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There is a strong chance that there are no actual "drones" involved and these sightings are just due to random people mistaking airplanes as drones/UFOs: https://x.com/MickWest/status/1971656713230270794
It's not just Denmark, drones have been sighted at multiple Norwegian airports as well, including confirmed sightings by both police and air force at the main air base in Ørland. (Source in Norwegian, https://www.nrk.no/trondelag/etterforsker-mulig-droneaktivit...)
In my opinion you really have to be skeptical. Its always possible drone reports are real, but also citings tend to cluster, and there is rarely anything outside of eyewitness reports. Humans are very bad at judging the size and distance of objects in the air, and a flying drone is much harder to spot than people actually imagine. But there is incentives to the state overacting to drone citings, if you're interested in keeping cameras out of public spaces.
There's a "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you" angle here. That Russia has been escalating drone activity against Danish allies is not in question. Some level of heightened care (like this 5-day ban) seems not unreasonable even if the reports can't be corroborated.
Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia? For as long as I can remember there have been things like fighter jets at the borders and we scramble ours to intercept etc, and before Russian media was blocked here they used to report the we were regularly doing the same. It was never really headline news, even after the war in Ukraine really got going
But now that the US has become an unreliable partner and the EU is talking about the need for increased cooperation suddenly they exact same stories become big news and ministers use it as examples of our complacency, when two years ago they would have said it's nothing to worry about.
And indeed now I see it shared all over social media with more and more "people" calling for harder responses, a single EU military, even outright declarations of war against Russia.
As someone who has been arguing for a war with Russia, I don't think there's been many attempts to manufacture consent for it.
In fact, I've noticed a lot of opposition to my view that I think is state organized, but probably by Russia. I've seen zero people like me online. I've seen zero repeated pro-war, zero capability-emphasizing arguments. Complete silence except for me.
No, I don't believe that it's tactically sensible to send troops where Russian troops are already entrenched or ready for war.
I believe that war should be conducted to exploit the enemy, not go at him in some idiot maneuver.
Our actions in Ukraine should be limited to stand-off weapons and glide bombs, mirror the Russian manner of aerial attack. We should also attack gas pipelines, ammonia plants, electrical infrastructure, etc. in Russia and generally shut the place down. We should of course also seize all Russian-flagged ships.
Exploits its dependence on transport and cheap energy, exploit Russia's size by seizing weak or undefended regions to force troop movements, attacking the troops with stand-off weapons while their being transported to the front etc.
Basically, we're playing tennis, and they're playing with both corridors in addition to the singles court. We should of course let them run.
I am absolutely opposed to sending ground troops against Russian positions or any region with sufficient defence, or capacity to resist. This risks the lives of soldiers needlessly and is not what war is about.
Do you also advocate the evacuation of the cities of whichever countries engage in the attacks you describe to reduce deaths in case Moscow responds by nuking those cities?
I don't see nuclear attacks from Russia as probable.
They know well that any attacks by them will be matched by attacks by us, so any nuclear exchange is just miscalculation on their part. It will end quickly.
It's important to understand that threats are irrelevant. If somebody says 'Eat this horrible snail, or I'll you shoot you' you just say 'No, you can shoot me anyway'. Same thing here. If they nuke us, so what? They can do that today too.
It's not in our power to decide whether they nuke us, and therefore it can't be a reason to limit any action against them.
Upon this there is of course also our own capability to nuke them, and due to Russian attitudes and their view of their place in the world any nuclear exchange with them will be short. They can choose to erase us if they are willing to erase themselves. That's their power, but the Russians won't ever be willing to erase themselves. They believe that they are on par with the US and a cultural beacon that is critical to the balance of the world, something without which there's nothing that matters. They will never choose to erase themselves.
Because of this-- mutually assured destruction and the irrelevance of threats, nuclear weapons only matters when one power has them and the other does not. It doesn't make sense for the Russians to erase themselves even if I stand at outside Moscow with an army, even if I have taken Moscow. There's never a slice when it makes sense. Thus the balance between nuclear power is determined entirely by the balance of conventional forces.
Deploying Western troops to Ukraine has a clear purpose and limit: evict Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. Using nuclear weapons does not make much sense in that scenario. There's nothing to gain and a lot to lose. Yes, it puts soldiers directly in harms way of conventional weapons, which is why no one is doing it, but it restricts it to still being a regional conflict.
The unrestricted warfare you're proposing escalates the situation dramatically and for Russia, nuclear warfare starts to look disturbingly approachable. The conversation wouldn't be about full exchange but a warning shot. A tit for tat escalation that makes Europe back off while the US is paralyzed with dysfunction. Any possible risk of a nuclear event is too much.
My comment doesn't propose use of nuclear weapons.
I don't see how what I propose is unrestricted. It is simply how one conducts war.
Entering Ukraine with troops puts those troops lives at risk for no reason. It is not legitimate to ask somebody to stand under artillery bombardment while the factories producing the shells are permitted to exist, or to attack well-defended positions when that is not the most efficient manner of attack.
We have no right to conduct a war so badly. Our duty to our soldiers and to our population is to conduct the war in the free and appropriate way that is the normal conduct of war.
We have a duty to undertake no operation of any kind that is not the most efficient and useful operation. This means not going against any prepared position, while betters targets exist, without considering any escalation concerns. This means focus on radical targets-- the roots of the enemy's fighting capability.
This is our duty to our soldiers in planning and conducting a war and this not something we can deviate from.
It sort of sounds like you believe that Washington (or any other country with enough nukes) could use nukes to kill every single Russian and that Moscow could use nukes to kill every single American. This belief gets repeated a lot on the internet: a full "exchange" of nukes is game over.
In reality, even if Moscow were cheating on its treaty obligations and had (in ready-to-use form) every nuke that the Soviet Union possessed at the peak of its arsenal, plus all the intercontinental missiles and bombers the Soviets had at the peak of their arsenal, Moscow could kill only about half of the US population. Since the Russian population is more concentrated in cities than the US population, Washington could kill about 55% of Russians with the arsenal it possessed at the height of the Cold War.
There is a bit of a wild card in these estimates: if the effect called nuclear winter turns out to be as bad as some say it will be, a lot more would die (mostly outside the countries that got nuked). Nuclear winter will probably turn out to be a nothing burger, but we cannot know that for sure, so there is some chance it would cause the deaths of most of the people in the world, but if Moscow's situation becomes desperate enough and there is a clearly identified enemy who is causing the desperation, it start to become rational for Moscow to bet that the nuclear winter won't be extremely bad (which it probably won't be).
Moscow might calculate that Russian are better at enduring hardships than the West is, so Russia will be able to recover from the nuclear exchange before the West does, so that in a model in which the only thing that matters is Russia's strength relative to the West, a nuclear exchange can make sense -- not now, but if the situation becomes more desperate for Moscow because of the attacks you describe.
I don't see how there's a Russian central authority upon the destruction of the great cities. It's state collapse. It's never going to get up. The cultural and intellectual elite's gone and there's nothing.
Whether the elite is gone depends on whether the elite sought shelter from a nuclear attack, like it did during the start of the invasion of Ukraine. (The Russian regime has facilities built into granite in the Southern Ural mountains that can withstand direct attack from nukes.) Also, if an attacker does manage to kill everyone in the ruling coalition during a time of existential war, a new ruling coalition forms that is just as committed to the war as the old coalition.
A government of a society like Russia (or the US for that matter or Britain) doesn't collapse when it is hit very hard. Everyone rallies around the government, or more precisely, most people rally around and the rest either remain silent or get imprisoned or killed.
Hitler famously believed that the Soviet Union would collapse if invaded: "We have only to kick in
the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down," he said.
It didn't collapse, nor did China when Japan invaded and killed millions of Chinese and occupied all its coastal cities. Neither of China's two governments collapsed even though before the Japanese invasion the two governments were engaged in a civil war that was in itself the third most deadly war of the 20th Century.
The most powerful military in the world could not force regime change on Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s or on Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s. This is because when invaded, most countries will become very unified around the goal of expelling the invader -- and a big nuclear attack will elicit the same "nationalistic" feelings as an invasion.
The political leadership did do so, but I'm not talking about the political leadership, I'm talking about the class the produces MSU and SPbU professors, engineers, etc.
At best they'll be going into the subway. I think losses would be >75% though.
There’s certainly some amount of propaganda effort being put in it on EU level into elevating the threat.
1. There are actors who would benefit from arms race. The money, the military careers etc. The whole NATO nearly became irrelevant before Russia started invading. Now all those generals have jobs again and Rheinmetall shares are going up.
2. There are actors for whom threat from the East is existential factor (it’s in the core of the political platform of nationalists in Baltic states - remove it and they are suddenly less competitive compared to neutral or pro-Russian parties). Current chief of EU diplomacy Kallas belongs to this group.
However I think Russia wants to make a point too. It’s hardly planning any war with NATO (I hope their intelligence isn’t as bad as in Ukraine), but they do need to convince European voters that war is possible if peace in Ukraine won’t come anytime soon (on their terms). And European voters are certainly not in the mood for big war, so the question really is, who is more convincing: von der Leyen & Co with their idea to support Ukraine until it wins, or Russia with it’s idea that further escalation may harm EU citizens directly.
I'll take the bait and answer. There are indeed actors for whom the threat from the East is AN existential factor. That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like and they don't want to repeat it.
Whether there's a mood for a big war, I am not sure. But there are states that are ready for it. And yes, it is within EU interests to let the fighting happen in Ukraine rather than EU.
Also, it's a nice collection of the subtler Russian points you have here, B+ for effort.
>That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like
Just as a reminder: Latvian Riflemen helped to create it by supporting Lenin in the crucial phase of revolution and suppressing anti-Bolshevik rebellion in Moscow. Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites. So this “oh, it was so terrible in Soviet Union” projection on Russia is a very specific nationalist narrative ignoring shared history of both nations, which included shared suffering from the same regimes and shared participation in oppression.
> Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites.
Name one Lithuanian or Estonian member of the Politburo in the half-century spanning 1940 to 1990. I'll save you time: there were none.
Your knee-jerk reaction of trying to shift blame onto historical oddities like the Latvian Riflemen reminds me of neo-nazis pointing out that the Wehrmacht had some 150 000 Jews in its ranks, "proving" that Germans weren't all that antisemitic and that the Holocaust has been exaggerated. Same impulse.
Yes, I could very well believe that they're funding online campaigns to stir up feelings of unease and distrust in our governments. It helps them even if we don't get sucked into an outright conflict.
I remember they’ve been observed (alongside China) flooding US social media with bots that spew inflammatory and divisive comments to help further divide the country around key events like the Charlie Kirk assassination or deportation or Gaza or whatever. I’m not sure how successful they are but I get the feeling it’s working.
Its been a well known secret that Russia has been using incursions into Swedish airspace and Swedish land as a part of troop training for decades. The only major change in recent time is the rate of the incidents, and the use of interference that is more noticeable to civilian infrastructure. Boat captains from multiple industries are complaining that they have to go back to use physical maps rather the GPS when plotting courses through the Baltics, as the gps indicator just spins in circle and produce visual noise. It is a new situation, through built on top of past behavior. The general theory is that this represent a change towards a more drone-heavy strategy with different attack and defense technologies being used as part of training and testing.
I do not see it as a direct way to manufacture consent for a war, but the impact on civilian infrastructure is starting to be annoying enough that the military of multiple nations around the Baltics are looking to do something, and the effect of that something may create political waves. Same things with the attacks on undersea cables and the suggested counter measures, which also include military aspects to it.
Russia (and the USSR) before routinely flew military aircraft right to the edges of international airspace but seldom entered the national airspace of NATO member space. So these repeated deliberate incursions appear to be something new, and perhaps an attempt to provoke a reaction by the Russian side.
Russia seems to be working very hard to do just that. Their own actions seem to be the best argument for focusing on Russia as a threat. That's not manufacturing, that's their own efforts / choices.
I think there are some who want war. But for Europe and America it is much better for Russia to be a friend again (like part of the G8). The alternative is that they become a servant of China, and this will end with them making a deal to give China land in the northeast of Russia. All of this is a huge strategic problem for NATO countries, and democracies in general, especially with India out of such a coalition due to nonsensical tariffs over Russian oil (when Europe buys Russian gas) or Nobel peace prizes (Trump falsely claiming he helped resolve conflicts between India and Pakistan) or whatever.
Now are European leaders smart enough to play geopolitics properly? That I doubt. To be honest, I doubt if the democratic processes will result in leaders that are competent enough and mature enough to deal with all this. More likely for countries to keep electing unhinged populists from either side.
