"close to Renault's factory in the town of Cléon", which is now preparing to start manufacturing drones for the French military, in collaboration with Ukrainian military-industrial groups.
I don't think they look similar, the synchronicity notwithstanding. The sabotage in France was a 250–300 kg rail fragment (per your link). The objects in the Netherlands look much smaller, and look like they're intended to short-circuit two rails to trigger a signal fault. In one place they found car jumper cables with clamps attached to both rails,
Not asserting this is definitely a Russian op (given the amount of simultaneous farmers' protests and all in NL today), but their modus operandi for foreign operations of this kind involves paying random thugs a few hundred to a couple thousand euros to carry out acts of sabotage using whatever items they have on hand. The items don't need to match, the people involved don't need to know each other.
Correct, this is their exact MO and has been for decades. "Random thug" recruitment notwithstanding, part of the point of such ops is to prove to themselves that they can, in fact, reach out and touch a target - i.e., exercising the entire operational chain from C&C down to the minutiae of execution. A kind of integration test for sabotage, if you will. (Not saying this specific incident is or isn't anything in particular, just commenting on the general MO.)
If one were in a charitable mood, one could think of this as a "just in case" measure of ongoing capability assurance in the event of a broader conflict. In a less charitable mood, one might imagine it as preparation for proactive action. In either case, if you don't do this kind of sub-threshold stuff at least occasionally, you often discover that when a real conflict erupts, the capabilities you thought you had are in fact literally or figuratively rusty. (See the Russian army's logistical debacle early in the Ukraine war for a recent example.)
Most top tier nation states do some version of this; each one has its own style. The Russians are somewhat unusual in that they care less than most who knows or suspects them of this kind of activity.
France provides Ukraine with targeting information that allows Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia, including industrial targets. So France is directly contributing to attacks against non-military target in Russia, yes.
Hm, if Russia were to seriously deploy that logic to justify sabotage in European countries (insofar as a kleptocratic dictatorship is ever serious or logical), it could backfire a bit:
1. If France is a sabotage-justified enemy, then so is the US, which provides some intelligence to Ukraine.
2. In the other direction, Russia has been giving targeting information and weapons to Iran to attack the US forces. So if they're the enemy of the US, then certain members of the current Republican administration may have to tone down their "aid and comfort" for Russia lest it mean future treason charges.
>The sinking of Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique, was an act of French state-terrorism carried out on 10 July 1985. The event was described by France as a "covert operation" by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence agency, the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE). During the operation, two operatives (both French citizens) sank the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, Rainbow Warrior, at the Port of Auckland on her way to a protest against a planned French nuclear test in Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship.
Right, but you absolutely need the suspicion. If it's too deniable, it rather loses efficacy. It seems in this situation it could be any number of actors, which rather dilutes any intended message.
> The ideal scenario is everyone suspects it's you but can't prove it.
Why? EU countries have shown time and time again they won't do anything. I mean for God's sake, Russia was caught sending THREE remote controlled flying bomb on a German airfield, with another one found by a passerby before it was launched.
They contained professionally made Russian explosives. There is no doubt who did it. This was not the first, or the 10th time they got caught. I mean Russia murdered someone in the UK with polonium, for God's sake.
The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd. They leave their fingerprints knowing there will be no reaction.
> The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd.
I mean they are. That is the reason they haven’t sent balistic missiles to the same airfield. They could have sent the same agents who placed those drones to the fence of the airport with a shoulder mounted missile and shot down the planes as they were departing. Or even shoot them down on the ground.
Or similarly they could send a submarine and disrupt the railway services of the Netherlands with missiles from that.
Those would be clearly attributable actions which trigger an immediate military response. That is the reason why they don’t do them.
You look at the actions they take and conclude that they don’t have any restraint or worries. But you should also be looking at the actions they could have but did not take to see that they are in fact restrained and probably quite a bit worried. If they werent they would play the game differently.
I think it's to slowly increase offenses _that won't lead to military response_. The response to each individual incident, worse than the one before, kinetic action can be delayed because "this was only a little worse than the last one".
This compounds because NATO needs to act collectively to effectively act militarily (maybe Poland could go it alone).
Really? Unless they are complete morons they realize something. If you take EU governments, any random country, as a general rule government expenditures go like this:
35% pensions (usually also has some health care here)
35% social security and health care
15% education
15% everything else, roads, bridges, government buildings, ... (army is in here @ maybe 5%)
They're also drowning in debt, of the non-tiny, only Germany does better than the US. So they can't realistically borrow to finance this for 5 years. They're trying to cheat, and treat the EU like a separate country (meaning get investors to treat the EU as a separate state that is not on the hook for the debt of member countries but levies it's own taxes, then borrow against that, but EU countries are cheating, for example using money the EU borrowed for military purposes to fund general expenses like fixing roads)
If the EU countries mobilize the army will go to 20-25% of government expenditures easily.
That means either pensions or social security HAVE TO go down 15% (or 7.5% each). That will cause a revolt since a great many people can't survive like that. At that point there will be no choice for a lot of people but to tear the government down.
Because being too blatant will galvanize the public and create support for open war.
The goal is to ensure all reasonable people know, while keeping enough deniability that Russian-funded right-wing groups can sow doubt about attribution and response policy’s
They don’t care whether it can be proven in court or by people paying close attention. They care whether it can’t be denied even by their aligned agents in western countries.
Maybe it depends on the country, but here the public automatically assumes everything like this done by Russia and these increase support for open war. I don't think Russia wants deeper European involvement in the war, so I'm having trouble understanding why Russia would be doing this. They're already having difficulties in Ukraine, how would angering the European public and increasing the support for further involvement help Russia achieve its goals?
Exactly. If anything, the country that would benefit most from heightened Europe-Russia tensions (as a result of these sorts of infrastructure "accidents") isn't even on the continent. I'm not ruling out Russia completely, but it would sure be stupid for them to effect this strategy. Additionally, Russians weren't the ones that blew up a pipeline at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Look up how successful the US has been in getting right wing crazy people elected as the heads of state in nearly every Central and South American country by funding right-wing groups, with the exception of Mexico and Brazil (but top minds are working on this).
Russia has been trying to get locals to elect governments on their side and even revolt and destroy their own countries to do so ... since 1917. They used the red army to make this happen in most of Eastern Europe, half of Asia, Africa, South America, Middle America ... and they're still at it in quite a few places (like Africa). They fought until their state collapsed to change the government in Afghanistan.
Just because the US does something bad, does not mean others don't do 100x worse. In both meanings of the word.
You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
If you wanted you could claim you have evidence, without having any. Doesn't matter.
"This better stop or there will be sanctions, and if its not within your power to stop it, tough luck" is a valid response.
Whether that's wise is another question.
Here's a recent example where Germany so far claimed that it tied the attack to Russia, but whether that's actually true is anyone guess (since there's little publicly verifiable information released so far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Leipzig_Airport_drone_att...
It wouldn't be terribly surprising if Russia was behind it, but on the other hand it wouldn't be the first false flag incident of this war either.
Well yes technically countries can just attack others. In practice they need to justify those attacks to their allies and populace if they want to maintain the status quo with them. That's where "they started it, we're only defending ourselves" is very helpful.
