but necessary because the centralized power of the Soviet Union was dwindling. The SU became more and more occupied with fixing its own problems and could no longer hold together the Eastern Bloc by influence or force. Which is why the Eastern Bloc then slowly dissolved. This didn't start with the German unification, but earlier, and encompassed Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989
The SU (who are actually dominated by, but different from "the Russians") certainly would have liked to hold it together. And while under Yeltsin, there was a period of acceptance of the dissolution of the SU, currently Putin seems to want to revive it, at least in terms of territory.
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.
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.
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.
Little green men. Crimea is an island.
Narva is much less interesting in that sense.
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.
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.
With hindsight, we can conclude it was madness. Before the war we maybe could have concluded that it would be better to err on the side of caution because of what it will do to foreign relations.
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.
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.
This is hilarious as naval blockade by itself is an act of war.
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.
They have chewed up their army and lost a navy to a country without ships. How will they fight another war?
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.
can confirm!
Texas would already had seceded and turned into a neutral state in order to avoid further issues. And OFC several states bordering Canada and Mexico would secede too joining Canada and Mexico themselves in order to fight Washington and Nevada. Because that's the way to avoid being a nuclear target. Similar stuff would happen in Russia too with states becoming independent so they aren't a target from both Europe and the USA.
China would just stare there thinking on the good chunk of money would get post war. It would just declare neutral too a la Switzerland asking for diplomatic agreements between the two sides.
The most probable war today with Russia would be an small one in the Arctic because of oil/gas, totally irrelevant and with few casualities.
Turns out it was the Ukrainians! I'm past even guessing at this point...
What relations? Nordstream went boom after 2022 war started.
And let's not forget that Russia purposely inflated gas prices to put pressure on EU during 2021.
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.
Wouldn't be the first time Russia to make a bold move that blows up in their face... 3-day special operation and all.
There was already no gas flowing through either pipeline at the time and with European gas reserves having been kept at an artificially low level, this could've put a lot of pressure on Germany to certify and permit gas flows through the remaining undamaged NS2 pipeline if it hadn't been a mild winter.
This could've been a massive strategic political win for Russia.
But you are not answering the question. What need is there for an independent international investigation that has not already been served by the investigations done by Sweden and Denmark?
Remember the Ghost of Kiev?
I agree with the first part of your comment, but it baffles me that people keep claiming "Sending some divers from a small yacht plant a bomb underwater" would beyond the capabilities of the Ukrainian special forces.
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...
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?
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.
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
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.
Do you want to make your country such a nightmare country, so you can also cheat like they do?
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.
Sadly, it seems a fiction.
Also, am I on the hook because my wife's great-grandfather was russian?
The other thing that sprang to mind was the US interning their own citizens in camps. Would you be in favour of internment camps across Europe for all citizens with any Russian heritage, preemptively locking them up in case they might provide succor to The Enemy?
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.
This self-hypnosis of walking on water while going to Takatuka, is falling apart faster then it can repair itself.
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?
In the grand scheme, repairing the cables and supporting Ukraine will cost less and hurt Russia more than escalating tentions in the Baltic sea.
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.
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.
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.
Russia is obviously having quite a hard time from sanctions caused by their actions.
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.
Internal Propaganda. You show to your own people, that you can cut off the enemies' communication lines easily.
External Propaganda. You show to the enemies that they are vulnerable, spreading fear and doubt in their own strength.
Exercises for larger operations. You train ships' crews for those kinds of maneuvers, in case you need to to it a large number of times, e.g. to cut off all baltic cables at once, cut all transatlantic cables, cut all cables to some important island like Iceland, etc.
Internal Normalisation. You get the ships' crews, your population and your governance structures used to a more aggressive mode of operations.
External Normalisation. You get the enemies' population and governance structures used to those kinds of pinpricks. So when the large-scale operation starts, they will ignore the first signs as "just the usual irrelevant pinpricks".
Testing and mapping connectivity. When the cable goes down, you can have your spies look at which relevant infrastructure goes down at the same time.
But i could suggest another potential benefit for russia: If russia already operates under the assumption that they are in a (cold) war with EU/NATO, and they don't care about the effects on the relationship with Finland. Then this may simply be a really low cost, high damage operation. That not only imposes the replacement cost of the cable, but also forces countries to invest in counter measures.
It is however in the west's interests precisely for this reason.
For "hackers", you are a quite stupid herd.. or a hypocritical, rabidly antirussian, and war mongering one, and I feel that it's closer to the truth.
"But Russia invaded Ukraine!!" ..after the 2014 western sponsored coup in Kiev, the massacre in Odessa, and the "anti terrorist operation" in Donbass. And after "inviting" NATO (or rather NATO inviting itself") to sit on Russia's borders.
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.)
The response needs to be forceful: seize and auction off the ships. 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.
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.
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.
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.
The 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.)
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...
Has the White House rolled over?
So you really need to tread lightly around enemy oil tankers.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/us/politics/russia-oil-ta...
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.)