Geopolitics depends on geography. If you are a smaller country bordering Russia, major powers like China, India, and the US are far away and ultimately not that relevant. Russia, on the other hand, is an unavoidable fact of life. It would be much better to be in friendly terms with them. At least in Finland, the economy is good basically whenever trade with Russia is good. But that's not always possible.
Right now, Russia is a country waging a war of conquest. Regardless of what they say, they are making it unambiguously clear that they do not recognize the sovereignty of their neighbors. It's not possible to be in friendly terms with such a neighbor, until there is a regime change. Or until enough time has passed that the supporters of the regime waging the war have become irrelevant.
Then there are bigger entities like NATO and the EU. From their perspective, geopolitics means having to choose between being in friendly terms with some of their eastern member states and Russia. They cannot choose both.
Well I think the benefit of containing the CCP empire is big enough to require NATO to still find a way forward with Russia. That’ll require a compromise around Ukraine though.
That would require Russia to move in a direction that it does not seem to be willing to move in. You can't have your officials with high regularity declare that you are going to annihilate all of the West just because you don't get to beat up your neighbor. You can't indiscriminately bomb, kill and abduct civilians and expect compromise. That's just not how this works.
The EU, and Germany by way of Merkel in particular for the longest time believed in 'wandel durch handel'. It turns out that this was a massive mistake and in spite of the still lingering abberations (Orban, Fico) that seem to think that sucking up to the Russian mob is going to pay off for them in the long term the sentiment has changed quite dramatically from where it was five years ago. I don't think there is any high level EU politician that still believes that we are going to go back to 'the good old days', and that is in spite of the current course of the USA, which is best described as 'confused'. Just check out what Russia did in the last 24 hours to give you an idea of how far from any kind of compromise we are. I think escalation is more likely than de-escalation and that's not something I consider lightly. But Putin has dug himself into a very deep hole and he does not seem to have a way out other than to keep on digging, he's ignored each and every off-ramp offered so far thinking that they were offered out of weakness rather than out of an aversion to war.
If Europe is ever forced to go - reluctantly - to war against Russia it will be because it saw no other way out. Until then we will keep arming Ukraine and we will continue to build up our defenses. Russia's main plan: to decapitate Ukrainian leadership and to use Ukrainians to continue its operation in the South has failed so utterly it is incredible, and yet, here we are. Whether Russia will still exist in one form or another in a decade is now something you can legitimately wonder about. All they had to do was absolutely nothing, and they'd be in a far stronger position today. Just live and let live. But that idea seems to be very hard for Russian leadership to entertain: that you can create together rather than that you can only expand at someone else's expense.
The “imperial” narrative is a made-up thing by contemporary Eastern European politicians. There are fringe political groups in Russia that think this way, but they have no significant influence and are mainly tolerated by Putin’s administration (it’s a destabilizing factor for internal politics). Russian empire ceased to exist in 1917 and whatever happened since then were not imperial projects.
No, that narrative is taken straight from the horses mouth, one V. Putin himself, who is about as mainstream as it gets. The Russian Empire from 1917 is not the one people have in mind when they refer to this.
Simple question: in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and there was peaceful “annexation” of GDR into FRG, in which West Germany effectively took over, with its constitution taking into effect in new federal states, the GDR assets being taken over by western economic structures etc. Was it imperial by its nature?
From Russian perspective it’s kind of the same (except the war part of course). Same language spoken, shared history etc. If you look at any empire, they colonize other nations. This specific conflict is framed as imperial by analysts based on the notion that the annexed territories are where a completely separate nation forged, which is being colonized. It’s not a historical but a propaganda narrative, that attempts to hide all the complexity of this topic.
It's not the same because one party is clearly not willing. That's all it takes: consent. If tomorrow morning Friesland decides by majority vote it wants to be independent of the rest of NL I'd be perfectly ok with that. Likewise I'm fine with countries deciding whether or not they want to join one alliance or another.
Languages and history have nothing to do with it, it is all about consent. If you plan to kill people in order to get them to join your idea what your country should look like you've already lost, then you're just another occupier.
I've lived in Poland under the USSR, it was pretty clear what the Russian position was on how they viewed the Poles - and anybody else that wasn't 'properly' Russian for that matter. This was an occupation, not a league of nations, and in a way Russia got more out of WWII than even the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact would have given them. I've lived in Romania, I visited Latvia many times, I visited Ukraine, many times. Everywhere the sentiment is roughly the same: that they would rather die than live under Russian occupation again, they already know what that is like. And no amount of shared history or language (or forced relocation, which in many of those cases is the source of that shared history) is going to offset that.
You're if I'm not mistaken someone with Russian roots living in Berlin. Coincidentally, I know more people that are in that position. Most of them still have family back in Russia so they are very circumspect in the positions that they take. But they have zero illusion about Russia having good intentions in any of the wars they have engaged in since the USSR fell apart and it is patently clear by the indiscriminate attacks on the Ukrainian population that Russia does not care for the people that they in the same breath claim to call their brothers and sisters.
>If tomorrow morning Friesland decides by majority vote it wants to be independent of the rest of NL I'd be perfectly ok with that.
That is a easy postition for the Netherlands to take because it has very little security against invasion even now before Friesland secedes, given its location in which there is little in the way of mountains, rivers or seas between it and countries more powerful than it. (More powerful if only because of their greater size: I'm not claiming that the Dutch are bad at fighting).
But it would be foolish for Australians to allow a large chunk of Australia to secede or for the Japanese to allow part of Japan to secede because the way it is now, both countries enjoy a very favorable security situation in which any invader would need to cross an ocean or at least a wide channel even to begin an invasion. If Japan split into two, then one of the two new countries might invite in the military of a larger power with the result that the other new country is in a vastly more precarious security situation than it was before the split into 2 countries.
The Mongols attempted a massive invasion of Japan, but the invasion was foiled by stormy weather while the Mongols were trying to cross the wide channel. If there were two polities in Japan at the time, the Mongols could have offer to protect one polity from the other one, and if their offer had been accepted, they could have moved their forces to Japan at their leisure, and would not have needed to risk an operation in which all their forces try to cross a sea as quickly as possible ready to fight as soon as they get to the other side.
Because of their separation from other countries by large bodies of water, Australian and Japan have been invaded or occupied only once in the last 2000 years (Australia when Europeans arrived and Japan after WWII) whereas during those 2000 years, the Netherlands has been invaded many times (with the occupation or annexation of the Netherlands by Spain having proved particularly painful).
Again: the Netherlands is not giving up much in the way of security advantages by allowing parts of itself to secede, but not all countries are in a similar situation.
You are just repeating the same idea without further analysis. As a German born in USSR I do know something about oppression too, however I also understand the difference between socialism, imperialism and Russian flavor of neoconservatism - 3 different ideologies that existed in Russia in last 300 years. They are very different in operation and expansion modes and those differences are very important for external observers, especially when there are few trillions of taxpayer money at stake. Russia stopped being an imperial project with colonies in 1917. Period. Soviet Union wasn’t Russian nationalist project at all, so mixing it up with contemporary history or seeing it as an extension of empire is just incompetent. Contemporary Russia of Putin’s period is claiming to extend both, but it’s just propaganda legitimizing the regime, when the motives, the goals, the government structures are very different.
It's a distinction without a difference. For the victims it hardly matters what idiocy motivated the occupiers, and those are the people we are concerned with, not with how Russians view themselves. Just like I don't give a fuck about how MAGA adherents want to redefine what the United States is. I do care about the people that they then collectively threaten to murder/invade.
Well, good for you. Your taxpayer money aren’t going to be spent in this conflict, thanks to Trump. What concerns me is that Eastern European nationalists are selling the big war narrative that will make Europe overspend on defense and American LNG when we have plenty of other problems. It doesn’t have to go this way, but that requires really good understanding of intentions and capabilities of either side, at least on the level of Cold War. At the moment there’s no such understanding neither among public nor among politicians. What’s worse, there’s no even attempts to understand - you are great example of such attitude.
Instead of spending taxpayer money it would be better to seize all assets held by Russian entities (including private citizens) in NATO and other allied countries. Just steal it all. Killing Russian soldiers is expensive so we might as well let the Russians themselves pay for it.
I actually do understand why Russia is attempting to seize Ukraine, and from a strategic geopolitical perspective it was sort of logical. But so what, that doesn't mean we should have any sympathy for them or let them gain any advantage. Better so utterly crush, humiliate, and impoverish them so that they cease to be a threat for a couple generations to come. This will also serve as a useful object lesson to anyone else who might want to try a similar stunt: FAFO.
> Instead of spending taxpayer money it would be better to seize all assets held by Russian entities (including private citizens) in NATO and other allied countries. Just steal it all.
So basically just like Israel in Gaza. What will be left from EU if it cannot stick to its own charter, which rejects collective responsibility?
That amount of money is barely enough for Ukraine anyway. European defense will cost much more.
I'm not an EU citizen and don't give a damn about the EU charter. The important thing is to win the war and wreck the "Russian Empire" at minimal cost, regardless of artificial legalisms.
Yes, it is possible to be both against what Israel does in Gaza and to be against what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
> What will be left from EU if it cannot stick to its own charter, which rejects collective responsibility?
This does not even parse. The EU has plenty of collective responsibility, is part of the EU mutual defense pact and is part of NATO. The only two countries that are nominally in the EU but that are not unified in their viewpoint here are substantially influenced by russia.
> That amount of money is barely enough for Ukraine anyway.
It seems to have an outside effect on the situation in russia, for as little as it is, but I agree with you it should be much more and we should do this sooner rather than later.
> European defense will cost much more.
So what? Why are you so focused on the money angle, rather than on the injustice and the indiscriminate murder of citizens in a country that meant russia - or should I say you - no harm?
Where is your voice in this? As a person safe in Berlin you could afford to raise your voice against Putin if you wanted to.
Israel executes collective punishment of all Palestinians for actions of Hamas. Putin executes collective punishment of all Ukrainians for actions of certain politicians. The commenter above suggested that the same principle should be applied to all Russian citizens.
> So what? Why are you so focused on the money angle, rather than on the injustice and the indiscriminate murder of citizens in a country that meant russia - or should I say you - no harm?
Why I should be focused on that? To release the steam? Oh, yes, that’s bad, poor people. What’s next? Their fates are determined not by the preparation of Europe to war, but by the willingness of politicians to discuss realistic peace terms. The sooner the war will end, the less people will die. This war was lost by Ukraine and NATO when counteroffensive failed (not least because NATO failed to provide sufficient help), so the only important thing to discuss is how to minimize the losses, because we are obviously not engaging directly. But nobody in Europe is prepared to start this conversation. The money is the only topic where real conversation happens.
> Where is your voice in this? As a person safe in Berlin…
What kind of voice are you expecting and why do you think I’m not using it?
> Israel executes collective punishment of all Palestinians for actions of Hamas.
> Putin executes collective punishment of all Ukrainians for actions of certain politicians.
Yes, both are nuts.
> The commenter above suggested that the same principle should be applied to all Russian citizens.
There is a fair chance that if Russia decides to engage NATO that it will in fact end up that way. If that's not something you want then now would be a good time to act.
> Why I should be focused on that? To release the steam? Oh, yes, that’s bad, poor people.
Yes, indeed, poor people. Why gloss over that? It's the main article, not some kind of side dish.
> Their fates are determined not by the preparation of Europe to war, but by the willingness of politicians to discuss realistic peace terms.
Did you entirely miss the previous times that Russia agreed to terms and then violated them, over and over again? If you want people to be willing to discuss peace terms it would really help if you had a good track record of abiding by those terms. Russia does not currently have that track record.
> The sooner the war will end, the less people will die.
No shit. But unfortunately there is one party that seems to want to continue this war, no matter what the cost. The other side has one option: to capitulate, but for some weird reason they seem to think that that is not an option. Mostly because they already know how that part of the story goes just by looking at other places that did just that.
> This war was lost by Ukraine and NATO when counteroffensive failed (not least because NATO failed to provide sufficient help), so the only important thing to discuss is how to minimize the losses, because we are obviously not engaging directly.
You are not as well informed as you seem to think. As we speak 21.7% of russian oil refinery capacity is down, and it will remain down for another 3 to 6 months at a minimum. My guess is that when Ukraine is done going after russian oil infrastructure that number will be a lot higher and then they're going to set their sights on electrical infra. And they're getting scary good at this. Russia is succeeding in grabbing land and killing civilians, Ukraine is succeeding in seriously reducing Russia's capacity to continue to be a power of any kind at all. You must at least be aware of some of this.