Romania has reluctantly done exactly that after the drone incident and tensions have escalated. The Romanians closed the Russian consulate in Constanta as a response and sent the consul back to Russia. The Russians sent an hijacked Ukrainian drone that blew up after 5 hours in the port of Constanta just after this. Now they're slowly escalating by periodically sending drones into Romanian airspace or attacking cargo ships bound from/to Odessa while in the Romanian EEZ.
> You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
First order, maybe. But the clearer the attribution the more political capital there is to act. Just look at the article. We don’t know, and won’t know for a while, if this was caused by Russia or the FDF protestors or who. That is all confusion all kind of actors can use to criticise a government who puts more sanctions on Russia.
This isn’t a show of power. Sabotage works best when your target doesn’t even realize it was sabotage. Similarly it’s best if you misattribute blame because then you’re fighting the wrong party and looking for ghosts.
Russia throwing journalists out of windows or paining with Novachok - that’s a “it’s us, you can’t do anything about it, don’t fuck with us” power signal that benefits from “plausible” deniability - you can’t prove it was us.
If the main point is slowing/frustrating drone production?
It would honestly be kind of fair game to sabotage production of drones that would be used against you, even if they're made in a country you're not at war with --- if it wasn't for Russia having a lot of responsibility for that war in the first place (to put it mildly).
Your analogy is way off base. This is how you've framed it:
> Let's say I [the Netherlands] pay [!?] someone [Ukraine] to punch you [Russia] int the face every day. Then one day when you [Russia] punch me [Ukraine] in the face do I have a right to complain?
Ukraine is defending itself, and nobody is paying Ukraine to do that. Russia is the aggressor here. It's weird that I need to point that out. We're talking about Russia sabotaging someone for selling defensive capabilities to Ukraine. So a better analogy is this:
Let's say I punch you in the face every day. Then one day you buy a baseball bat from Gart Sports to defend yourself, so I go in and punch the manager of Gart Sports. Am I in the wrong?
Yes, very obviously, when you frame the analogy correctly, you are in the wrong.
With you up until there. There's nothing defensive about drones. Retributive capabilities certainly, pre-emptive capabilities maybe, but absolutely offensive capabilities, not defensive ones. Attacking Russia back was a line that was definitively crossed in May 2024. You may argue it was justified, but not that it wasn't attacking. In terms of that stupid punching analogy (which wasn't yours to begin with, I know) this is going over to your bully's neighborhood with that baseball bat.
I mean what I said: if you're being attacked by drones, then no one can fault you for trying to sabotage the production of those drones, even if they're made in a different country than the one which is sending them against you.
But, you can and should fault Russia for getting into that position in the first place, that their neighbor is attacking them back with drones.
I guess no one can fault the West for retaliating by paying people to light stuff on fire in Russia, for deterrence. And I guess no one can blame the West for sending Ukraine more missiles to fire into Russia, to end the war.
Amazes me how the right wing American view point is so anti the “Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back” of libertarian darling Malcolm Reynolds from 25 years ago. Reagan would be spinning in his grave with how Russia has owned the discourse.
There was recently this german lady reporter who posed as actively pro-Putin for few months and it didn't take long for fsb/gru to come to her online.
It started small, just check this or that, little favor there but soon escalated to proper spycraft. Some other folks reported having death threats against family. Its for peanuts, few hundred euros mostly. They just need to find the dumbest and most desperate folks to commit acts of treason.
The chances of this being real are basically zero, or Russia would be getting double agented, and reverse intelling themselves, out the arse. Instead all we get are attempts to connect random events, of which there are endless viable suspects, to Russia.
It's fair to say that if one jumps in the middle of a fight, they should expect to get punched, but it's also fair to say that for now Russia has been avoiding throwing much in the way of punches.
How does some chump who gets paid to stick potatoes into tailpipes* become a double agent? Being a double agent requires the ability to hurt the side you're ostensibly working for. The potato guy can show Telegram chats where a guy called Alexey, or maybe an entirely non-Russian name, gave him a job.
* That actually happened. It was a false flag operation to discredit the Greens (party).
I'm not saying such claims are not being published, I'm saying they're likely false because they make about as much sense as a country blowing up its own pipeline. Espionage outside of war is an extremely sensitive issue, and were any country trivially baitable, they'd end up getting played hard. Not only would it eliminate deniability, but you also open up the door to major counter-intel operations and getting more insight into the operations, potentially on a massive scale, of an adversary.
I suspect this is why there's endless stories, in pretty much every country, of dissidents handing over information to 'enemy states' who are in fact just domestic law enforcement. These people glow to everybody, and no foreign power's going to touch them.
This has been extremely well documented. They are just paying some losers a few hundred euros to throw a molotow cocktail somewhere, that's it. As for the Germans, you know that they investigated the NS incident and are prosecuting the Ukrainian perpetrators. Now when the perpetrators are Russian, everything is fake of course.
It's odd that you would jump to "Russian op" and hedging by _not_ asserting that it is "definitely" one; but it very well could also be and arguably even is far more likely an act by someone who would benefit form scaring the public and manipulating the affected governments. I'm not going to assert at all, one way or another who it may be because it could be several actors with interests in producing outcomes of fear among the public and animating and manipulating the respective governments and the clowns in the EU to take actions without thinking.
It is really a rather common playbook of stoking fear and even instigating war not for direct outcomes that has been used innumerable times over history. Only it seems that the majority of people are incapable of seeing, accepting, or maybe just internalizing when they are being played, lied to, and manipulated for the benefit of others at their own expense.
One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing by some minor event like this, are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions, and they could simply just send barrages of missiles to hit actually meaningful targets if they ever become sick and tired of all the CIA/MI6 clowns thinking they can salami slice their way into conquering Russia and once the Germans and Poles have been whipped up to be the battering ram of minced meat again.
It's why we have so many catastrophic and calamitous events in our history because people never ask themselves who may be benefitting from the act that is immediately used to manipulate people through fear. In spite of having been told and explained a long time ago and many times since, you should always ask you who benefits, cui bono. Russia does not benefit from scaring the populace into supporting the murderous and war mongering governments and the maniacal ruling parasites that control them in order to profit from war as they send your children in to the meat grinder.
> One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
Or one could choose not to take this in isolation from all the acts of brazen and identified sabotage Russia does, slashing deep-sea cables in international waters with their shadow fleets, organizing psyop campaigns throughout the entire continent that can be traced back right to their government units, and so on :-)
"brazen and identified" is doing a lot of work here. IIRC the cable thing was an anchor accident, and everyone is doing psyop campaigns (Western psyops being far more advanced and sophisticated than their enemies). Nord Stream was definitely not an accident and we know who did that.
Implying that Russia somehow invented or is the undisputed leader in "psyops" is a popular hallmark of a low-information civilian, a narrative promoted by arch-propagandists like Peter Pomerantsev and Anne Applebaum.
\One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
They are known for actions that negatively affect them and everyone around. That's kinda their whole thing.
The ruling class in Europe needs this war for economic reasons. They're orchestrating and selling it to the public by constant fear mongering and provoking conflict.
Even in a relatively intelligent crowd like this forum, people are gullible and easily guided to hate the Other: red ("communists", Russia, China); brown (immigrants, Muslims, Iran); or green ("far left", environmental and civil rights activists). They hate us for our freedoms!
Be afraid, people, and keep funnelling billions of your tax money into the pockets of the rich who profit from literal conspiracy, mass murder and war crimes. No wonder we have endless conflict and fascism on the rise around the world. There's so much money to be made from war and hate, defrauding the public for generations.
