It happened in late September… that’s a tricky one, because there’s no Fall Olympics. I think Summer already has enough water sports, so let’s give this one to Winter.

Nope, it was definitely Poland trying to maximise on their gas connection to Norway.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Pipe

It’s like the UN of explosions!

I sense someone hasn't actually read the thread they're replying to.

> it sounds like you've probably never seen this - tanker Minerva Julie (belonging to Putin's friends) traveling through the Baltic Sea suddenly decided to hang around for a week right at the same place where couple weeks later Nord Stream exploded: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/03/16/23/68797949-11868975...

Just look upthread from my comment.

I'm waiting for Nazis and Jews to be blamed because Godwin's law after all.

The US destroyed the Nordstream pipeline for certain and Sy Hersh has the evidence.

It is more than probable that this incident indicates possible collusion between the Chinese and Russian governments to sabotage European interests. The simplest fix is for Sweden and Denmark to ban Chinese and Russian ships from their territorial waters until they deliver accountable assurances that this sort of behavior will not happen again. Until then, they must be stopped and European countries must play hardball because that's the only language these criminals understand.

Yup - he's a genuine tragedy.

As much as I'd like to blithely believe you actually agree with me, who gives a damn about muscovites, particularly from more than 400 years ago? and what bearing does this have on our conversation?

Russia is pursuing low stakes, plausibly deniable, minor nuisance actions against the EU and U.S. It does enough to fool itself internally that it has a great enemy in The West, to which it is bravely standing up.

The purpose of this is to unite enough of the domestic population to suppress dissent and keep the current regime in power.

The reality is that it is actually at war with only one small neighbor, which is going so badly that they have had to import troops from North Korea. Embarrassing.

If they actually engaged in war with the EU, more specifically a member of NATO, they would lose quickly. So they stay well back from that line.

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I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, near a strategic Cold War military base. I still remember seeing the TU-95 “bear” bombers flying overhead being escorted and turned around by our fighter jets.

It makes it pretty real when 7 year old me is wondering if this one has any nukes on board, and if this will be the day that they drop.

Russia is not to be trusted, imho. They do not honor their international commitments in good faith, and they will expand their territorial claims if they are allowed to do so. Europe, like a frog in a pot, is in peril and they need to take steps to make sure that Russian war fighting capabilities are destroyed through exhaustion in Ukraine.

This of course is tragic for Ukraine, because it means that she will be utterly razed in the process. But if Russia prevails or backs down with strength, it will happen again. And again.

Russias ability to project force in a strategic way must be destroyed. They are not trustworthy stewards of coercive force.

Sadly as a German I must agree. AfD (financed by Russia) and BSW (probably also financed by Russia, or simply hopelessly naive) will fall over themselves making those excuses. Poor Putin, if only someone _talked_ to him ... while Russia is sabotaging of critical infrastructure like train service, hospitals, Internet, politics, and probably more. Russia is like this annoying bench neighbor, who under the table pokes you in the side during class, until they get shoved hard and then act all hurt. Kinda makes AfD and BSW traitors of their own country.

I for one am in favor of giving Wagenknecht a list of must haves for a ceasefire and peace treaty, which obviously will contain giving back all territory to Ukraine, costly reparation for many years to come, and denazification in Russia. With that list we send her to Russia to negotiate. She is only allowed to return, when the points on that list are achieved. She will be the negotiator, the change she will be the change she wants to see. (If it is not obvious to someone, this is rather a joke, since she cannot be trusted to have meaningful negotiations with her idol.)

By that logic every dictator t72 field trip would make Russia participant in that local war... Absolutely absurd statement. Siria civil war would see Russia waging war on Russia since their equipment was in both hands. What a contrived statement that the arm provider is at war itself.

The passive voice is doing a lot of work here.

Who is now threatening nuclear war?

As long as they're able to, until they get their land back.

What did Ukraine do? Just exist ... menacingly?

Or they know the history all too well.

That seems like a reasonable explanation lol

For the purposes of the crisis, sure. But commerce and average consumer internet access will suffer hugely. Similarly, severing the sea cable had no direct military effect, but was economic damage. Kessler syndrome is still a serious concern even in LEO, just not to the same extent of practically denying access to space for the foreseeable future.