> But nobody in Europe is prepared to start this conversation.
Nobody in Europe is in a position to negotiate with russia on this, the only parties that we believe can credibly do this are russia and Ukraine and one of these believes that they should continue the war because they have something to gain from it.
> The money is the only topic where real conversation happens.
Indeed. And you won't be able to sell me on Ukraine's land being worth as much as russia is currently prepared to pay for it. Or rather, to be more precise, than russia is willing to make other parties pay for it because it isn't exactly the crowd from St. Petersburg and Moscow at the front lines. And if it ever should come to that the war would be over very quickly.
> What kind of voice are you expecting and why do you think I’m not using it?
I'm expecting you to speak up against Putin, and to donate as much as you can afford to the defense of Ukraine. If your comments in this thread are a sample of how you really feel about all this then I'm guessing you're not doing either until you provide proof otherwise. You are all but suggesting the EU or Ukraine are at fault here when clearly it is russia that is the aggressor, and which continues to commit one warcrime after another with complete disregard for human rights and what is considered civilized in general.
>You are not as well informed as you seem to think. As we speak 21.7% of russian oil refinery capacity is down, and it will remain down for another 3 to 6 months at a minimum
The numbers are wrong. It’s in 10-15% range, not all damage requires months of work and it’s within overcapacity that Russia had before the war. There exist temporary local shortages after strikes and it’s creating inflationary pressure, but it’s not dramatic yet. Also, 30% of capacity is beyond Ukrainian reach.
I don’t see any point to comment on anything else. Personal attacks are against the rules of this forum.
The money is the least of the problem for me, I'm more than happy to spend and do whatever it takes to ensure that this kind of idiocy ends here, once and for all.
> Well, good for you. Your taxpayer money aren’t going to be spent in this conflict, thanks to Trump.
You're quite wrong about that.
> What concerns me is that Eastern European nationalists are selling the big war narrative that will make Europe overspend on defense and American LNG when we have plenty of other problems.
Europe can not possibly overspend on defense at the moment, the way the situation has shifted in the last five years has made that abundantly clear. And if you live in Berlin, then your security too depends on this. It definitely isn't the 'Eastern European Nationalists' that are the problem.
> It doesn’t have to go this way, but that requires really good understanding of intentions and capabilities of either side, at least on the level of Cold War.
You are, I assume, aware of the various acts of espionage and sabotage of Russia in the West? And if you are then I assume that you realize that these are not just games but that they feel suspiciously like a prelude similar to what happened prior to Russia engaging in Ukraine for a second time. I don't need to see much more evidence beyond what I've already seen to believe that there may well be an operation already planned, either an attack on one of the Baltic countries to see if Europe can be further divided, or, if Putin is really reckless, one on Poland. The fact that 'Eastern European Nationalists' are selling that narrative is because they are actively under threat, not because they are making up funny stories for comedic effect.
> At the moment there’s no such understanding neither among public nor among politicians.
Why do you believe that to be the case? All I see is very measured responses and attempts to leave a backdoor to normalcy open. I also see the other side interpreting this structurally as weakness. But frankly, that is a massive mistake. Europe doesn't like to go to war, but if it has to it will.
> What’s worse, there’s no even attempts to understand - you are great example of such attitude.
That's not even close to the truth. Given my history, places where I've lived and people that I know I think I have a fair picture of what is going on. Putin bit off far more than he could chew and has found out the hard way that as long as his nukes are off the table that he does not have a way to resolve this in his favor. Every day Ukraine is getting stronger and every day Russia is set back further and further. The best that could happen to Russia at this point in time is a leadership change and a path to an off-ramp. Anything else will only lead to more of the same with China as the laughing party in the background.
Your characterization of me as someone who does not even try to understand is unfair and not worthy of discourse here, if you, given all of your unfettered access to media are unable to see the truth of what is going on then that's on you, not on me, I know enough Russians who see things dramatically different from how you position them to know that it is possible to do better than that.
> I don't need to see much more evidence beyond what I've already seen to believe that there may well be an operation already planned
In case of Ukraine there was at least plenty of strategic and political reasons. Why Russia should attack any NATO country? They were afraid even to respond to Turkey shooting down their planes. Hypothetical land bridge to Kaliningrad? It is not completely isolated - there’s a railway connection still operating for example. Well, maybe, but the stakes are much higher here and Moscow and St.Petersburg will be on the line of fire.
> Why do you believe that to be the case? All I see is very measured responses and attempts to leave a backdoor to normalcy open.
Do you see any plausible strategy communicated and executed by the West on how this war can end on favorable terms for Ukraine? I don’t.
> Putin bit off far more than he could chew and has found out the hard way that as long as his nukes are off the table that he does not have a way to resolve this in his favor. Every day Ukraine is getting stronger and every day Russia is set back further and further.
Russia is making steady gains in territory over quite long period of time now and is on track to achieve it’s current military goals that were outlined in their peace proposal (full control of Donbas and land bridge securing logistics for Crimea). It’s hard to understand what are you talking about.
>Your characterization of me as someone who does not even try to understand is unfair
You literally told that in previous comment, dismissing the understanding of differences as unimportant.
> unable to see the truth of what is going on then that's on you, not on me
What makes you think that I’m less informed and understand it less than you? Just the fact that I disagree?
The strategy on how this war can end on favorable terms for Ukraine is the same as most other wars of attrition: kill more Russians steadily over a period of several more years. Their population is large but not infinite. With a sufficient arsenal of advanced weapons from allied countries this is potentially achievable. This is a horrible situation and I take no delight in it but now millions of Russians will have to die to resolve a problem caused by their leaders.
The other strategy is to cut off Russia's war funding through a combination of sanctions and (more importantly) Ukrainian long-range strikes on fossil fuel export infrastructure. This is more of a long shot but it could work.
In an attrition war where Ukraine has less than 30M people (25% population decline since start of war) and Russia has around 140M, who do you think can win? What advanced weapons and in which volume can West supply that can change the course of war given population constraints?
> In case of Ukraine there was at least plenty of strategic and political reasons.
And all of them illegal. But never mind that, right?
> Why Russia should attack any NATO country?
Well, that's a good question but I'm the wrong person to ask. Clearly, sending a wave of drones into Poland is inviting some kind of response and unless you believe this was just for shits and giggles you too should be worried. Because if and when Russia decides that NATO is an alliance they'd like to go up against your position will rapidly become very difficult.
Of course you are donating as much as you can to Ukraine to stop that from happening, right?
> They were afraid even to respond to Turkey shooting down their planes.
Yes. And that's because Turkey is part of NATO and because at that time there was no benefit to Putin from any escalation. But today there just might be. It does not have to be rational, if that were the case then Ukraine would have never been invaded in the first place.
> Hypothetical land bridge to Kaliningrad? It is not completely isolated - there’s a railway connection still operating for example. Well, maybe, but the stakes are much higher here and Moscow and St.Petersburg will be on the line of fire.
That railway connection is one of those little proof points that it isn't Poland, the EU or NATO that seems to be hell-bent on escalating this. It's not Poland that flies waves of drones into Russia.
> Do you see any plausible strategy communicated and executed by the West on how this war can end on favorable terms for Ukraine? I don’t.
I do. Because with every passing day Russia is getting weaker to the point that even the most die-hard Putin supporters are going to have to question whether or not they are better off with or without him. True, that may not happen tomorrow. But dictators like Putin don't go quietly, they go out with a bang. The question is more one of how large of a bang it will be, and how many more people he wants to take with him into his grave. But his legacy will forever be the little man that overstepped his boundaries, not the person that brought Russia back to greatness.
> Russia is making steady gains in territory over quite long period of time now and is on track to achieve it’s current military goals that were outlined in their peace proposal (full control of Donbas and land bridge securing logistics for Crimea).
Yes, sure, 'steady gains' at absolutely massive expense of territory that will never be recognized and which eventually will be given back. That's where this will end. There is no way the developed world will recognize the gains during this war as legitimate.
> It’s hard to understand what are you talking about.
Maybe that is because you don't want to understand?
How hard is it to understand that the days of gaining ground by conquest in Europe are - as far as the rest of Europe is concerned - over. And that any attempt to revive that sentiment is going to be met with resistance? Merkel got it wrong, we know that much now. So that changes the equation considerably.
> You literally told that in previous comment, dismissing the understanding of differences as unimportant.
Yes, I'm trying to get you to understand that the Russian point-of-view in this whole discussion is utterly irrelevant, we're talking about the victims, not about the aggressors and I honestly don't give a fuck about what justification Russia feels it needs to do whatever it is that it is doing: it is wrong. And you are perfectly positioned to see that it is wrong.
> What makes you think that I’m less informed and understand it less than you? Just the fact that I disagree?
The fact that in spite of living in the West you seem to insist on carrying water for Putin and company. That makes you a liability rather than an asset. If that's not your position now would be an excellent time to correct the record. There is no way that you can legitimize the Russian aggression against Ukraine, it doesn't matter if Russia wins territory or not, it doesn't matter whether Russia ends up victorious or not. What matters is that they are the aggressors and that they are wrong in doing so. What matters is that they indiscriminately bomb civilians. What matters is that even Russians living abroad who could know better are still somehow closing their eyes to the truth: Russia was wrong to start this war, Russia is wrong to continue this war and Russia is making a massive miscalculation about the degree of resolve in other countries about this.
This reminds me of American voting on Gaza resolutions in UN. Apparently I have not condemned Putin enough and must be helping him, just because I say that further military escalation leads nowhere. What a nonsense. But if you wish so, I do fully agree that Russia was wrong to start this war and Russia is wrong to continue this war. As for resolve, time will tell. I don’t see a lot of resolve now in practice.
> There is no way that you can legitimize the Russian aggression against Ukraine
I did not legitimize the Russian aggression. Understanding the logic and legitimizing are not synonymous. Whether the reasons were legal or not, it doesn’t change the fact that they serve as a basis for starting negotiating position.
> I'm trying to get you to understand that the Russian point-of-view in this whole discussion is utterly irrelevant
If it’s irrelevant to you, this is fine. It’s absolutely relevant to EU foreign policy and the negotiations and as such worth talking about, because it may actually save lives.
I understand the direction of this conversation, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to continue. We are looking at it from very different angles and while agreeing in principle that the war is bad, have very different perspectives on the future of it. Time will tell who is right.
> just because I say that further military escalation leads nowhere.
Yes, but only the russian side is escalating. And seems to want to escalate much further still.
> But if you wish so, I do fully agree that Russia was wrong to start this war and Russia is wrong to continue this war.
Good. Thank you for clearing that up.
> As for resolve, time will tell. I don’t see a lot of resolve now in practice.
There are a lot of Ukrainians dying every day and it is certainly not their fault that this is so. Only russia can stop this war, the alternatives that Ukraine has are to capitulate, be roped into russia's armed forces and to see their people further murdered and used, just like what russia is doing to the other parties that they've roped into this fight.
So if you want the EU and Ukraine to stop this you are barking up the wrong tree, they do not have agency other than to give up and that isn't going to happen.
> I did not legitimize the Russian aggression. Understanding the logic and legitimizing are not synonymous. Whether the reasons were legal or not, it doesn’t change the fact that they serve as a basis for starting negotiating position.
No, they do not. A negotiation position is only believable if the parties in the negotiations have previously shown that they can be trusted. Russia has proven beyond a shadow of doubt that they can not be trusted and that if there is any kind of peace agreement it will just be used to re-arm and try again from a stronger position.
> If it’s irrelevant to you, this is fine. It’s absolutely relevant to EU foreign policy and the negotiations and as such worth talking about, because it may actually save lives.
It won't save lives in the longer term. The only thing that will save lives in the longer term is the ultimate defeat of russia a-la Germany and to take away their nuclear toys. Then they can figure out at what point they want to re-join the developed world, it is clear that as long as they can hide behind their nukes that they will keep trying to expand their territory at the expense of their neighbors.
> I understand the direction of this conversation, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to continue. We are looking at it from very different angles and while agreeing in principle that the war is bad, have very different perspectives on the future of it. Time will tell who is right.
The idea that there is a 'right' here in itself is one that I disagree with, and if you are truthful in that you believe that this war should have never started then you already know the answer to what really is right.
But that's not a future that I think is viable with the current russian leadership, they've decided that their own wealth is more important than the lives of their citizenry. It will take a sea change for that to no longer be the case and I don't have much hope that the tide will turn. But maybe it will.
> Simple question: in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and there was peaceful “annexation” of GDR into FRG, in which West Germany effectively took over, with its constitution taking into effect in new federal states, the GDR assets being taken over by western economic structures etc. Was it imperial by its nature?