How can we not see it, it's the same playbook again and again. One day we will have to face the true evil, the traitors of humanity, the enemy within.
The last thing ‘the ruling class in Europe needs’ is a pan European war! Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place. They actively don’t want outright war and Russia knows this, which is why Russia continually provokes and gets away with acts of sabotage.
>Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place.
The system is already unstable due to the rampart growth of wealth inequality, especially after covid, disproportionately affecting the purchasing power and CoL of the working class, while those with assets have seen their wealth ballon. All orchestrated by EU politicians and the ECB currency inflation policies and and allocation towards banks and corporations who spent it during covid on assets and stock buybacks and left the working class footing the bill with inflation and mass layoffs years later.
The EU elites are already worried about how they can manage this bottled anger of the working class, which is why you see more and more draconical EU "chat control" and "speech control" laws trying to get passed. Pointing the peasants to vent their anger towards Russia as the scapegoat, for the fiscal irresponsibility of the EU elites that lead to the current wealth disparity, is a good way for the EU elites to avoid the angry mob.
After all, most of the wealthy European elites and nobles didn't lose their wealth after WW1 and WW2 even though millions of peasants died.
Most consumers know Renault as an ordinary car manufacturer but also worth mentioning it's a major manufacturer of armored vehicles for the French armed forces.
> Just days after a similar (criminal) incident causing a train to derail in France
From what I read, the similarity ends in “both involved trains”. This chain of attacks seems to have used short metal pipes (“Footage published by Dutch public broadcaster NOS on Tuesday showed police carrying what appeared to be metal pipes - about 1.5 metres (5ft) long”) to short a connection, making safety systems signal “there’s a train there”, stopping trains further up the track.
The France incident involved a piece of rails heavy enough to cause derailment (“The rail fragment was estimated to weigh between 250 and 300 kilograms”)
My money is on this being a rogue farmers protest.
The easiest way to hide the incompetence of local european politics, be it expensive diesel or the upcoming economic prices is to blame it all on russia.
Volkswagen is laying off 100k of workers, because they can't make cars people can afford anymore... blame russia! Germans fed up with merz and vote afd? Russia! Macron doesn't even have 20% of support in polls anymore? Russia! Stub your pinky on the corner of the bed? russia!
It seems unlikely they would let any political divisions or legitimate grievances go unexploited. It is their cultural core competency for centuries. That does not mean the greivances being exploited aren't valid, or that the parties themselves don't aid in the fracture so they don't have to worry about competition with parties whose ideology is too close to theirs.
Edit: This is reductive, Russia has tons of culture besides this trait, but it is the fundamental strategy that allowed a landlocked state with no natural borders to survive and expand. When you learn a strategy to survive or cope with adversity, it sticks long after it is beneficial.
But all those political divisions are a result of national politics of those countries. People want higher wages, less taxes, affordable housing, more recently cheaper gas/diesel, and in the last decade (or more in some places), less foreign migrants. If no other political party will do anything about that, people are forced to vote for Alternatives (intentionally capitalized).
Especially after all the anti-russian propaganda being false ("three days of rockets left", etc.), after double standards ("ukraine is being attacked, we must help them!", vs "israel is commiting a genocide, we must continue selling them weapons", and "iran was attacked by our buddies, let's send nato (uk, etc) planes to shoot down their counterattacks"). Americans started a war that hurts us every time we go to a gas station and no politician even points a finger at them, no sanctions, no nothing.
It's not russia exploiting the divisions, it's the eu governments being incompetent to the levels never seen before, be it local national governments or EU levels (eg. 3eur customs on everything from china, chat control, etc.).
Look at this for example: https://cbnunfiltered.com/macrons-approval-rating-falls-to-h... macron has 16% approval rating, while 81% see him "unfavorably"... how shitty of a politician do you have to be to not step down when 81% of the country hates you?
If the governments listened to what people wanted and did at least something in that direction (again, top paragraph), people would not be looking for Alternatives (again, intentionally capitalized). Since they don't the Alternatives are the only thing left.
The way I see it, both things are true - European politicians and major parties have stirred anger by their incompetence, AND Russia has exploited this anger for their own purposes.
EU has huge flaws, but it's still better than Russia. Germans, French and the British may not understand it, but us unfortunate enough to live next to Russia do. There is a reason why Poland, Baltic countries and now even Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Russia is ruled by evil, murderous tyrants (as is always has been), while EU elite is merely lazy, greedy and incompetent.
I'll choose pro-EU parties over pro-Russian parties as long as EU is not bombing children's hospitals and massacring civilians. I can only hope citizens of other countries do the same, or otherwise there's a pretty good possibility my country will face what Ukraine has suffered.
It's unfortunate that so many alternatives to mainstream parties in big EU countries are also more or less pro-Russian. One should be able to vote against the flaws of European Union without voting for closer ties with Putin.
Yes, and Stalin was Georgian, Kaganowitch was Ukrainian (and orchestrated the Ukrainian Holodomor), Breshnev was Ukrainian and so on.
The alternative parties are not pro-Russia. They want to trade with a totalitarian regime just like we trade with Saudi Arabia. And they'll break their election promises anyway just like Meloni and Trump broke theirs.
> macron has 16% approval rating, while 81% see him "unfavorably"... how shitty of a politician do you have to be to not step down when 81% of the country hates you?
When elections come due, following the natural order. Otherwise maybe some bad actor could influence polls - which are easier to manipulate than official elections - to make you resign.
All that's being said is, "Russia is known to exploit political conflicts to harm their enemies".
WHY those conflicts exist is irrelevant.
No one is saying it absolutely, unquestionably was Russian interference. Just that it could be. EDIT: OK, at least one person is saying that. But most people are likely thinking, "Well, could be, might not be... dunno."
Why those conflicts exist is actually very relevant when those responsible for them keep using "wawawa russians" as a diversion to avoid doing anything about the issues. If both my local politicians and foreign countries are working against my interests I am going to first vote for better local politicians because at least there I am supposed to have agency.
This is a completely all over the place gish gallop. Both can be true: there's real reporting on acts of sabotage that aren't made up, and there are domestic tensions happening independently of that. The skill is keeping both things in your mind at the same time.
They certainly seem to be implying it. And not only that, disinformation narratives often to to emphasize domestic political troubles that fan the flames of skepticism against mainstream institutions, and their reply to a topic about Russia was to go straight to that particular well.
When the mainstream institutions are obviously divorced from reality ( Nordstream - "Russians did it themselves", or every mainstream news segment in spring 2022 starting with "unprovoked full scale invasion of Ukraine" where even a casual glance at numbers involved (~ 180000) pales in comparison with what US used in Iraq I or II), you don't need disinformation narratives to elicit skepticism against mainstream institutions. A bit of common sense is entirely sufficient.
One could even argue the mainstream institutions were involved in disinformation narratives (e.g., in the case of 40 beheaded babies or widespread systematic rape on Oct 7th: did not bother to check the facts before spreading it wide).
Old German politicians had many opportunities to say something about the genocide. They decided to support Israel instead and (maybe) this choice played some part in their demise. They miscalculated how angry was the people and basically fired themselves. Should know better after seeing the Democrats fall in the same trap.
When you are surrounded only by people that says "I don't care" every single time, you may forget that those aren't the people that you have to convince that "you care".
The similarity is also timing and geopolitical context. It doesn't have to be an identical method to merit the comparison as the means for sabotage can be variable.