How is this working for the gulf of aden? Go to sleep grandpa, we can take it from here
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.
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.
The US follows the rules carefully when Russia encourages it to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/us/politics/russia-oil-ta...
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.
You haven't really thought this plan through.
You haven't really thought this plan through.
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...
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-...
They won't be able to seize those without opening fire.
https://ioplus.nl/en/posts/how-seven-students-unmasked-russi...
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.
This is not a way rational adults make decisions. I truly hope you are not a voter in any democratic nuclear-armed country.
If Russia doesn’t like it they can stop with the dumb threats.
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 the USA threatens to nuke Russia if they don't leave Ukraine tomorrow, would you be giving these same sage warnings to Russia?
Russia isn't gonna fling nukes if the West doesn't first. Putin and co have no interest in Moscow being glassed.
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.
Red line still pretty intact.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look up what they said would trigger a nuclear war at the start of the invasion. Many of those things have already happened.
Is this correct?
But yeah, if Russia keeps it up, just blockade the Baltic Sea for ships heading to Russian ports.
The only reason why this seizure of russian money in Belgium might be a bad idea is reciprocity. Russia would of course then try to seize European assets in Russia.
And regarding ships, prize law is still internationally accepted and in effect. Ukraine can offer prize letters to privateers or foreign navies, allowing the seizure of Russian ships. Or they can seize ships themselves. When those ships are then in a Ukrainian or allied harbor, a Ukrainian admirality court then assigns ownership of the vessel and all goods to the ones who brought it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_(law)
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
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.
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.
The exhibits are short and worth looking at
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d...
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...
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
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Russian_drone_incursion_i...
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.
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 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.
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.
Do you see a deal for such a peace?
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
- The Philippines, a US territory, where tens of thousands of American soldiers were killed or captured and
subjected to the infamous Bataan Death March. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos are killed during invasion and occupation.
- Guam, also a US territory
- Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore: British territories
- Thailand, an independent kingdom
Not only did the Japs attack Pearl Harbor, formally declare war on the United States, enjoy an alliance with Germany and Italy who themselves declared war on the Unites States, and conquer or attempt to conquer all those places to build their empire; they also fought fanatically and with exceptional brutality, they committed countless atrocities (wanton murders, amputations and mutilations, gang rapes, sex slavery, vivisections, human experiments--you name it, they did it), they administered conquered territories cruelly, and they treated prisoners of war even more cruelly.
Considering all of the above, conquering the Japanese nation and ensuring their total defeat was not only justified (as I believe you'd agree), it was also entirely proportionate to their warmongering and brutality.
Please stop pushing ahistorical claims.
Good luck with that, though.
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...
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.
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.
"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.
Look if russia wants to conquer the world, let them. They can't make things worse than the indolent ivy-league rot that has destroyed western culture. If people braying about the threat of the east want to be taken seriously, they need to make a much more concerted effort to convince us that the western model makes sense and we're not just working our asses off to suck off rich retards
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.
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:
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...
But yes, imprisoning the crew (especially the captain) is also a good idea.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT looking at your post history its very clear you have no intention of discussing this in good faith.
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).
What should NATO and the EU do to Russia, since Russia would like to break up NATO and the EU?
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
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
-- Then when Russia inevitably seizes and imprisons the crew
Are you volunteering yourself for a vacation in a Russian gulag?
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
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.
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.
- 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.
Your move.
You’re not going to get young German to go to the front. He is more interested in domestic interest-generational conflict.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/25/russian-cargo-...
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-h...
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!
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?
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.
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.
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?
I mean they could have simply not invaded Ukraine. Seems like that's the thing a peace advocate such as yourself would endorse.
As far as I understand, it is totally different case if they find any proof of intent.
That would pass the right message if courts keep refusing to make things right.
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.
You mean like NATO did off the coast of Spain a year ago?
Your argument, taken to its limit, is might makes right. Which, fine; but we're just not that strong anymore. Certainly not the EUpeeans.
Russia declares ware with the west every other Monday.
North Korea is at war with South Korea which is an allied country and partner.
> Or are we OK with the Chinese silently torpedoing the next batch of military equipment to Taiwan (a rouge province under intl law)?
You mean like they already destroy boats of nearby countries?
China doesn't respect International Law anyway and Taiwanese people have the right to choose their independence.
Russia invaded Ukraine just fine without ever declaring war.
However, I also couldn't care less if the Russians Oreshniks Liverpool or Marseille.
Meanwhile, we'll be protecting your loved ones.
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.
A famous example which gave rise to similar hypotheses:
https://news.err.ee/1142424/foreign-ministry-adviser-ms-esto...
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Sure, no. More than a million casualties in this war, it is definitely just 'grey zone' tactics.
Transnistria, Abkhazia, Chechen wars, Georgia, Ukraine.
> not a warmonger, grey zone tactics
What the fuck am I even reading?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
> 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
I'm sorry I have no snark-free way to respond to this.
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?
Geez, how are we so much better at this than the actual engineers?
Edit: to parent comment, I think people missed your joke.
[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.