> From Russian perspective it’s kind of the same (except the war part of course). Same language spoken, shared history etc. [...]
This is a truly bizarre piece of mental gymnastics. You list superficial similarities and casually gloss over the only thing that is substantial as if it were some inconsequential detail. By your "logic", rape is indistinguishable from making love. The same organs involved, the same movements (except the consent part, of course).
What's interesting to me is that this is an educated russian living in Berlin. So full access to all of the news, CTO of a company, so somewhat influential, not directly influenced by things happening inside russia and yet, all of the idiocy that you see on display with russians that are interviewed inside of russia, including copium, irrational reasoning and russian talking points interspersed with confused personal takes.
It is fascinating in a pathological way, but it also makes me wonder to what degree there is a rational pathway out of this. If this is the best then the people inside the russian propaganda machine don't stand a chance. Fortunately I know some russians outside of russia that have their eyes wide open but they too are scared of the long arm of putin.
> Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia?
Your prior is that Denmark wants a shooting war with Russia? Or do you have a weirder antecedent in mind for "actors"?[1]
Basically this idea needs a ton of elaboration and construction. As written it's a little tin-foily.
[1] I mean, let's make the obvious point and take Russia off that list of actors: they literally can't even win a shooting war against Ukraine. Maybe you can make a brinksmanship/extortion argument, but not a "actors want a war" one from their perspective.
I'm happy to follow up on anything I say but I ask you to consider if framing my response as weird before you've heard it or if using terms like "tin foily" are in keeping with site guidelines about arguing in good faith.
> Your prior is that Denmark wants a shooting war with Russia?
No, I didn't say this.
> let's make the obvious point and take Russia off that list of actors: they literally can't even win a shooting war against Ukraine.
You're assuming that the intended result of this apparent campaign is to actually start a war between the EU and Russia. But it could just as much be to create enough fear of one amongst EU voters that there is increased pressure towards bolstering military qualities within the EU, which in turn creates complications and financial burdens that could result in support for Ukraine being--even if unintentionally--weakened.
> Maybe you can make a brinksmanship/extortion argument, but not a "actors want a war" one from their perspective.
Yes, I could, if you could let me do so without calling me weird before I open my mouth.
> For as long as I can remember there have been things like fighter jets at the borders and we scramble ours to intercept
Russian air assets never crossed NATO airspace until this September, and the last time the Zapad exercises were held, Ukraine was invaded within months.
As such, most European nations are on extreme edge right now for a possible escalation.
> Russian air assets never crossed NATO airspace until this September.
Yes, they had. ACLED reports[0] that it occurred 50 times since 2022, and 4 of them had already been in Poland. It just never became a huge news piece until September, that's exactly what I mean.
Yes, we do actually know this. And anybody that pretends that we do not is either very naive, does not understand any of the technology or has not made even a cursory effort to find out.
Proof points:
- the drones that made it into Poland did not have warheads
- they flew over Belarus before entering Polish airspace
- they were under continuous control from the moment of launch
- they were prepped with longer range tanks than they would have had if they had been aimed at Ukraine
- quite a few of them were equipped with ways of sending back telemetry
So no, these were not strays. The best explanation is that they were an intel gathering mission with respect to the kind of response generated and the speed with which they were detected. Other possible uses for russia are to misdirect attention from wherever they might want to attack for real (say, the Baltics) and a way to reduce the flow of defensive measures to Ukraine by instilling fear in the population further West.
We know this very well, because of the range the drone are able to fly and the wreckage. Its amazing these days with the wealth of information that people do not do a few seconds of research.
1. Imagine: Your are Russia, are you going to launch drones with the fuel to fly not only into Ukraine, but also all across the map of Poland? Or do you dedicate that space to bigger warheads. Or lighter drones to increase their speed. That alone answers your question.
2. The drones found crashed, has modifications like bladdertank in the warhead section to increase their fuel. You do not accidentally get a drone all the way to Gdansk without increasing its fuel load. See point 1 again ...
3. Having a drone gone stray is not uncommon, but there is a difference between 1 going stray and 20 going stay. Your argument about jamming is flawed by the simply fact that we have the path the drones took, and unless Ukraine magically got the exact same drone misdirecting tech, active on multiple paths, again, check the map. See the issue there?
4. If the drones got jammed / flight spoofed, why did they not fly in a erratic course. You expect a drone that has its course altered to to suddenly start flying in different path.
5. The drone paths again, if the drone left the jamming or misdirection area, it will try to get back to to its intended area. They did not do so.
6. If this tech worked so great, why did we not have more mass drones flying in the wrong direction the following days? Drone attacks happen every day in Ukraine, they are not one off events. If the Ukrainians got this tech to work so good, to send 20 drones into Poland, why no repeat? You do not fix a flaw that the enemy found in just one day. Did Russia ground its drones the next day, the next week until they fix the issue? Added more antenna's and more hardware to make it harder to jam/redirect? No, they continue they typical pattern.
7. ... insert conspiracy that it was all planned and they do not use that tech again to not over use it (while giving the Russians time to adjust their hardware???). Sigh ...
People posting this nonsense that NATO is looking for a war or to ramp up incidents. Here is a simple answer: Who attack first? Was it NATO? Was not Ukraine? No ... Russia invaded a country for the SECOND TIME, triggering this mess.
You claim financial motives to trump up rhetoric ... our arms industries can already not keep up with the orders. We have backlogs that will take 10+ years to fill already, even with the expanding industry.
Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy but what else is new these days. Hate to tell ya, but the internet / social media is a battlefield these days, just as much as troops on the ground. Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic, its just a modern adaptation of old tactics. The new "remember we have nukes, we can get you", or the old USSR "see our planes flying into your identification zones"...
Do you have source for any of these claims? You're being quite snarky and rude with me but you back up nothing of what you say, despite your claim that the research is so trivial. I actually did provide sources for what I said so it would seem kind to reciprocate.
> Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic
Where have I even claimed anything like this? Can you appreciate how it comes across to set up a strawman and begin with "please use your mind a bit?" It's incredibly condescending and makes it difficult to take anything you've said seriously. I even made explicit reference to the repeated border tests on both sides over the past 30 years, and I linked to an independent body that showed how often it happens with drones. Did you just not read anything I wrote?
> Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy ...
Are you really saying that neither Russia nor other state actors perform online misinformation campaigns? It only takes a second of research to see otherwise.
Russia is already at (asymmetric) war with the West. I think you mean traditional military engagement, which is a greater possibility with all of these recent NATO country probings.
Accelerationists + rando crazy people, war hawks, and defense contractors sure want it.
Without finding real perpetrators and verifiable evidence, it still lives in the domain of speculation and politicians can and will use fictional narratives to do whatever they want.
Open war should never be started "preemptively", however NATO needs to and is preparing diligently for possible need for defense. Eastern Europe won't be safe until Putin is gone and replaced by a moderate who isn't a nationalist expansionist.
I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.
Russia has gotten more offensive and attacking more frequently in the hybrid war, including a murder plots against Rheinmetall CEO [1], putting explosives in packages [2], etc.
It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims (1) testing Trumps commitment to NATO; (2) their invasion of Ukraine is not going well. The front barely moves annd Ukraine is starting to mass produce their own long-range cruise missiles and they are hitting oil refineries in Russia. Most likely he wants to instill fear in Europeans to support the narrative that Europe should keep weapons/money for their own defense, hoping that Ukraine will lose support.
> I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.
No, that's true. But they could be worried about their lack of strength without the US and recognise that there's no domestic appetite to move public funds towards strengthening the militaries, so publicising the "potentially imminent dangers" posed by Russia could be a way to do that.
> It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims
Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
If not, it's not manufacturing consent. It's just sparkling self-defense.
Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world. See {polonium poisoning Litvinenko, defenestration (multiple), Syrian actions, Ukraine invasion, etc}
Military resources are expensive and inefficient, so it takes some degree of political capital to develop and maintain them. I'd so much rather see that capital (human and otherwise) go into research and art and human flourishing, but that's not the world we live in.
) Driving refugees into liberal western democracies is a deliberate outcome of this strategy.
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
> If not, it's not manufacturing consent.
Is it not? Maybe we have a different understanding of what manufacturing consent means. For me the consent could be manufactured long before the question is raised. I'm not sure why it needs to be called for immediately, why do you believe so?
> Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world.
Yes it has, consistently, but I feel a significant seachange in the landscape of various media channels, both mainstream media and social media, as well as in the rhetoric of politicians. And yes, they have been talking about increased cooperation, taking heavier action against stray drones etc.
And it all seems to have happened in the past 2 months, like a sudden spike.
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
I hope not. That's never worked. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Wagner Group's comic-opera invasion all failed.
The Economist seems to view this as the end of a happy era for Europe, an era when the EU could focus on making the EU work well and provide a good life for its people, without worrying too much about external problems.
They're not wrong.
Putin's stated goal is to re-establish a Russian empire, out to the boundaries of the 19th century Russian Empire.[1] He's been saying things like this for years now: "Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them, he did not take anything from them, he returned [them (to Russia)]. Apparently, it also fell to us to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face."
I was careful not to point any fingers as I'm not completely without doubt that the voices I see calling for more strength and unity in Europe aren't being paid for by Russia.
What a dumb comment. It is fairly obvious that russia conducts all kinds of clandestine activity all over Europe, if anything the EU has shown - possibly too much - a lot of restraint in their responses to all this.
You’re not being trolled. I’m asking you a genuine question, but because you feel strongly on the subject and assume the we all see things the same way, you feel that there’s malice involved when someone appears on the radar and says hey I don’t see it that way.
Religious people have the exact same reaction when you question god, they just assume you are on some sort of attack when you are genuinely curious.
I am seeing a surge of downvotes and comments around this. I think this is the hallmarks of a spamouflage attempt. I've heard rumblings that it's been somewhat easy to buy/sell HN accounts for product launches, but never tried it.
Barely 2 weeks, Russian drones violated both Polish and Romanian airspace amidst the Zapad military exercises (which themselves were the precursor to the Russian invasion of Ukraine).
There has also been a surge in hybrid attacks linked to Russian intelligence within Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began [0][1].
Your response was very clear that asking was not okay.
Look. We have seen a whole number of wars started based on dishonesty and disinformation, every one who asked questions was branded a traitor, a sceptic etc… until the truth came out.
But what we are discussing is serious, lives would be lost on a tragic scale.
I genuinely think space should be given to those who question the premise of war, especially one that is already begun on information.
For five days from Monday till Friday, while they host some VIP international guests.
They could also have added this to the headline to make it more informative.
The news site yes. Otherwise HN rules are you have to add the exact article title to your submission, only exception is if it is too long.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think a case can be made for it being slightly misleading. Also there is not mention of title length that I can see.
Length is enforced when submitting; titles that are too long generate a message about how many characters they are too long by and the [Submit] button is invalidated until shortened.
There is a strong chance that there are no actual "drones" involved and these sightings are just due to random people mistaking airplanes as drones/UFOs: https://x.com/MickWest/status/1971656713230270794
When people have analyzed the flight logs, the sightings match with known planes: https://x.com/ThomasH_Synth/status/1972236703864586463
https://x.com/MickWest is a good source to follow since he and others are willing to actually track down the data related to UFOs.
It's not just Denmark, drones have been sighted at multiple Norwegian airports as well, including confirmed sightings by both police and air force at the main air base in Ørland. (Source in Norwegian, https://www.nrk.no/trondelag/etterforsker-mulig-droneaktivit...)
In my opinion you really have to be skeptical. Its always possible drone reports are real, but also citings tend to cluster, and there is rarely anything outside of eyewitness reports. Humans are very bad at judging the size and distance of objects in the air, and a flying drone is much harder to spot than people actually imagine. But there is incentives to the state overacting to drone citings, if you're interested in keeping cameras out of public spaces.
Some actual drones have been involved as they showed up enough to shut down an airport.
I imagine there are lots of false positives too, but they're not all false
Yet we keep finding actual Russian drones/parts of their drones in Estonia.
There's a "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you" angle here. That Russia has been escalating drone activity against Danish allies is not in question. Some level of heightened care (like this 5-day ban) seems not unreasonable even if the reports can't be corroborated.
Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia? For as long as I can remember there have been things like fighter jets at the borders and we scramble ours to intercept etc, and before Russian media was blocked here they used to report the we were regularly doing the same. It was never really headline news, even after the war in Ukraine really got going
But now that the US has become an unreliable partner and the EU is talking about the need for increased cooperation suddenly they exact same stories become big news and ministers use it as examples of our complacency, when two years ago they would have said it's nothing to worry about.