Of course more similarity would be a stronger signal, but we shouldn't miss the forest (rail sabotage) for the trees (shorted circuit).
As far as sabotage goes doing it in a way that is disruptive but causes no permanent damage is a bit odd. As a protest, however, it makes perfect sense.
Those aren't the first trains that had problems in Europe recently. Spain has been plagued with thousands of Train delays, cable stolen before a holiday, sabotages and rocks in the railway are also very popular. Russians are obsessed with trains, and the Kremlin even tried to buy the main Spanish train maker disguised as Hungarians, before to be blocked by the Spanish government.
About rogue farmers protest in France... well, exactly the same problem. They are always agitated by far right agents in special moments, and when people scratch a little, this people always are seen taking selfies and money from people associated with Putin. Farmers still didn't understood that are being used every single time, often again their own interests. See the Yellow Jackets movement for example.
I'm surprised people jump to Russia instead of the radical left. Left-wing environmentalist terrorists attached shunts to rail lines to short out the safety signals back in 2020 in the US [0]. Vulkangruppe has been conducting sabotage in Germany, and a 48-year-old named Daniel V was arrested on suspicion of sabotaging Germany's electrical grid because he hated fossil fuels [1]. The French had left-wing environmentalist terrorists sabotaging the rail network in 2024 [2]. The left has been conducting infrastructure attacks all over Europe this decade, but it's probably more politically expedient to blame Russia.
- Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups always claim the action pretty quickly and openly in NL.
- If you look at the locations of sabotage, it’s all close to the ‘farmer heartland’. Most left-wing and environmental groups would do it in the randstad.
Most likely it’s farmers. They announced very heavy protests today and also burnt hay near highways to create smoke clouds. Possibly nudged by Russian operatives because the like to sow dissent.
Also, extinction rebellion goes after motorways blocking private cars, not trains which are a sustainable mode of transport they support.
No, I'm pretty sure this would have been a farmer splinter group. The last time they protested with tractors on the motorways it caused a deadly accident, they won't be getting away with that anymore. So they'll be looking for new ways to protest.
Also, today was Prinsjesdag, similar to the state of the Union in the US. It was a day to expect local protests. Nobody in the Netherlands thinks Russia is behind this.
Surely there is a lot of Russian-motivated sabotage going on in Europe, but there's another group that might be motivated:
exactly today, a major farmer demonstration was already planned. They way they usually go ahead in the Netherlands is drive with their tractors over the highways towards The Hague, where our government is based. Obviously this leads to massive traffic jams.
A simultaneous disruption of the Dutch railways would add some extra effect to the expected traffic chaos.
Quite easy to go from a misdemeanor to terrorism charge if you sabotage the train network. IMHO likely those ** farmers causing insane amounts of damage while getting a slap on the wrist every time, that has to end. At least the climate activists only block one highway which you can work around. Unless it turns out it's them. Then they need be treated the same but it's not their MO.
Leaving aside the irony in seeing the "peaceful" EU (who bet it all on Uncle Sam) now going on full warmongering and wanting to spend 3% of its GDP on warfare, the serious issue here is the lack of will of politicians to punish the authors of such acts, which ruin society for everybody.
44 person injured and a young woman between life and death. Yet when the perpetrators are caught, we'll have journalists and judges relaying the official tune of the EU: "criminals are victims too".
They'll get a slap on the wrist and be able to ruin society again in no time.
When shall the left accept that people putting 300 kilograms of rails to try to kill people has only one solution: shackles and a heavy ball?
Where do you draw the line between "we're all beautiful butterflies" and "some psychos need to be scruffed by the neck and bowed into lifetime submission"?
Yes. And in combination it completely rules out the suggestion that the Netherlands attack is some kind of local activist protest. (The France attack resulted in several grave injuries and could have just as easily resulted in dozens of deaths.)
No I agree with that, but if it's "activists" I would expect them to claim credit otherwise it's all pointless. The same doesn't follow for Russian fuckery, IMO.
Last week we had four train-truck collisions at Polish level crossings resulting in derailment and passenger death, and afaik 2 or 3 involved foreign truck drivers.
I do engineering on these systems and have some expertise on this particular class of event. We’ve had tabletop red teams, and the general outcome is that rail systems being designed to ‘fail safe’ is an easy target. Failing safe at an individual actual ‘fault’ is still the best option, but it could be abused at scale.
It’s near impossible to cause two trains to run into each other (unless you are physically operating one of them), but it is really easy to cause all trains in an area to stop because a cross check or a bit has flipped. In this case, they literally flipped a bit by short circuiting the track circuit.
If done at scale, it is still possible to bypass and run trains safely the old fashioned way. It is less safe, but would probably be the decision if this was happening at multiple locations everyday.
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Russia is involved in many acts of sabotage in Europe over past 2 or 3 years, so this is a very natural first guess for us, European citizens. They also started increasing their activity recently.
Today is also Prinsjesdag. So pissed off Dutch is more likely. As it has been, for the last three years running with highways getting blocked on this day...
One, the other, or a mix of both! If I were a foreign agent wanting to sow chaos, I'd look for the easy to press buttons. Encouraging pissed-off Dutch citizens would be an obvious part of the plan.
Except that none of cases were proven. For one, recent attempts to blow up power lines in Germany were done by a German individual. Or remember how Russia was accused for blowing up Nord Stream. It never made any sense, but still European politicians and Western media fiercely pushed this narrative.
Get some critical media literacy and stop listening to NAFO trolls.
That's the usual trope used as an escape for the question: where are your sources?
Provide them or stop being so defensive about it, being defensive just shows you got not substance to your claim. Show, don't tell, if you can't show then you might have to do some more thinking by yourself to figure out why you ended up that way.
And are these multiple sources 50% biased towards one side and 50% biased towards the other side? If so, how can you tell? And are you doing an average of what "the truth" is at the end?
German authorities believe a militant climate activist was behind a series of recent sabotage attacks on the country's power grid and are hunting for a 48-year-old suspect.
This suspect is now under arrest as also can be read in the following report by The Local (DE):
* German police on Tuesday arrested a suspected militant climate activist over a spate of sabotage attacks on the power grid that had apparently aimed to disrupt power from coal-fired plants.
The man, partially named in German media as Daniel V., 48, had spent days on the run since the first attacks last Tuesday in Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) states.
Police in the city of Cologne said Tuesday that officers had "apprehended the wanted 48-year-old suspect near the Weisweiler power plant" in NRW state.
"The man was carrying additional explosive devices at the time of his arrest but offered no resistance," they said in a statement.*
Now that I showed these sources - none of them exactly 'Russian-friendly' as you might know, otherwise read a bit more of their reporting on similar subjects - will you agree that this specific case was not directly related to Russia? That these 'climate extremists' do not need to be directed by the FSB or GRU to attack their own country's infrastructure because they have somehow convinced themselves that their 'climate activism' is a good cause?
After you agreed to this can you also agree to the fact that blindly claiming 'Russia Russia Russia' does nobody a favour, least of all those who want to be able to show where Russia is actually responsible for similar attacks? This is quite important because in the end it is not infeasible that Russia and its Soviet Union predecessor are actually responsible for these anti-Western activities through the decades of support - financial, ideological and sometimes practical - they lent to all manners of activism in the west with the goal of undermining western society.
Why is it unlikely that Russia would seek to obscure its involvement by recruiting (possibly without their knowledge that Russian was involved ) locals to carry out these acts?