And a bullet costs $0.0001, so it's off just as much in the other direction.

Also, your focus on cost was not the point. The point was numbers necessary. You need $lots of bullets, but you don't need any where near the same number of jets/tanks. You don't need $lots of satellites. You need a much smaller number closer to the number of jets/tanks. At least based on Starlink constellation numbers.

If that list became popular it would be weaponised by military intelligence.

Why would that not be prone to the same issue you think Wikipedia faces?

> actually launching attacks one way or another, which we haven't seen yet

On the contrary. The attacks have been ongoing for years now. You're looking for the tanks and missiles when the attack is actually happening right under your feet. Rot and corruption are more powerful than any bullets or missiles.

A next step for them might be to disable/poison something like an entire urban water distribution system. But come to think of it, the US et al. might be able to do the same back to Russia. Because, you see, there is a whole 'nother ladder of escalation to explore.

A submarine cable is an attractive target for Russia because Russia doesn't have cables of their own exposed: Russia is a continental power, not a maritime alliance. A cable attack is an asymmetric attack, difficult to respond to appropriately.

>"Beyond probing" would be actually launching attacks one way or another, which we haven't seen yet

he's saying "this was not a probe, this was an actually launched attack"

Because their prosecution means going to war. I don't know about you but as someone living less than 30 minutes from Ukraine I don't want my country to go to war.

Who are you referring to? Putin and Russian oligarchs? If so, how would you imagine the mechanics of prosecuting them to work?

Decades? I suppose that 40 decades is still decades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK7l55ZOVIc

so i guess you've got russia all figured out. what's your excuse for the staggering amounts of violence and invasions from americans?

Do you ever wonder why mainstream school curriculum doesn't include the discipline most suitable for navigating these waters: philosophy?

And if you do now: do you wonder if this is 100% coincidence, or oversight? How often do you hear the idea even discussed, as compared to, say, how often we hear about "misinformation", and the need for more "critical thinking"?

I am glad this situation has a substantial humorous aspect to it, otherwise I'd probably get stressed out about it.

Right, but that quote is kind of dumb. It implies that disagreements or criticism of the US are coming from russian disinformation agents. You can see how that framing (even if true sometimes!) isn't productive to any kind of actual discussion right?

> who bases his theory on 'Putin never lies'.

Can you cite anything that he has actually said that even resembles this?

Not really sure what you're referring. The US has most definitely sprayed poison all over the place in South America with cocoa plant eradication efforts. Or Agent Orange in South East Asia.

If you mean poison as in disinformation, then you'd be wrong there as well. We literally "bombed" Iraq with pamphlets from airplanes encouraging them to rise up against Suddam and we'd be there to support them; we didn't.

Europe is great at producing armaments as well - but there are a lot of useful armaments that are only produced in the US. If you had to choose either EU or US support, the US is the better option as they can give you things that the EU cannot even though the EU has more people than the US and a good economy.

The Patriot system is one the of best examples. EU doesn't really have anything in this space, but Ukraine needs more of it yesterday.

Thanks a lot for doing that, even thought kind of ad-hoc :) Some data for guesses is better than none!

I'm guessing that if US pulls their support, EU will try to add as much to cover up for it as humanly possible, as most compatriots see Ukraine as the frontline of something that can grow much, much bigger which because of remembering history, we'd obviously like to avoid.

Fairly confident, at least for the countries I frequent and have friends in. As an example, public opinion of NATO in Sweden was really negative up until ~2013 (Crimea occupation) where it kind of was equally positive/negative and then fast forward to today where it's at 64% positive. https://www.gu.se/en/news/opinion-on-nato-record-shift-betwe...

Being a Swede myself, and knowing how apathetic Swedish people are about basically anything, something having that large of support is pretty uncommon and signal a strong will to make NATO and EU defenses stronger, if anything.

Even people I know who been historically anti-"anything military" in the country have quickly turned into "We need to defend our Nordic brothers and sisters against the Russians" which kind of took me by surprise.