And indeed now I see it shared all over social media with more and more "people" calling for harder responses, a single EU military, even outright declarations of war against Russia.
As someone who has been arguing for a war with Russia, I don't think there's been many attempts to manufacture consent for it.
In fact, I've noticed a lot of opposition to my view that I think is state organized, but probably by Russia. I've seen zero people like me online. I've seen zero repeated pro-war, zero capability-emphasizing arguments. Complete silence except for me.
By "war with Russia", do you mean sending troops to fight in Ukraine? Or Napoleon style march to Moscow? Because those are very different things.
No, I don't believe that it's tactically sensible to send troops where Russian troops are already entrenched or ready for war.
I believe that war should be conducted to exploit the enemy, not go at him in some idiot maneuver.
Our actions in Ukraine should be limited to stand-off weapons and glide bombs, mirror the Russian manner of aerial attack. We should also attack gas pipelines, ammonia plants, electrical infrastructure, etc. in Russia and generally shut the place down. We should of course also seize all Russian-flagged ships.
Exploits its dependence on transport and cheap energy, exploit Russia's size by seizing weak or undefended regions to force troop movements, attacking the troops with stand-off weapons while their being transported to the front etc.
Basically, we're playing tennis, and they're playing with both corridors in addition to the singles court. We should of course let them run.
I am absolutely opposed to sending ground troops against Russian positions or any region with sufficient defence, or capacity to resist. This risks the lives of soldiers needlessly and is not what war is about.
Do you also advocate the evacuation of the cities of whichever countries engage in the attacks you describe to reduce deaths in case Moscow responds by nuking those cities?
As different as the Russian mindset is, I highly doubt they would be MAD enough (pun intended) to engage in nuclear warfare.
When NATO/EU's hostility becomes overt enough, they will though.
I don't see nuclear attacks from Russia as probable.
They know well that any attacks by them will be matched by attacks by us, so any nuclear exchange is just miscalculation on their part. It will end quickly.
It's important to understand that threats are irrelevant. If somebody says 'Eat this horrible snail, or I'll you shoot you' you just say 'No, you can shoot me anyway'. Same thing here. If they nuke us, so what? They can do that today too.
It's not in our power to decide whether they nuke us, and therefore it can't be a reason to limit any action against them.
Upon this there is of course also our own capability to nuke them, and due to Russian attitudes and their view of their place in the world any nuclear exchange with them will be short. They can choose to erase us if they are willing to erase themselves. That's their power, but the Russians won't ever be willing to erase themselves. They believe that they are on par with the US and a cultural beacon that is critical to the balance of the world, something without which there's nothing that matters. They will never choose to erase themselves.
Because of this-- mutually assured destruction and the irrelevance of threats, nuclear weapons only matters when one power has them and the other does not. It doesn't make sense for the Russians to erase themselves even if I stand at outside Moscow with an army, even if I have taken Moscow. There's never a slice when it makes sense. Thus the balance between nuclear power is determined entirely by the balance of conventional forces.
Deploying Western troops to Ukraine has a clear purpose and limit: evict Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. Using nuclear weapons does not make much sense in that scenario. There's nothing to gain and a lot to lose. Yes, it puts soldiers directly in harms way of conventional weapons, which is why no one is doing it, but it restricts it to still being a regional conflict.
The unrestricted warfare you're proposing escalates the situation dramatically and for Russia, nuclear warfare starts to look disturbingly approachable. The conversation wouldn't be about full exchange but a warning shot. A tit for tat escalation that makes Europe back off while the US is paralyzed with dysfunction. Any possible risk of a nuclear event is too much.
My comment doesn't propose use of nuclear weapons.
I don't see how what I propose is unrestricted. It is simply how one conducts war.
Entering Ukraine with troops puts those troops lives at risk for no reason. It is not legitimate to ask somebody to stand under artillery bombardment while the factories producing the shells are permitted to exist, or to attack well-defended positions when that is not the most efficient manner of attack.
We have no right to conduct a war so badly. Our duty to our soldiers and to our population is to conduct the war in the free and appropriate way that is the normal conduct of war.
We have a duty to undertake no operation of any kind that is not the most efficient and useful operation. This means not going against any prepared position, while betters targets exist, without considering any escalation concerns. This means focus on radical targets-- the roots of the enemy's fighting capability.
This is our duty to our soldiers in planning and conducting a war and this not something we can deviate from.
It sort of sounds like you believe that Washington (or any other country with enough nukes) could use nukes to kill every single Russian and that Moscow could use nukes to kill every single American. This belief gets repeated a lot on the internet: a full "exchange" of nukes is game over.
In reality, even if Moscow were cheating on its treaty obligations and had (in ready-to-use form) every nuke that the Soviet Union possessed at the peak of its arsenal, plus all the intercontinental missiles and bombers the Soviets had at the peak of their arsenal, Moscow could kill only about half of the US population. Since the Russian population is more concentrated in cities than the US population, Washington could kill about 55% of Russians with the arsenal it possessed at the height of the Cold War.
There is a bit of a wild card in these estimates: if the effect called nuclear winter turns out to be as bad as some say it will be, a lot more would die (mostly outside the countries that got nuked). Nuclear winter will probably turn out to be a nothing burger, but we cannot know that for sure, so there is some chance it would cause the deaths of most of the people in the world, but if Moscow's situation becomes desperate enough and there is a clearly identified enemy who is causing the desperation, it start to become rational for Moscow to bet that the nuclear winter won't be extremely bad (which it probably won't be).
Moscow might calculate that Russian are better at enduring hardships than the West is, so Russia will be able to recover from the nuclear exchange before the West does, so that in a model in which the only thing that matters is Russia's strength relative to the West, a nuclear exchange can make sense -- not now, but if the situation becomes more desperate for Moscow because of the attacks you describe.
I don't see how there's a Russian central authority upon the destruction of the great cities. It's state collapse. It's never going to get up. The cultural and intellectual elite's gone and there's nothing.
Whether the elite is gone depends on whether the elite sought shelter from a nuclear attack, like it did during the start of the invasion of Ukraine. (The Russian regime has facilities built into granite in the Southern Ural mountains that can withstand direct attack from nukes.) Also, if an attacker does manage to kill everyone in the ruling coalition during a time of existential war, a new ruling coalition forms that is just as committed to the war as the old coalition.
A government of a society like Russia (or the US for that matter or Britain) doesn't collapse when it is hit very hard. Everyone rallies around the government, or more precisely, most people rally around and the rest either remain silent or get imprisoned or killed.
Hitler famously believed that the Soviet Union would collapse if invaded: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down," he said. It didn't collapse, nor did China when Japan invaded and killed millions of Chinese and occupied all its coastal cities. Neither of China's two governments collapsed even though before the Japanese invasion the two governments were engaged in a civil war that was in itself the third most deadly war of the 20th Century.
The most powerful military in the world could not force regime change on Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s or on Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s. This is because when invaded, most countries will become very unified around the goal of expelling the invader -- and a big nuclear attack will elicit the same "nationalistic" feelings as an invasion.
The political leadership did do so, but I'm not talking about the political leadership, I'm talking about the class the produces MSU and SPbU professors, engineers, etc.
At best they'll be going into the subway. I think losses would be >75% though.
There’s certainly some amount of propaganda effort being put in it on EU level into elevating the threat.
1. There are actors who would benefit from arms race. The money, the military careers etc. The whole NATO nearly became irrelevant before Russia started invading. Now all those generals have jobs again and Rheinmetall shares are going up.
2. There are actors for whom threat from the East is existential factor (it’s in the core of the political platform of nationalists in Baltic states - remove it and they are suddenly less competitive compared to neutral or pro-Russian parties). Current chief of EU diplomacy Kallas belongs to this group.
However I think Russia wants to make a point too. It’s hardly planning any war with NATO (I hope their intelligence isn’t as bad as in Ukraine), but they do need to convince European voters that war is possible if peace in Ukraine won’t come anytime soon (on their terms). And European voters are certainly not in the mood for big war, so the question really is, who is more convincing: von der Leyen & Co with their idea to support Ukraine until it wins, or Russia with it’s idea that further escalation may harm EU citizens directly.
I'll take the bait and answer. There are indeed actors for whom the threat from the East is AN existential factor. That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like and they don't want to repeat it.
Whether there's a mood for a big war, I am not sure. But there are states that are ready for it. And yes, it is within EU interests to let the fighting happen in Ukraine rather than EU.
Also, it's a nice collection of the subtler Russian points you have here, B+ for effort.
>That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like
Just as a reminder: Latvian Riflemen helped to create it by supporting Lenin in the crucial phase of revolution and suppressing anti-Bolshevik rebellion in Moscow. Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites. So this “oh, it was so terrible in Soviet Union” projection on Russia is a very specific nationalist narrative ignoring shared history of both nations, which included shared suffering from the same regimes and shared participation in oppression.
> Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites.
Name one Lithuanian or Estonian member of the Politburo in the half-century spanning 1940 to 1990. I'll save you time: there were none.
Your knee-jerk reaction of trying to shift blame onto historical oddities like the Latvian Riflemen reminds me of neo-nazis pointing out that the Wehrmacht had some 150 000 Jews in its ranks, "proving" that Germans weren't all that antisemitic and that the Holocaust has been exaggerated. Same impulse.
> Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia?
Actors like … Russia?
Yes, I could very well believe that they're funding online campaigns to stir up feelings of unease and distrust in our governments. It helps them even if we don't get sucked into an outright conflict.
I remember they’ve been observed (alongside China) flooding US social media with bots that spew inflammatory and divisive comments to help further divide the country around key events like the Charlie Kirk assassination or deportation or Gaza or whatever. I’m not sure how successful they are but I get the feeling it’s working.
[flagged]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45407199
You missed one
Its been a well known secret that Russia has been using incursions into Swedish airspace and Swedish land as a part of troop training for decades. The only major change in recent time is the rate of the incidents, and the use of interference that is more noticeable to civilian infrastructure. Boat captains from multiple industries are complaining that they have to go back to use physical maps rather the GPS when plotting courses through the Baltics, as the gps indicator just spins in circle and produce visual noise. It is a new situation, through built on top of past behavior. The general theory is that this represent a change towards a more drone-heavy strategy with different attack and defense technologies being used as part of training and testing.
I do not see it as a direct way to manufacture consent for a war, but the impact on civilian infrastructure is starting to be annoying enough that the military of multiple nations around the Baltics are looking to do something, and the effect of that something may create political waves. Same things with the attacks on undersea cables and the suggested counter measures, which also include military aspects to it.
> and before Russian media was blocked here
Where? Not blocked in the US. Russia Today is accessible.[1] Old-school Pravda is reachable.[2] The video stream from Russia Today is working.[3]
[1] https://www.rt.com/
[2] https://www.pravda.ru/
[3] https://www.rt.com/on-air/
Here in the EU, specifically The Netherlands. There was an EU Council regulation about it [0] and many Dutch ISPs complied [1].
0: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/350/oj/eng
1: https://merlin.obs.coe.int/article/9476
Oh. Ouch.
Russia (and the USSR) before routinely flew military aircraft right to the edges of international airspace but seldom entered the national airspace of NATO member space. So these repeated deliberate incursions appear to be something new, and perhaps an attempt to provoke a reaction by the Russian side.
Russia seems to be working very hard to do just that. Their own actions seem to be the best argument for focusing on Russia as a threat. That's not manufacturing, that's their own efforts / choices.
Absolutely guaranteed Russia is not doing that, no interest in an even wider war there.
Not doing what?
Threatening neighboring countries?
I think there are some who want war. But for Europe and America it is much better for Russia to be a friend again (like part of the G8). The alternative is that they become a servant of China, and this will end with them making a deal to give China land in the northeast of Russia. All of this is a huge strategic problem for NATO countries, and democracies in general, especially with India out of such a coalition due to nonsensical tariffs over Russian oil (when Europe buys Russian gas) or Nobel peace prizes (Trump falsely claiming he helped resolve conflicts between India and Pakistan) or whatever.
Now are European leaders smart enough to play geopolitics properly? That I doubt. To be honest, I doubt if the democratic processes will result in leaders that are competent enough and mature enough to deal with all this. More likely for countries to keep electing unhinged populists from either side.
Geopolitics depends on geography. If you are a smaller country bordering Russia, major powers like China, India, and the US are far away and ultimately not that relevant. Russia, on the other hand, is an unavoidable fact of life. It would be much better to be in friendly terms with them. At least in Finland, the economy is good basically whenever trade with Russia is good. But that's not always possible.