If Russia was behind it, this seems like the most likely way they would proceed.
You're reasoning from the standpoint that Russia was behind it while I'm reasoning from the standpoint that this is not a given and as such does not need to be front and center. Once the culprit has been caught there is enough time to finagle out where he got his motive, mode and means. If this turns out to be something related to some foreign state it can and should become the issue, now with actual proof of their involvement. Starting out with 'Russia was behind it, we just need to find proof' is counterproductive because it ends up like the boy who cried 'Wolf!' or its modern urban equivalent: howling car alarms. Nobody blinks an eye because they've heard it so often it blends into the background and is most likely false alarm anyway.
It’s hard to prove these things of course but you have to ask yourself who benefits most from these kind of attacks and sabotage? Who benefits from a weakened and infighting Europe?
You can use the same logic about shit happening in Russia too. E.g. EU meddling in elections in Russia. Western security apparatus was behind Crocus City Hall attack. Ukrainian drones are launched from European countries and EU is actively involved in planning these attacks . All these claims were made by Russian media and politicians. Do you believe these as well, considering EU benefits the most from the weak Russia?
Russia is waging an active war of aggression against Ukraine and has its sights set on the rest of Europe (countries that they feel belong to the Russian empire just as they did during USSR).
So yea I believe and actually support the EI pushing back and helping Ukraine against warmongers who have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of their own citizens on the frontline - for what exactly?
The war could be over tomorrow if they would just let go of their imperial ambitions - but of course Putin wants to immortalise himself as Russian emperor.
These acts are subterfuge by their nature so you're not going to get Putin coming on TV and saying "lol it was me".
"There is no proof at this stage to link the flying bomb directly to Russia, which denies any role. But as well as the means and the motive, Moscow does have form. The BBC has seen details of the investigation into a plot in 2024 in which Russian-linked proxies in Poland and Lithuania not only handled drones and explosives but also delivered them to Germany."
There are some indications that make Russian saboteurs a very likely culprit. It would be unwise to look at every occurrence of sabotage as a singular incident in the context of the ongoing campaign against European political stability.
Who did it is irrelevant. The more important thing is who the propaganda is blaming. Then we know what the elites (behind this piece of propaganda) want.
I knew before clicking it will be one of the things they say. people are sheeps. they will say whatever they think is right up to a limit. then they will break this limit and punish everyone that is deviating from it. this is what happened in nazi germany, soviet union, china and in the US under biden and I can already see the premises of the next term of US presidency through the lindsay clancy reaction from millions of women. to me it feels like we broke this limit in the modern developed world now. sad that as humans we cant use our brains for better than following what our hiveminds say is truth
So today's the yearly presentation of the new budget, with protests expected in several places. Whether this sabotage campaign is (part of a) misguided protest action or something else is yet to be determined.
That does mean that I would not automatically jump to conclusions about Russia or war or whatever; since much of national public policy is presented today, it's also a popular day to express disagreement, and apparently some farmers had already announced they would be doing so today.
(I'd assume the BBC reporter to be aware that Prinsjesdag is today, and that they'd mention that fact in this article, but apparently not.)
Might be related to today's yearly 'Prinsjesdag' in the Netherlands:
The day on which the reigning monarch of the Netherlands addresses a joint session of the States-General of the Netherlands (consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives) to give the Speech from the Throne (Dutch: Troonrede), similar to the annual State of the Union in the United States or the British State Opening of Parliament. This speech sets out the main features of government policy for the coming parliamentary session.
Depends on how it's done I think: breaking stuff vs sitting on it. And sitting on a highway is also quite visibly claiming the action, that is not clear in this case.
If this is XR, would be very dumb and against their message.
Yes and no. "rede" is a noun and has two syllables (ray-də) and means address (as in Gettysburg address). It's an archaic word, nowadays we would use "toespraak" (speech) or "lezing" (lecture). The word does share its origin with the modern English "to read", but no Dutch speaker would interpret "rede" to mean the same as a parent reading a child a bedtime story.
Farmers protesting new nitrogen emissions regulation. They are also setting hay bales on fire next to highways. The rail sabotage is relatively harmless, the tracks use block signalling so if you use a conductive metal bar or jumper cables to connect the rails, the system thinks a train is present and the preceding signal will stay red.
Protests are much less effective if they can just be ignored. At the very least "lost productivity" is a very abstract harm and not something that endangers human lives directly.
That does depend on the productivity being lost. No doubt many of the people who were unable to commute that day would have been doctors and nurses.
I think it would be of a stretch to actually claim that this specific incident caused loss of life, but it’s possible to see how such wide sabotage, especially conducted over a number of days, could result in compromised emergency services and result in loss of life.
Protests also tend to be more effective if the protesters involved actually make some clear demands about what they want. Simply breaking shit isn’t much of a protest.
Why do people automatically jump to conclusion that it was Russia in the comments? They haven't even released any evidence or investigation yet in official sense.
There are over 200 incidents of suspected Russian sabotage in Europe in recent years. [1] They continuously drum up the EU as the enemy. I think it's prudent to take them at their own word, and accept we're at active hybrid war with them.
We should assume by default now that every single act of sabotage is linked to Russia, before any investigation even. Then if evidence points elsewhere, we can update the suspect for that single event.
Because we had seen the same old tricks a thousand times before.
Nobody wakes up some day saying I know exactly how to stop a train without being caught. Or: I know exactly were to cut to enter in this restricted area that normal people never had heard about it just to steal a few copper cable here and there (or worse, fiber optic cable)
Random actions are truly random. This acts aren't random. They need instead planning, precise knowledge that is not available to most people, and direction to coordinate them in several locations at the same time
European governments (and American) have been drumming up fear and hatred of Russia for more than 50 years.
It's my default assumption at this point that all blame placed on Russia is either from those trying to stoke those feelings, or those who have been swayed by them.
That is not to say that Russia does nothing, but I think it is blamed for more publicly known events than it is actually responsible for.
European governments (and American) have been drumming up fear and hatred of Russia for more than 50 years.
Let's see Russia is actively committing genocide against Ukrainians, Actively commits war crimes against civilian infrastructure, Invaded Crimea, Shot down MH17 and murdered 283 innocent people, constantly broadcasted plans and imagery of nuking American cities, assassinated people in the UK using extremely dangerous nerve agents, is actively boasting about and planning sabotage within the European uninion against civilian targets...
So yeah,,,weird that people would be worried about them?
What's always conveniently left out of lists like this is the greater context in which it occurred. Any state will go to great lengths to protect themselves and ensure their survival.
Ukraine is an excellent example. Look at all of the ways they're attacking Russia internationally, even using "terroristic" tactics. It's justified because they're fighting for their survival.
The West has been bent on Russia's destruction since the cold war, and it didn't end with the fall of the USSR.
I won't bother with a point by point, but take the death toll of MH17. The US has probably killed 10x that amount of innocent people as collateral damage while striking weddings and religious services. And yet it's not brought up in lists about how dangerous we are.
As for whether Russia has anything to fear from the west, well, just look at Venezuela and Iran. It's a good indication of what we'd like to do to them.
> What's always conveniently left out of lists like this is the greater context in which it occurred. Any state will go to great lengths to protect themselves and ensure their survival.
Putin isn’t worried about Russia’s survival or livelihoods. The country would’ve been an even richer Norway with all the natural resources and opportunity to trade with both mature European and emerging Asian countries. Instead they can’t even go a decade without invading any neighboring countries or a week of not threatening nuclear annihilation. It’s a national inferiority complex.