> UE is full of Trump supporters

That won't ever happen. Even right-wingers (Europe right, not US right) are laughing at Trump and the Republicans.

> Support in other European countries does not differ much from Germany:

Yes, it seems to differ in at least one place by a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42193290

I'm sure that's true for other places too.

In Feb 2022, just before the war started, the Rubble was worth $0.012. Now it's $0.0099. That's a 17% value drop in almost 3 years. It's true, the inflation is high, but nowhere near out of control.

Also, the discussion was about the effect of the sanctions. But the inflation is going up not because of that, but because of the huge amount of Russian government money that's flowing to the military and to the weapon industry.

none of those things prevent russia from waging war.

All of it are merely suffering that the russian citizens suffer, but canwithstand. Russia does not import food, does not need to import fuel, and can import most consumer goods from china and bypass western sanctions.

Therefore, russia's gov't can allocate most of their internal resources for war production.

But obligatory reminder, that back then there were no nukes. So it is not exactly the same situation.

The nazis won many wars even tho they lost the big one. Will NATO win against Russia? Who knows. But in the showdown NATO/Ukraine vs Russia, they lost.

it's why instead of an appropriate, equal and measured response for acts of bullying, any sort of aggression should be faced with overwhelming relatiation.

This is what one would do to a school yard bully. They push you, and you immediately do a full face punch and knee to the nose. Fight to the death from the first push/shove, and let it escalate. One fight, and the bullying is over, or you both get injured sufficiently to go to the hospital. There should be no middle grounds.

The other big issue is US adventurism in Iraq (and to a lesser extent Afghanistan) has made US citizens wary of any international actions, no matter the details. It's especially galling how many of the same people who were cheering on the direct military conquering of Iraq are now against supporting Ukraine at an arms length. "Can't get fooled again", indeed.

The us is currently one of the most stable economies, so there's a long way to go.

I think it's unlikely that the world will pick an economic partner that:

- builds 90% of the new coal fired plants while the rest of the world (including the US) is decarbonizing

- has 280+% debt to GDP ratio

- has capital controls on its currency (the real exchange rate could change suddenly at the drop of a hat)

none-the-less, it is a clear escalation ON THE INVOLVEMENT OF EUROPE AND THE US in the war.

It is not that Ukraine are escalating the war by using long-range missiles. Of course Russia have been using them all along.

But it is a clear escalation in western 'participation' in the war.

> That is a very particular use of the term 'escalation' which is bound to mislead people.

I am not the OP, but I think your interpretation is not as obvious as you make it to be. This often leads to misunderstandings.

AFAIK military analysts use the term escalation as a morally neutral term. Escalation is anything that goes up on the 'scala' (= "ladder", the Latin root of the word). In this interpretation, D-Day would be an e_scala_tion (climbing up the ladder) simply because opening a new front means number_of_fronts_today > number_of_fronts_yesterday. In this interpretation, self-defense and escalation are not mutually exclusive.

Apparently, the term changed meaning. Many people now treat it the way you do (if I understand you correctly) as something associated with aggression. Therefore, they assume that when someone labels something like an escalation, they mean it is an act of aggression, unjustified, something you should not be allowed to do, and not morally neutral.

I am not saying you are wrong. I am just pointing out that when people talk about escalation, it is worth checking whether they mean the same escalation.

Right. URSS putting nuclear missiles in Cuba was not an escalation then.

If a robber is holding an innocent at gunpoint and the innocent pulls out a gun and starts pointing it at the robber, has the situation escalated?

Ukraine is very clearly a proxy war between NATO and Russia, merely framed as a plucky country defending it's sovereignty, though it is that too, of course.

With all the backlash here, I feel like some kind of radical, but here is a BBC article from 2 DAYS AGO that basically says what I'm saying: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2nrlq1840o

Although they miss out the bit about a media campaign, and so on, of course.

This is the BBC, pretty much the mouthpiece of the UK government.

And although they frame recent actions as trying to give Ukraine an advantage in any Trump negotiations with Russia, the truth is that these missiles will probably not advance Ukraine's military position, but will certainly change Europe and America's standing, possibly to the point of derailing any possibility of negotiation.