Right now, Russia is a country waging a war of conquest. Regardless of what they say, they are making it unambiguously clear that they do not recognize the sovereignty of their neighbors. It's not possible to be in friendly terms with such a neighbor, until there is a regime change. Or until enough time has passed that the supporters of the regime waging the war have become irrelevant.
Then there are bigger entities like NATO and the EU. From their perspective, geopolitics means having to choose between being in friendly terms with some of their eastern member states and Russia. They cannot choose both.
Russia won't be 'a friend again' until they stop thinking of empires.
We tried the appeasement through trade route already and look at what it lead to.
Well I think the benefit of containing the CCP empire is big enough to require NATO to still find a way forward with Russia. That’ll require a compromise around Ukraine though.
China can be managed with a sustained policy of containment, just like we dealt with the old USSR. Call it Cold War 2.0.
That would require Russia to move in a direction that it does not seem to be willing to move in. You can't have your officials with high regularity declare that you are going to annihilate all of the West just because you don't get to beat up your neighbor. You can't indiscriminately bomb, kill and abduct civilians and expect compromise. That's just not how this works.
The EU, and Germany by way of Merkel in particular for the longest time believed in 'wandel durch handel'. It turns out that this was a massive mistake and in spite of the still lingering abberations (Orban, Fico) that seem to think that sucking up to the Russian mob is going to pay off for them in the long term the sentiment has changed quite dramatically from where it was five years ago. I don't think there is any high level EU politician that still believes that we are going to go back to 'the good old days', and that is in spite of the current course of the USA, which is best described as 'confused'. Just check out what Russia did in the last 24 hours to give you an idea of how far from any kind of compromise we are. I think escalation is more likely than de-escalation and that's not something I consider lightly. But Putin has dug himself into a very deep hole and he does not seem to have a way out other than to keep on digging, he's ignored each and every off-ramp offered so far thinking that they were offered out of weakness rather than out of an aversion to war.
If Europe is ever forced to go - reluctantly - to war against Russia it will be because it saw no other way out. Until then we will keep arming Ukraine and we will continue to build up our defenses. Russia's main plan: to decapitate Ukrainian leadership and to use Ukrainians to continue its operation in the South has failed so utterly it is incredible, and yet, here we are. Whether Russia will still exist in one form or another in a decade is now something you can legitimately wonder about. All they had to do was absolutely nothing, and they'd be in a far stronger position today. Just live and let live. But that idea seems to be very hard for Russian leadership to entertain: that you can create together rather than that you can only expand at someone else's expense.
The “imperial” narrative is a made-up thing by contemporary Eastern European politicians. There are fringe political groups in Russia that think this way, but they have no significant influence and are mainly tolerated by Putin’s administration (it’s a destabilizing factor for internal politics). Russian empire ceased to exist in 1917 and whatever happened since then were not imperial projects.
No, that narrative is taken straight from the horses mouth, one V. Putin himself, who is about as mainstream as it gets. The Russian Empire from 1917 is not the one people have in mind when they refer to this.
Simple question: in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and there was peaceful “annexation” of GDR into FRG, in which West Germany effectively took over, with its constitution taking into effect in new federal states, the GDR assets being taken over by western economic structures etc. Was it imperial by its nature?
From Russian perspective it’s kind of the same (except the war part of course). Same language spoken, shared history etc. If you look at any empire, they colonize other nations. This specific conflict is framed as imperial by analysts based on the notion that the annexed territories are where a completely separate nation forged, which is being colonized. It’s not a historical but a propaganda narrative, that attempts to hide all the complexity of this topic.
It's not the same because one party is clearly not willing. That's all it takes: consent. If tomorrow morning Friesland decides by majority vote it wants to be independent of the rest of NL I'd be perfectly ok with that. Likewise I'm fine with countries deciding whether or not they want to join one alliance or another.
Languages and history have nothing to do with it, it is all about consent. If you plan to kill people in order to get them to join your idea what your country should look like you've already lost, then you're just another occupier.
I've lived in Poland under the USSR, it was pretty clear what the Russian position was on how they viewed the Poles - and anybody else that wasn't 'properly' Russian for that matter. This was an occupation, not a league of nations, and in a way Russia got more out of WWII than even the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact would have given them. I've lived in Romania, I visited Latvia many times, I visited Ukraine, many times. Everywhere the sentiment is roughly the same: that they would rather die than live under Russian occupation again, they already know what that is like. And no amount of shared history or language (or forced relocation, which in many of those cases is the source of that shared history) is going to offset that.
You're if I'm not mistaken someone with Russian roots living in Berlin. Coincidentally, I know more people that are in that position. Most of them still have family back in Russia so they are very circumspect in the positions that they take. But they have zero illusion about Russia having good intentions in any of the wars they have engaged in since the USSR fell apart and it is patently clear by the indiscriminate attacks on the Ukrainian population that Russia does not care for the people that they in the same breath claim to call their brothers and sisters.
>If tomorrow morning Friesland decides by majority vote it wants to be independent of the rest of NL I'd be perfectly ok with that.
That is a easy postition for the Netherlands to take because it has very little security against invasion even now before Friesland secedes, given its location in which there is little in the way of mountains, rivers or seas between it and countries more powerful than it. (More powerful if only because of their greater size: I'm not claiming that the Dutch are bad at fighting).
But it would be foolish for Australians to allow a large chunk of Australia to secede or for the Japanese to allow part of Japan to secede because the way it is now, both countries enjoy a very favorable security situation in which any invader would need to cross an ocean or at least a wide channel even to begin an invasion. If Japan split into two, then one of the two new countries might invite in the military of a larger power with the result that the other new country is in a vastly more precarious security situation than it was before the split into 2 countries.
The Mongols attempted a massive invasion of Japan, but the invasion was foiled by stormy weather while the Mongols were trying to cross the wide channel. If there were two polities in Japan at the time, the Mongols could have offer to protect one polity from the other one, and if their offer had been accepted, they could have moved their forces to Japan at their leisure, and would not have needed to risk an operation in which all their forces try to cross a sea as quickly as possible ready to fight as soon as they get to the other side.
Because of their separation from other countries by large bodies of water, Australian and Japan have been invaded or occupied only once in the last 2000 years (Australia when Europeans arrived and Japan after WWII) whereas during those 2000 years, the Netherlands has been invaded many times (with the occupation or annexation of the Netherlands by Spain having proved particularly painful).
Again: the Netherlands is not giving up much in the way of security advantages by allowing parts of itself to secede, but not all countries are in a similar situation.
You are just repeating the same idea without further analysis. As a German born in USSR I do know something about oppression too, however I also understand the difference between socialism, imperialism and Russian flavor of neoconservatism - 3 different ideologies that existed in Russia in last 300 years. They are very different in operation and expansion modes and those differences are very important for external observers, especially when there are few trillions of taxpayer money at stake. Russia stopped being an imperial project with colonies in 1917. Period. Soviet Union wasn’t Russian nationalist project at all, so mixing it up with contemporary history or seeing it as an extension of empire is just incompetent. Contemporary Russia of Putin’s period is claiming to extend both, but it’s just propaganda legitimizing the regime, when the motives, the goals, the government structures are very different.
It's a distinction without a difference. For the victims it hardly matters what idiocy motivated the occupiers, and those are the people we are concerned with, not with how Russians view themselves. Just like I don't give a fuck about how MAGA adherents want to redefine what the United States is. I do care about the people that they then collectively threaten to murder/invade.
Well, good for you. Your taxpayer money aren’t going to be spent in this conflict, thanks to Trump. What concerns me is that Eastern European nationalists are selling the big war narrative that will make Europe overspend on defense and American LNG when we have plenty of other problems. It doesn’t have to go this way, but that requires really good understanding of intentions and capabilities of either side, at least on the level of Cold War. At the moment there’s no such understanding neither among public nor among politicians. What’s worse, there’s no even attempts to understand - you are great example of such attitude.
Instead of spending taxpayer money it would be better to seize all assets held by Russian entities (including private citizens) in NATO and other allied countries. Just steal it all. Killing Russian soldiers is expensive so we might as well let the Russians themselves pay for it.
I actually do understand why Russia is attempting to seize Ukraine, and from a strategic geopolitical perspective it was sort of logical. But so what, that doesn't mean we should have any sympathy for them or let them gain any advantage. Better so utterly crush, humiliate, and impoverish them so that they cease to be a threat for a couple generations to come. This will also serve as a useful object lesson to anyone else who might want to try a similar stunt: FAFO.
> Instead of spending taxpayer money it would be better to seize all assets held by Russian entities (including private citizens) in NATO and other allied countries. Just steal it all.
So basically just like Israel in Gaza. What will be left from EU if it cannot stick to its own charter, which rejects collective responsibility?
That amount of money is barely enough for Ukraine anyway. European defense will cost much more.
I'm not an EU citizen and don't give a damn about the EU charter. The important thing is to win the war and wreck the "Russian Empire" at minimal cost, regardless of artificial legalisms.
> So basically just like Israel in Gaza.
Yes, it is possible to be both against what Israel does in Gaza and to be against what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
> What will be left from EU if it cannot stick to its own charter, which rejects collective responsibility?
This does not even parse. The EU has plenty of collective responsibility, is part of the EU mutual defense pact and is part of NATO. The only two countries that are nominally in the EU but that are not unified in their viewpoint here are substantially influenced by russia.
> That amount of money is barely enough for Ukraine anyway.
It seems to have an outside effect on the situation in russia, for as little as it is, but I agree with you it should be much more and we should do this sooner rather than later.
> European defense will cost much more.
So what? Why are you so focused on the money angle, rather than on the injustice and the indiscriminate murder of citizens in a country that meant russia - or should I say you - no harm?
Where is your voice in this? As a person safe in Berlin you could afford to raise your voice against Putin if you wanted to.
> This does not even parse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_responsibility
Israel executes collective punishment of all Palestinians for actions of Hamas. Putin executes collective punishment of all Ukrainians for actions of certain politicians. The commenter above suggested that the same principle should be applied to all Russian citizens.
> So what? Why are you so focused on the money angle, rather than on the injustice and the indiscriminate murder of citizens in a country that meant russia - or should I say you - no harm?
Why I should be focused on that? To release the steam? Oh, yes, that’s bad, poor people. What’s next? Their fates are determined not by the preparation of Europe to war, but by the willingness of politicians to discuss realistic peace terms. The sooner the war will end, the less people will die. This war was lost by Ukraine and NATO when counteroffensive failed (not least because NATO failed to provide sufficient help), so the only important thing to discuss is how to minimize the losses, because we are obviously not engaging directly. But nobody in Europe is prepared to start this conversation. The money is the only topic where real conversation happens.
> Where is your voice in this? As a person safe in Berlin…
What kind of voice are you expecting and why do you think I’m not using it?
> Israel executes collective punishment of all Palestinians for actions of Hamas. > Putin executes collective punishment of all Ukrainians for actions of certain politicians.
Yes, both are nuts.
> The commenter above suggested that the same principle should be applied to all Russian citizens.
There is a fair chance that if Russia decides to engage NATO that it will in fact end up that way. If that's not something you want then now would be a good time to act.
> Why I should be focused on that? To release the steam? Oh, yes, that’s bad, poor people.
Yes, indeed, poor people. Why gloss over that? It's the main article, not some kind of side dish.
> Their fates are determined not by the preparation of Europe to war, but by the willingness of politicians to discuss realistic peace terms.
Did you entirely miss the previous times that Russia agreed to terms and then violated them, over and over again? If you want people to be willing to discuss peace terms it would really help if you had a good track record of abiding by those terms. Russia does not currently have that track record.
> The sooner the war will end, the less people will die.
No shit. But unfortunately there is one party that seems to want to continue this war, no matter what the cost. The other side has one option: to capitulate, but for some weird reason they seem to think that that is not an option. Mostly because they already know how that part of the story goes just by looking at other places that did just that.
> This war was lost by Ukraine and NATO when counteroffensive failed (not least because NATO failed to provide sufficient help), so the only important thing to discuss is how to minimize the losses, because we are obviously not engaging directly.
You are not as well informed as you seem to think. As we speak 21.7% of russian oil refinery capacity is down, and it will remain down for another 3 to 6 months at a minimum. My guess is that when Ukraine is done going after russian oil infrastructure that number will be a lot higher and then they're going to set their sights on electrical infra. And they're getting scary good at this. Russia is succeeding in grabbing land and killing civilians, Ukraine is succeeding in seriously reducing Russia's capacity to continue to be a power of any kind at all. You must at least be aware of some of this.
> But nobody in Europe is prepared to start this conversation.