I would be surprised if it wasn’t by Russia. Russian infrastructure is being systematically destroyed by Ukraine with funding, training, intelligence and materiel from Europe. This is an attempt to discourage European support by disrupting Europeans.
Likely organized by farmer protest groups (FDF for example) to protest against emission restriction regulation. They are known for their dangerous stunts, including driving their tractors on the highway and spraying manure on government buildings. These actions are tolerated by the Dutch police, which willingly and purposefully refuses to punish these acts.
Look to Birmingham in the UK for evidence of the same deference. Many have been on strike since 2025. The city was a rat infested public waste dump for nearly 3 months until the government hired private firms to do the waste handling while the public worker strike action continued.
Rubbish. They don't want to. The tractors have license plates, allowing them to be pursued after the fact, and the NL police have firearms if they want to get spicy.
There have been a number of attacks in Europe of the form "deranged person drives vehicle into crowd". I'm sure the police wouldn't sit back and shrug if that was done with a tractor. The vehicle doesn't have magic properties, the driver has police protection.
The protestors tape their license plates. And I'm happy to report Dutch police generally doesn't draw guns on people who are no direct threat.
And how is the "vehicle driven into crowd" even relevant here? Nobody's using these tractors to kill (intentionally), but they're just many and hard to stop.
> If the garbage men started dumping the contents of garbage bags in public places I bet they will not be given a free pass.
I mean, they wouldn't have to, they just need to stop cleaning it up. Such an action likely will be given a free pass, anything other than that is strikebreaking which is either illegal or heavily discouraged depending on jurisdiction.
Farmers and right wing people in all of Europe are actively being disinformed by Russian intelligence service and either wilfully ignores it or too incompetent to realize it.
We are all being disinformed, whether it's by a foreign or our own government. This is not a problem unique to Europe, right-wingers, farmers or Russia. The goal is to have us fight while the powerful become even more powerful. It is important to be aware of this fact, it is not just "the other side I don't agree with" that are affected, and thinking of them as willfully ignorant or incompetent is what the powerful would like you to think (infighting is the goal).
You are right in the sense that there is likely an underlying meddling causing these farmers to act this way. It does not excuse their actions.
Russia spends a huge amount on manipulating western citizens via the internet, let's not play dumb about that. You may not think that it has any effect, but apparently Russian intelligence does.
We're all being misinformed by various interest groups. If you think you're immune and have some perfect understanding of reality, you're kidding yourself.
Ockham's razor may be? Big protests are common on Prinsjesdag, particularly when sensitive decisions or policies are made. A local protest organisation is therefore significantly more likely than an organized foreign sabotage. If I were Putin and had foreign agents in the Netherlands I certainly wouldn't expose them this physically.
> German journalist Angelique Geray posed as a fan of Vladimir Putin on social media while investigating how covert Russian agents operate in Germany.
> Geray spent several months creating a fictional online persona. Using the alias Katya, she presented herself as a pro-Russian influencer, trying to build a following organically and establish contacts on social media.
> “Katya” posted videos of herself posing in a striped Russian sailor shirt, professing her admiration for Putin, and walking around the Bundestag with a Russian flag. Before long, agents contacted her and offered her unspecified assignments and sent her payment in Bitcoin.
> Geray and other RTL journalists were able to observe the recruitment process firsthand. New agents were initially given simple tasks — taking a photo, picking up a package, or obtaining a SIM card. They were later drawn into more serious operations, though these “disposable agents” knew only their own roles and did not understand the overall plan.
> Jović invited “Katya” to meet. During their meeting, he spoke about his pro-Russian activities and hinted at the involvement of Russian intelligence agencies. Asked directly whether intelligence agencies in Moscow were directing his social media activity, he said, “Nobody knows. Well, I don’t know — in theory. In practice, I do know.” Later, when Geray approached him under her real name as a reporter, he denied taking part in a pro-Russian campaign.
We should just build up enough nuclear deterrent to prevent Russia from attacking us.
We've been dependent on the US for this but this was also by the US' own design. They didn't want many countries to have nukes. So the whole 'Europe is not doing its bit' is not really justified.
We don't need more tanks and soldiers because if we go at Russia like Ukraine does, so many people will die that it doesn't matter who wins. We just need to be able to destroy Russia so thoroughly that they won't think about attacking us, just like they don't attack the US. Mutually assured destruction has kept the world safe for almost a century but now with the US no longer committed to NATO we just need to build our own.
I live here. It is the disgruntled farmers whodunnit. There is no measure these onions wont take to defend their stranglehold on our little land. Block the highways with tractors. Sabotage the railways. Intimidate politicians. All because we are sensibly trying to limit their ability to pollute our soils with nitrogen and ask them to leave some space for people to build houses on but nay tmust all be spent towards producing cowfeed yuck
It's easy enough to make a human level self driving car, that's not the problem. The expectation is not human level it's much closer to perfection. Security is the same way, the expectation requires near zero defection. Western governments have slowly accepted compounding marginal decreases in security assuming it doesn't move the needle much. Now they are reaping the consequences of their ignorance of security posture.
This is getting concerning. Multiple locations and deliberate disruption suggest this may be more than random vandalism. Hopefully investigators find out who is behind it and why.
Russians been messing with your elections, blowing up factories, inducing illegal immigration, destroying infrastructure and openly threatening to turn Europe into a radioactive dust. Meanwhile people: "hopefully investigators find out".
A similar hijack will soon(ish) become impossible, as the current train protection system will be replaced by ERTMS.
Basically, the current system works by injecting a small current signal on one rail and trying to sense it on the other rail. A train's axle shorts the rails together, so sensing it means a train is present. Or, in this instance of sabotage, a jumper wire.
ERTMS L2, which is being installed over the next decade or two, primarily uses axle counters and train position reporting, so a jumper won't do a thing. You can still fool an axle counter, but that's rather easy to fix: just drive a known-good train over the section.
Or maybe they do realise it how close it is.
It is not a certainty yet, but we can see russia circling.
No idea when it would start but there are only two outcomes I can see:
* Russia doesn't use nukes and get flattened. They don't have the troops, material or finances to deploy on even half the frontline.
* Russia use nukes and get flattened (and so does a chunk of EU). French doctrine when it come to nuclear warfare is quite agressive. Not idea how london would react, but major russian cities and/or ressource hubs would see retalations on kind.
I don't know how much support or opposition from the population such actions would have, but people are getting fed up with external threat burning so much of our governments time and attention on external issues (brexit, babysitting trump, russian threat) that internal issues get further pushed to the future.
Define Europeans - us Poles absolutely understand the danger. In fact I'd say we're already at war with Russia, the way they attack our democracy, our institutions and politics daily. But someone in Portugal might not see it the same way we do.
Many, maybe even most Russians would like to be part of Europe, even if they would complain about the terms that would enable them to join pan European organizations. For now they are just potential Europeans.
Russia being part of Europe is a fact and not a preference. It seems like you want to see Europe as being united against Russia instead of this being an internal European conflict, which it is.
Yes, obviously - but I'm not sure how that's related. Or maybe actually in fact it speaks of the fact that some terrorist acts within Russia were commited by or on the order of the Russian government.
They're trying to dissuade European NATO members from continuing their support for Ukraine.