Nobody in Europe is in a position to negotiate with russia on this, the only parties that we believe can credibly do this are russia and Ukraine and one of these believes that they should continue the war because they have something to gain from it.
> The money is the only topic where real conversation happens.
Indeed. And you won't be able to sell me on Ukraine's land being worth as much as russia is currently prepared to pay for it. Or rather, to be more precise, than russia is willing to make other parties pay for it because it isn't exactly the crowd from St. Petersburg and Moscow at the front lines. And if it ever should come to that the war would be over very quickly.
> What kind of voice are you expecting and why do you think I’m not using it?
I'm expecting you to speak up against Putin, and to donate as much as you can afford to the defense of Ukraine. If your comments in this thread are a sample of how you really feel about all this then I'm guessing you're not doing either until you provide proof otherwise. You are all but suggesting the EU or Ukraine are at fault here when clearly it is russia that is the aggressor, and which continues to commit one warcrime after another with complete disregard for human rights and what is considered civilized in general.
>You are not as well informed as you seem to think. As we speak 21.7% of russian oil refinery capacity is down, and it will remain down for another 3 to 6 months at a minimum
The numbers are wrong. It’s in 10-15% range, not all damage requires months of work and it’s within overcapacity that Russia had before the war. There exist temporary local shortages after strikes and it’s creating inflationary pressure, but it’s not dramatic yet. Also, 30% of capacity is beyond Ukrainian reach.
I don’t see any point to comment on anything else. Personal attacks are against the rules of this forum.
The money is the least of the problem for me, I'm more than happy to spend and do whatever it takes to ensure that this kind of idiocy ends here, once and for all.
> Well, good for you. Your taxpayer money aren’t going to be spent in this conflict, thanks to Trump.
You're quite wrong about that.
> What concerns me is that Eastern European nationalists are selling the big war narrative that will make Europe overspend on defense and American LNG when we have plenty of other problems.
Europe can not possibly overspend on defense at the moment, the way the situation has shifted in the last five years has made that abundantly clear. And if you live in Berlin, then your security too depends on this. It definitely isn't the 'Eastern European Nationalists' that are the problem.
> It doesn’t have to go this way, but that requires really good understanding of intentions and capabilities of either side, at least on the level of Cold War.
You are, I assume, aware of the various acts of espionage and sabotage of Russia in the West? And if you are then I assume that you realize that these are not just games but that they feel suspiciously like a prelude similar to what happened prior to Russia engaging in Ukraine for a second time. I don't need to see much more evidence beyond what I've already seen to believe that there may well be an operation already planned, either an attack on one of the Baltic countries to see if Europe can be further divided, or, if Putin is really reckless, one on Poland. The fact that 'Eastern European Nationalists' are selling that narrative is because they are actively under threat, not because they are making up funny stories for comedic effect.
> At the moment there’s no such understanding neither among public nor among politicians.
Why do you believe that to be the case? All I see is very measured responses and attempts to leave a backdoor to normalcy open. I also see the other side interpreting this structurally as weakness. But frankly, that is a massive mistake. Europe doesn't like to go to war, but if it has to it will.
> What’s worse, there’s no even attempts to understand - you are great example of such attitude.
That's not even close to the truth. Given my history, places where I've lived and people that I know I think I have a fair picture of what is going on. Putin bit off far more than he could chew and has found out the hard way that as long as his nukes are off the table that he does not have a way to resolve this in his favor. Every day Ukraine is getting stronger and every day Russia is set back further and further. The best that could happen to Russia at this point in time is a leadership change and a path to an off-ramp. Anything else will only lead to more of the same with China as the laughing party in the background.
Your characterization of me as someone who does not even try to understand is unfair and not worthy of discourse here, if you, given all of your unfettered access to media are unable to see the truth of what is going on then that's on you, not on me, I know enough Russians who see things dramatically different from how you position them to know that it is possible to do better than that.
> I don't need to see much more evidence beyond what I've already seen to believe that there may well be an operation already planned
In case of Ukraine there was at least plenty of strategic and political reasons. Why Russia should attack any NATO country? They were afraid even to respond to Turkey shooting down their planes. Hypothetical land bridge to Kaliningrad? It is not completely isolated - there’s a railway connection still operating for example. Well, maybe, but the stakes are much higher here and Moscow and St.Petersburg will be on the line of fire.
> Why do you believe that to be the case? All I see is very measured responses and attempts to leave a backdoor to normalcy open.
Do you see any plausible strategy communicated and executed by the West on how this war can end on favorable terms for Ukraine? I don’t.
> Putin bit off far more than he could chew and has found out the hard way that as long as his nukes are off the table that he does not have a way to resolve this in his favor. Every day Ukraine is getting stronger and every day Russia is set back further and further.
Russia is making steady gains in territory over quite long period of time now and is on track to achieve it’s current military goals that were outlined in their peace proposal (full control of Donbas and land bridge securing logistics for Crimea). It’s hard to understand what are you talking about.
>Your characterization of me as someone who does not even try to understand is unfair
You literally told that in previous comment, dismissing the understanding of differences as unimportant.
> unable to see the truth of what is going on then that's on you, not on me
What makes you think that I’m less informed and understand it less than you? Just the fact that I disagree?
The strategy on how this war can end on favorable terms for Ukraine is the same as most other wars of attrition: kill more Russians steadily over a period of several more years. Their population is large but not infinite. With a sufficient arsenal of advanced weapons from allied countries this is potentially achievable. This is a horrible situation and I take no delight in it but now millions of Russians will have to die to resolve a problem caused by their leaders.
The other strategy is to cut off Russia's war funding through a combination of sanctions and (more importantly) Ukrainian long-range strikes on fossil fuel export infrastructure. This is more of a long shot but it could work.
In an attrition war where Ukraine has less than 30M people (25% population decline since start of war) and Russia has around 140M, who do you think can win? What advanced weapons and in which volume can West supply that can change the course of war given population constraints?
> In case of Ukraine there was at least plenty of strategic and political reasons.
And all of them illegal. But never mind that, right?
> Why Russia should attack any NATO country?
Well, that's a good question but I'm the wrong person to ask. Clearly, sending a wave of drones into Poland is inviting some kind of response and unless you believe this was just for shits and giggles you too should be worried. Because if and when Russia decides that NATO is an alliance they'd like to go up against your position will rapidly become very difficult.
Of course you are donating as much as you can to Ukraine to stop that from happening, right?
> They were afraid even to respond to Turkey shooting down their planes.
Yes. And that's because Turkey is part of NATO and because at that time there was no benefit to Putin from any escalation. But today there just might be. It does not have to be rational, if that were the case then Ukraine would have never been invaded in the first place.
> Hypothetical land bridge to Kaliningrad? It is not completely isolated - there’s a railway connection still operating for example. Well, maybe, but the stakes are much higher here and Moscow and St.Petersburg will be on the line of fire.
That railway connection is one of those little proof points that it isn't Poland, the EU or NATO that seems to be hell-bent on escalating this. It's not Poland that flies waves of drones into Russia.
> Do you see any plausible strategy communicated and executed by the West on how this war can end on favorable terms for Ukraine? I don’t.
I do. Because with every passing day Russia is getting weaker to the point that even the most die-hard Putin supporters are going to have to question whether or not they are better off with or without him. True, that may not happen tomorrow. But dictators like Putin don't go quietly, they go out with a bang. The question is more one of how large of a bang it will be, and how many more people he wants to take with him into his grave. But his legacy will forever be the little man that overstepped his boundaries, not the person that brought Russia back to greatness.
> Russia is making steady gains in territory over quite long period of time now and is on track to achieve it’s current military goals that were outlined in their peace proposal (full control of Donbas and land bridge securing logistics for Crimea).
Yes, sure, 'steady gains' at absolutely massive expense of territory that will never be recognized and which eventually will be given back. That's where this will end. There is no way the developed world will recognize the gains during this war as legitimate.
> It’s hard to understand what are you talking about.
Maybe that is because you don't want to understand?
How hard is it to understand that the days of gaining ground by conquest in Europe are - as far as the rest of Europe is concerned - over. And that any attempt to revive that sentiment is going to be met with resistance? Merkel got it wrong, we know that much now. So that changes the equation considerably.
> You literally told that in previous comment, dismissing the understanding of differences as unimportant.
Yes, I'm trying to get you to understand that the Russian point-of-view in this whole discussion is utterly irrelevant, we're talking about the victims, not about the aggressors and I honestly don't give a fuck about what justification Russia feels it needs to do whatever it is that it is doing: it is wrong. And you are perfectly positioned to see that it is wrong.
> What makes you think that I’m less informed and understand it less than you? Just the fact that I disagree?
The fact that in spite of living in the West you seem to insist on carrying water for Putin and company. That makes you a liability rather than an asset. If that's not your position now would be an excellent time to correct the record. There is no way that you can legitimize the Russian aggression against Ukraine, it doesn't matter if Russia wins territory or not, it doesn't matter whether Russia ends up victorious or not. What matters is that they are the aggressors and that they are wrong in doing so. What matters is that they indiscriminately bomb civilians. What matters is that even Russians living abroad who could know better are still somehow closing their eyes to the truth: Russia was wrong to start this war, Russia is wrong to continue this war and Russia is making a massive miscalculation about the degree of resolve in other countries about this.
This reminds me of American voting on Gaza resolutions in UN. Apparently I have not condemned Putin enough and must be helping him, just because I say that further military escalation leads nowhere. What a nonsense. But if you wish so, I do fully agree that Russia was wrong to start this war and Russia is wrong to continue this war. As for resolve, time will tell. I don’t see a lot of resolve now in practice.
> There is no way that you can legitimize the Russian aggression against Ukraine
I did not legitimize the Russian aggression. Understanding the logic and legitimizing are not synonymous. Whether the reasons were legal or not, it doesn’t change the fact that they serve as a basis for starting negotiating position.
> I'm trying to get you to understand that the Russian point-of-view in this whole discussion is utterly irrelevant
If it’s irrelevant to you, this is fine. It’s absolutely relevant to EU foreign policy and the negotiations and as such worth talking about, because it may actually save lives.
I understand the direction of this conversation, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to continue. We are looking at it from very different angles and while agreeing in principle that the war is bad, have very different perspectives on the future of it. Time will tell who is right.
> just because I say that further military escalation leads nowhere.
Yes, but only the russian side is escalating. And seems to want to escalate much further still.
> But if you wish so, I do fully agree that Russia was wrong to start this war and Russia is wrong to continue this war.
Good. Thank you for clearing that up.
> As for resolve, time will tell. I don’t see a lot of resolve now in practice.
There are a lot of Ukrainians dying every day and it is certainly not their fault that this is so. Only russia can stop this war, the alternatives that Ukraine has are to capitulate, be roped into russia's armed forces and to see their people further murdered and used, just like what russia is doing to the other parties that they've roped into this fight.
So if you want the EU and Ukraine to stop this you are barking up the wrong tree, they do not have agency other than to give up and that isn't going to happen.
> I did not legitimize the Russian aggression. Understanding the logic and legitimizing are not synonymous. Whether the reasons were legal or not, it doesn’t change the fact that they serve as a basis for starting negotiating position.
No, they do not. A negotiation position is only believable if the parties in the negotiations have previously shown that they can be trusted. Russia has proven beyond a shadow of doubt that they can not be trusted and that if there is any kind of peace agreement it will just be used to re-arm and try again from a stronger position.
> If it’s irrelevant to you, this is fine. It’s absolutely relevant to EU foreign policy and the negotiations and as such worth talking about, because it may actually save lives.
It won't save lives in the longer term. The only thing that will save lives in the longer term is the ultimate defeat of russia a-la Germany and to take away their nuclear toys. Then they can figure out at what point they want to re-join the developed world, it is clear that as long as they can hide behind their nukes that they will keep trying to expand their territory at the expense of their neighbors.
> I understand the direction of this conversation, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to continue. We are looking at it from very different angles and while agreeing in principle that the war is bad, have very different perspectives on the future of it. Time will tell who is right.
The idea that there is a 'right' here in itself is one that I disagree with, and if you are truthful in that you believe that this war should have never started then you already know the answer to what really is right.
But that's not a future that I think is viable with the current russian leadership, they've decided that their own wealth is more important than the lives of their citizenry. It will take a sea change for that to no longer be the case and I don't have much hope that the tide will turn. But maybe it will.
> Simple question: in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and there was peaceful “annexation” of GDR into FRG, in which West Germany effectively took over, with its constitution taking into effect in new federal states, the GDR assets being taken over by western economic structures etc. Was it imperial by its nature?
> From Russian perspective it’s kind of the same (except the war part of course). Same language spoken, shared history etc. [...]
This is a truly bizarre piece of mental gymnastics. You list superficial similarities and casually gloss over the only thing that is substantial as if it were some inconsequential detail. By your "logic", rape is indistinguishable from making love. The same organs involved, the same movements (except the consent part, of course).
What's interesting to me is that this is an educated russian living in Berlin. So full access to all of the news, CTO of a company, so somewhat influential, not directly influenced by things happening inside russia and yet, all of the idiocy that you see on display with russians that are interviewed inside of russia, including copium, irrational reasoning and russian talking points interspersed with confused personal takes.
It is fascinating in a pathological way, but it also makes me wonder to what degree there is a rational pathway out of this. If this is the best then the people inside the russian propaganda machine don't stand a chance. Fortunately I know some russians outside of russia that have their eyes wide open but they too are scared of the long arm of putin.
Putin is like Hitler. The only way we get to this reality is for Russia to lose on the battlefield now.
I don't like this reality either, but it is what it is.
> Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia?
Your prior is that Denmark wants a shooting war with Russia? Or do you have a weirder antecedent in mind for "actors"?[1]
Basically this idea needs a ton of elaboration and construction. As written it's a little tin-foily.
[1] I mean, let's make the obvious point and take Russia off that list of actors: they literally can't even win a shooting war against Ukraine. Maybe you can make a brinksmanship/extortion argument, but not a "actors want a war" one from their perspective.
I'm happy to follow up on anything I say but I ask you to consider if framing my response as weird before you've heard it or if using terms like "tin foily" are in keeping with site guidelines about arguing in good faith.
> Your prior is that Denmark wants a shooting war with Russia?
No, I didn't say this.
> let's make the obvious point and take Russia off that list of actors: they literally can't even win a shooting war against Ukraine.
You're assuming that the intended result of this apparent campaign is to actually start a war between the EU and Russia. But it could just as much be to create enough fear of one amongst EU voters that there is increased pressure towards bolstering military qualities within the EU, which in turn creates complications and financial burdens that could result in support for Ukraine being--even if unintentionally--weakened.
> Maybe you can make a brinksmanship/extortion argument, but not a "actors want a war" one from their perspective.
Yes, I could, if you could let me do so without calling me weird before I open my mouth.
> You're assuming that the intended result of this apparent campaign is to actually start a war between the EU and Russia.
Your original framing of your question was: "Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia?"
So, yes, that's exactly what I assumed you meant. Because it's what you said. (Absent, again, a bunch of exposition that wasn't delivered).
And you still haven't clarified what "actors" you're thinking about. I stand by the criticism of this as conspiracy logic.
> For as long as I can remember there have been things like fighter jets at the borders and we scramble ours to intercept
Russian air assets never crossed NATO airspace until this September, and the last time the Zapad exercises were held, Ukraine was invaded within months.
As such, most European nations are on extreme edge right now for a possible escalation.
> Russian air assets never crossed NATO airspace until this September.
Yes, they had. ACLED reports[0] that it occurred 50 times since 2022, and 4 of them had already been in Poland. It just never became a huge news piece until September, that's exactly what I mean.
0: https://acleddata.com/expert-comment/acled-data-show-least-5...
From the ACLE:
"mostly crashes of Russian and Ukrainian stray drones and missiles"
The recent incident in Poland and Romania was drones that were not strays or crashes.
Yes "mostly" crashes, meaning not all of them.
> The recent incident in Poland and Romania was drones that were not strays
We don't actually know this do we? The report states that the technology to push drones off their intended path has been ramped up significantly.
Yes, we do actually know this. And anybody that pretends that we do not is either very naive, does not understand any of the technology or has not made even a cursory effort to find out.
Proof points:
- the drones that made it into Poland did not have warheads
- they flew over Belarus before entering Polish airspace
- they were under continuous control from the moment of launch
- they were prepped with longer range tanks than they would have had if they had been aimed at Ukraine
- quite a few of them were equipped with ways of sending back telemetry
So no, these were not strays. The best explanation is that they were an intel gathering mission with respect to the kind of response generated and the speed with which they were detected. Other possible uses for russia are to misdirect attention from wherever they might want to attack for real (say, the Baltics) and a way to reduce the flow of defensive measures to Ukraine by instilling fear in the population further West.
We know this very well, because of the range the drone are able to fly and the wreckage. Its amazing these days with the wealth of information that people do not do a few seconds of research.
1. Imagine: Your are Russia, are you going to launch drones with the fuel to fly not only into Ukraine, but also all across the map of Poland? Or do you dedicate that space to bigger warheads. Or lighter drones to increase their speed. That alone answers your question.
2. The drones found crashed, has modifications like bladdertank in the warhead section to increase their fuel. You do not accidentally get a drone all the way to Gdansk without increasing its fuel load. See point 1 again ...
3. Having a drone gone stray is not uncommon, but there is a difference between 1 going stray and 20 going stay. Your argument about jamming is flawed by the simply fact that we have the path the drones took, and unless Ukraine magically got the exact same drone misdirecting tech, active on multiple paths, again, check the map. See the issue there?
4. If the drones got jammed / flight spoofed, why did they not fly in a erratic course. You expect a drone that has its course altered to to suddenly start flying in different path.
5. The drone paths again, if the drone left the jamming or misdirection area, it will try to get back to to its intended area. They did not do so.
6. If this tech worked so great, why did we not have more mass drones flying in the wrong direction the following days? Drone attacks happen every day in Ukraine, they are not one off events. If the Ukrainians got this tech to work so good, to send 20 drones into Poland, why no repeat? You do not fix a flaw that the enemy found in just one day. Did Russia ground its drones the next day, the next week until they fix the issue? Added more antenna's and more hardware to make it harder to jam/redirect? No, they continue they typical pattern.
7. ... insert conspiracy that it was all planned and they do not use that tech again to not over use it (while giving the Russians time to adjust their hardware???). Sigh ...
People posting this nonsense that NATO is looking for a war or to ramp up incidents. Here is a simple answer: Who attack first? Was it NATO? Was not Ukraine? No ... Russia invaded a country for the SECOND TIME, triggering this mess.
You claim financial motives to trump up rhetoric ... our arms industries can already not keep up with the orders. We have backlogs that will take 10+ years to fill already, even with the expanding industry.
Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy but what else is new these days. Hate to tell ya, but the internet / social media is a battlefield these days, just as much as troops on the ground. Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic, its just a modern adaptation of old tactics. The new "remember we have nukes, we can get you", or the old USSR "see our planes flying into your identification zones"...
Do you have source for any of these claims? You're being quite snarky and rude with me but you back up nothing of what you say, despite your claim that the research is so trivial. I actually did provide sources for what I said so it would seem kind to reciprocate.
> Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic
Where have I even claimed anything like this? Can you appreciate how it comes across to set up a strawman and begin with "please use your mind a bit?" It's incredibly condescending and makes it difficult to take anything you've said seriously. I even made explicit reference to the repeated border tests on both sides over the past 30 years, and I linked to an independent body that showed how often it happens with drones. Did you just not read anything I wrote?
> Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy ...
Are you really saying that neither Russia nor other state actors perform online misinformation campaigns? It only takes a second of research to see otherwise.
I am not the OP, but if I might, I would recommend Perun, who recently dedicated a video to this topic, which is IMO pretty well sourced:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG7sVKNP-yo
Russia is already at (asymmetric) war with the West. I think you mean traditional military engagement, which is a greater possibility with all of these recent NATO country probings.
Accelerationists + rando crazy people, war hawks, and defense contractors sure want it.
Without finding real perpetrators and verifiable evidence, it still lives in the domain of speculation and politicians can and will use fictional narratives to do whatever they want.
Open war should never be started "preemptively", however NATO needs to and is preparing diligently for possible need for defense. Eastern Europe won't be safe until Putin is gone and replaced by a moderate who isn't a nationalist expansionist.
Agreed. And people often forget Putin IS a moderate compared to most other options.
I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.
Russia has gotten more offensive and attacking more frequently in the hybrid war, including a murder plots against Rheinmetall CEO [1], putting explosives in packages [2], etc.
It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims (1) testing Trumps commitment to NATO; (2) their invasion of Ukraine is not going well. The front barely moves annd Ukraine is starting to mass produce their own long-range cruise missiles and they are hitting oil refineries in Russia. Most likely he wants to instill fear in Europeans to support the narrative that Europe should keep weapons/money for their own defense, hoping that Ukraine will lose support.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/threat-plot-murder-rhei...
[2] https://amp.dw.com/en/russia-linked-group-planned-parcel-bom...
> I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.
No, that's true. But they could be worried about their lack of strength without the US and recognise that there's no domestic appetite to move public funds towards strengthening the militaries, so publicising the "potentially imminent dangers" posed by Russia could be a way to do that.
> It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims
What is "it" here?
Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
If not, it's not manufacturing consent. It's just sparkling self-defense.
Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world. See {polonium poisoning Litvinenko, defenestration (multiple), Syrian actions, Ukraine invasion, etc}
Military resources are expensive and inefficient, so it takes some degree of political capital to develop and maintain them. I'd so much rather see that capital (human and otherwise) go into research and art and human flourishing, but that's not the world we live in.
) Driving refugees into liberal western democracies is a deliberate outcome of this strategy.
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
> If not, it's not manufacturing consent.
Is it not? Maybe we have a different understanding of what manufacturing consent means. For me the consent could be manufactured long before the question is raised. I'm not sure why it needs to be called for immediately, why do you believe so?
> Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world.
Yes it has, consistently, but I feel a significant seachange in the landscape of various media channels, both mainstream media and social media, as well as in the rhetoric of politicians. And yes, they have been talking about increased cooperation, taking heavier action against stray drones etc.
And it all seems to have happened in the past 2 months, like a sudden spike.
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
I hope not. That's never worked. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Wagner Group's comic-opera invasion all failed.
The Economist seems to view this as the end of a happy era for Europe, an era when the EU could focus on making the EU work well and provide a good life for its people, without worrying too much about external problems. They're not wrong.
Putin's stated goal is to re-establish a Russian empire, out to the boundaries of the 19th century Russian Empire.[1] He's been saying things like this for years now: "Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them, he did not take anything from them, he returned [them (to Russia)]. Apparently, it also fell to us to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire
russia seems to be doing an awfully good job of that on it's own.
I was careful not to point any fingers as I'm not completely without doubt that the voices I see calling for more strength and unity in Europe aren't being paid for by Russia.
Just for a few days, for a big EU meeting.
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What a dumb comment. It is fairly obvious that russia conducts all kinds of clandestine activity all over Europe, if anything the EU has shown - possibly too much - a lot of restraint in their responses to all this.
How is it fairly obvious, and why does it invoke such an emotional response?
Stop trolling.
You’re not being trolled. I’m asking you a genuine question, but because you feel strongly on the subject and assume the we all see things the same way, you feel that there’s malice involved when someone appears on the radar and says hey I don’t see it that way.
Religious people have the exact same reaction when you question god, they just assume you are on some sort of attack when you are genuinely curious.
You're a pro-russian troll and I have you labeled as such since:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44154270
There is no way you make comments like that if you are not purposefully trying to derail the conversation.
I am seeing a surge of downvotes and comments around this. I think this is the hallmarks of a spamouflage attempt. I've heard rumblings that it's been somewhat easy to buy/sell HN accounts for product launches, but never tried it.
Wow, learn a new thing every day. Thank you.
What process would you go through to "try it?" Where have you heard these rumblings?
Barely 2 weeks, Russian drones violated both Polish and Romanian airspace amidst the Zapad military exercises (which themselves were the precursor to the Russian invasion of Ukraine).
There has also been a surge in hybrid attacks linked to Russian intelligence within Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began [0][1].
As such, it is a relevant question to ask.
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-europe-hybrid-...
[1] - https://investigations.news-exchange.ebu.ch/playing-with-fir...
When asking questions is not allowed, it’s called a cult.
You asked. I answered.
I never said you shouldn't ask.
Your response was very clear that asking was not okay.
Look. We have seen a whole number of wars started based on dishonesty and disinformation, every one who asked questions was branded a traitor, a sceptic etc… until the truth came out.
But what we are discussing is serious, lives would be lost on a tragic scale.
I genuinely think space should be given to those who question the premise of war, especially one that is already begun on information.
Not OP, but I don't get what part of their comment makes it clear that asking is not okay.
I see, here is the line
> As such, it is a relevant question to ask.
Yes. How does that imply asking is not okay?
Ask an lllm and post the response here.
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