Things are going badly for Russia. The war has lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany and Ukraine is actually taking back territory. Over half a million Russians are dead and probably a million wounded. The economy is imploding due to the enormous expenditures (30% or more of GDP is spent on the war). Just like in WWI Russia is running out of men to continue the fight. It either has to give up or escalate.
I believe Zelensky made a big mistake insulting Putin when things were going stellar at the front a couple months ago. By making it personal Putin is doubling down until he defeats Ukraine or Russia is destroyed in a war with NATO.
Sad to see so many people here in the comments jump the gun and think of Russia.
Some local context: Today is "prinsjesdag" when the budget is announced. Protests are common, particularly when sensitive decisions are made. There are multiple organized protest movements in the country that have used physical force in the past and some of them had announced protests for today.
Could it be Russia? Yes. But local protests seem significantly more likely. Moreover, if I were Putin I wouldn't expose my foreign agents this physically. I would use them in much more insidious ways such as actually starting or supporting these protest movements. In a similar vein: Could any shooting in the US be caused by foreign agents? Maybe. But usually there is a much simpler explanation; guns and bitterness.
Protests draw attention to your cause. This doesn't draw attention to anything, it is straightforward sabotage. Neither is it in line with how typical protestors operated before.
You are jumping to the assumption that foreign agents wouldn't be exposed, but any willing idiot can be bought to conduct such activity. Recent research in Denmark showed that sabotage comes, most likely, from locals, persuaded by foreign actors.
So two things could be true at once. A local 'protestor', disengaged through some issue (whether climate, farming or anything else), persuaded to join some 'resistance' by anyone.
I don't expect this to be supported by local protesting groups, like FDF or XR, either. Way too risky, media-wise.
similar thing happened next to a minority area where they put railroad ties (the big wooden things, usually supporting the tracks) on the tracks themselves, and well, that even got politicized for the location reasons.
If we think about public infrastructure in an adversarial way, the same way we think about software systems; we could say that it's full of critical zero-day vulnerabilities.
Well this is natural, terrorism in Europe is almost entirely Russia-originating (and have always been, see drop to nearly zero after 1991 when Russia lost the capability).
Little by little, people are realising that Europe is at war. Politicians are trying so hard not to say it because of the implications, but there’s only so long you can keep your head buried in the sand.
We’re under constant attacks from Russia… drones, sabotage, cyberattacks, propaganda campaigns derailing our elections…
It is indeed possible Russia is behind it, but considering a domestic farmers' terror group has told its followers to cause disruption today (as it is a politically-significant day), and those are definitely disrupting highways, chances are good they are also responsible for the railway disruptions.
And if this is supposed to be war, then by European standards it is incredibly mild.
We don't know whether this was Russia, it's just as likely it was the "farmers defence force" or climate activists.
Edit: some context as I'm looking like a Russian shill now, which I understand. Today is the day that the budget gets announced, and the farmer terrorist organization (farmer defence force) have announced actions - and have disrupted highways by setting bales of hay on fire, and all the disruptions happened where farmer concentrations are high.
Regardless, the situation is dire, and probably either the tankies or terror farmers are being helped by Russian destabilizing forces, it's too early to call this disruption an action from the FSB.
In the case of France it is pretty obvious, they would never attack random people in such a way. They either target public infrastructure or very specific politician/execs properties, not random people, and definitely not in a way that could result in deaths.
>or very specific politician/execs properties, not random people,
I don't know enough about dutch politics but in my country if the blue collar anti-regulation people wanted to annoy the white collar pro-regulation people without annoying other blue collar people stopping the trains would accomplish that pretty handily.
>and definitely not in a way that could result in deaths.
They laid pipes and jumper cables across the tracks causing the signals to be red.
no? if you are diligent you can say nothing and people will hopefully attribute it to your enemies and you get off with your own ploy of looking peaceful and harmless
You can claim ownership via restricted channels, e.g. a phone call to key politicians, and rely on their self-interest to keep things quiet while understanding the threat.
In some cases, if the action is a bit too effective, you might even want to avoid it being pinned on you. Al Qaeda occasionally refused to claim ownership of things they very plainly did, and the Russians do it very often (e.g. when they shot down a Dutch passenger plane a few years ago).
Yeah, my bet is on the farmers. The locations where this happened are all pretty rural and farmers have announced havy actions today.
We in NL need to be more concerned about domestic terrorism than the Russians at the moment. Though I'm sure Russian money and bots are involved in some way.
I used "disrupted" as that is the language that is used to describe these actions. When you disrupt something, you increase the likelihood of something non-standard happening including accidents. I believe the narrative was that if drivers can not pay attention to the road and keep control of their vehicles, then they should not be driving.
This was something that people decried about during the BLM and Stop Oil protests, see below for some of the accidents caused by those actions:
>M25 Police Motorbike Crash (November 2022): An Essex Police motorcycle officer was injured in a collision involving two lorries during a rolling roadblock. The roadblock was set up because Just Stop Oil activists were trespassing and climbing onto overhead gantries along the M25.
I'm not defending Russia, it's just that the farmers terrorist organisation has announced major disruptions today and has also set hay bales on fire to shut down highways.
For context: it's "Prinsjesdag" in the Netherlands which is when the budget is announced, and there are major changes to agriculture subsidies.
We've had a bunch of these acts of terrorism in Germany in the recent years. Mostly power, but also train and industrial targets. They all came from the same source, which is very much not Russian.
Don't be naive. They definitely are Russian backed acts. Not all sabotage is done directly by their state security apparatus, funding useful idiots has been the Russian modus operandi since the Soviet times.
lol come on, I'm German. Of course a lot of the terrorism was probably (Vulkangruppe) or proven (the DHL and airport incidents, Tiergartenmord, SUV Bauschaum) Russian.
The only thing that is probably something else is that guy from the last week shooting wires over transmission lines (lone wolf ecoterrorist), and the Nord Stream explosion which likely was Ukrainian.
Anyone blathering about "the far left" is probably either far right or a Russian shill.
Climate activists are definitely known for disliking fossil fuel plants - and there's one directly next to that.
I could see an activist naïvely thinking that this would sever that one power plant from the grid, making a clear anti-fossil statement. Still a bit of an odd choice (it's gas-powered, Germany has far dirtier lignite-powered ones), but not unthinkable.
Not really, I do not buy that. Ukrainian intelligence can sabotage train tracks deep within Belarus and Russia. And given how convient it would be to blame Russia here I wonder why they do not.
Yeah, not sure why not at least being upfront about the possibility is so hard. In Spain we've had train derailments, flocks of people being directed on social media to force themselves across borders, subterfuge deluxe everywhere and what not, yet the government is mostly silent and claim it's all unrelated, but it's hard to not also see the parallels across the continent and reach your own conclusions. But then also, don't wanna fall into some conspiracy theory trap either...
Russia isn't the only group interested in doing terrorism in The Netherlands. Recently the Farmers Defense Force and Extinction Rebellion have caused far greater disruption.
Could it be Russia? Obviously. But in my opinion the odds are less than a coin flip.
> Recently the Farmers Defense Force and Extinction Rebellion
Why derail trains though, especially in regards to the latter? Given it's one of the most environmental ways for transportation. Besides, groups like that tend to want to take responsibility, the whole point is to get attention to their groups.
You're misunderstanding why they do those things in the first place. You're referencing real activities here, how many of those activities you references people refused to take responsibility for doing?
Look at photos from these events you refer to, people are proudly holding banners and signs here, not trying to be anonymous and flee from police and intelligence services.
Have you never participated in political activism yourself, and you have no clue why you'd do those things you cite?
Please, do suggest this to any of these environmental activism groups and see how they'll laugh at you. You seriously think these people think like that??
Groups such as Extinction Rebellion are easy to steer off course by the state into taking meaningless actions such as gluing themselves to London Underground trains.
Perhaps this is just as well. If Extinction Rebellion really wanted to take down the entire transport network, they could do so by 'accidentally' touring the big stations with a leaky rucksack filled with lead paint fragments or ground up asbestos tiles, to then tip off the press. This would probably reveal an unfortunate truth, that there was plenty of aforementioned toxins already on the network, from brake pads and paint of yesteryear. Nonetheless, some closure for the guys in hazmat suits would be needed.
I think of it the other way: EU politicians want war but are not able to say it out loud and clear. Instead we get a bunch of "russian sabotage" all over the place with flimsy evidence to back it. Get the simple people into a paranoid state and use it to justify decisions which are already made. Classic FUD.
And the people seem to swallow it.
Yeah mate whatever. Instead of scrolling twitter or whatever, donate some of your actual time to Ukraine and start getting up to speed with what Russia is really doing, straight from the source.
Otherwise you’re just going to continue being what is commonly called a “useful idiot”.
Edit: seeing your other posts, seems like you’re well beyond useful idiot territory and either a Russian agent or plain and simply a troll. Of course it’s always the ones you most expect.
Wont donate anything to Ukraine – hopefully the part of my family from there has managed to bring out their boys. Yes, busification is a thing over there, "mate".
If the useful idiots here in Europe are strong enough to back a political decision to go to war with Russia, I'm out. But you can go and fight, "mate".
Edit: Seeing you're profiteering from the war [0], case closed I guess.
[0]https://sevenseed.eu/
"Seven Seed is a Brussels-based group dedicated to empowering the European startup ecosystem, focused on the technologies that matter most: Artificial Intelligence and Defence."
And Russia is winning, they already have neutralized if not subjugated the US, but most of Europe is also heading towards that outcome, and fast. Russia is not this near omnipotent 5D chess mastermind behind all of the scenes in all of politics all across the West, but they are terrifyingly good at exploiting existing trends and influencing trajectories just so and they have been at it with great continuity over many decades. It's starting to really pay off. At this point, it's hard to imagine how the next German federal government could be anything else than either a completely dead-on-arrival coalition of polar opposites that only barely hangs on to keep the AfD out of government but will be unable to do anything at all, or an extremely Russia-friendly government the AfD is part of if not leads that is pretty much certain to continue within the EU what Trump started within NATO. Both outcomes serve Russia well, and the establishment has pretty much handed them that opportunity without meaningful resistance.
NATO is certainly weaker with the USA having lost her mind. But Russia seems to have gotten herself into a total quagmire in Ukraine and she is bleeding badly with no end in sight. Nobody is winning here.
It should be noted that today is Prinsjesdag and the new yearly budget is being presented, or however that is properly translated in english. Especially now that farmers are also lighting hay bales on fire next to highways the most likely explanation is nationals doing this
Dutch person here. I never heard of these but Prinjesdag is big national news each year. Considering that this is happening in the Netherlands, it's about as likely related to the, eh, ten days of repetitice as it is to the moon landing
Out of all the ignorant comments in this thread that clearly do not know what is happening in the netherlands and are just assuming wild stuff, you made the most insane one. Congratulations.
I appreciate that you know what is happening near you and in your homeland. As the snowclone could go, "think locally, speak globally"? My epistemology in this regard is unfortunately limited to concrete measurements, such as the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
The English Wikipedia is such an unreliable source, that I could not even be certain whether Mary of Hungary was born in 1505.
I am sorry that I have allowed the bigger picture, or mere coincidence and happenstance, to cloud my opinion of your yearly ceremony and the annoying disruption to your daily commute.
"History may not repeat itself, but it does often rhyme." -- unknown
Interestingly this mechanism contributed a lot to Brexit in my opinion, whenever there was legislation the politicians wanted to enact but knew would be unpopular with the voters they'd blame the EU and wring their hands saying there was nothing to be done, while in the background gold-plating the legislation far beyond what the EU was even asking for. This also made it easy for populists to point to many absurd examples of the EU being comically bureaucratic, when a lot of the more nonsensical ones were literally domestic additions. When the referendum happened, the consequences were obvious to everyone.
While no Brexiteer myself, I personally would want to see the European Parliament get a lot more powers and influence before I threw my wholehearted support behind rejoining. Half the problem with the EU is that it's seen as not particularly democratic as a place for legislation to originate, and giving the elected organ more power (including the power to propose legislation in its own right, and dismiss legislation proposed by the Commission with much more prejudice) would go a long way to addressing that I think. The Parliament needs to be more, well, parliamentary in how it functions.
All the Russia conspiracism in here reminds me of the claims that they blew up their own pipeline. The cost/benefit analysis of that situation was so obviously out of whack that no serious person should could have considered it to be a possibility.
This case is more plausible than that one was, but not by much. How could the benefit from derailing a few trains possibly justify the risk of A) more sanctions, and B) triggering NATO's Article V? The benefit of these operations is what, slowing trains down by one day? The 2022 sanctions on Russia have lowered their GDP by 6% by some estimates, which is the equivalent of turning the entire Russian economy off for three weeks of the year, every year. The notion that Russia would risk war and/or crippling sanctions to mildly inconvenience a tiny share of rail customers in The Netherlands is simply absurd. Putin makes plenty of mistakes, but he remains a shrewd adversary, and he is certainly not stupid.
Putin’s exit narrative requires escalation. Defeat vs Ukraine is a pathetic wound- “we would have won if it weren’t for.. europe” is preferable to narcissistic permanent victimhood.
That’s not true. It was (and is) a huge thing in the German news and public discussion, especially now that it’s brought up again with recent arrests of suspects, the explosives targeting cargo airports, etc.
Putin must be really happy - whatever happens in Europe, he's blamed for it, making him look omnipotent. Most countries would love to have that kind of power.
It’s so much more likely to be the farmers, but it's easier to blame Putin and do nothing about it than it is to stop ruining the farmers and risk angering the cosmopolitan politicians whose votes in the parliament you need.
Putin became a meme. He's almighty and weak at the same time. He's the Zar, Stalin AND Hitler in one person. He's been cloned at least a dozen times but seems to have a grave illness and will die soon. On the one hand it's funny to watch how people are losing their minds over it but on the other it just prevents a clear dialogue and assessment of a politician.
This is very much why I find most people's AI doom scenarios trite.
Humans are useful, easily manipulated operatives in the medium AIs are conversant in and we already have evidence of agents doing exactly this in arguing for PR requests (likely with prompting by an operator but still).
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Yes, and that's one of the reasons politics - which this is - used to be shunned on this site. It is like catnip for those who have an opinion - whether agreeing or disagreeing - on the subject and quickly turns into a mud fight. In combination with the down-voting system on HN this gives rise to a strong and unhelpful herd mentality where those with itchy down-vote fingers quickly make opinions outside of their desired narrative fade to grey. Unfortunately this 'no politics' rule has never been free from bias even before the rise of The Orange Man and seems to have been dropped off the radar ever since. This only serves to increase the level of polarisation, the bitter fruits of which are ripe for the picking right here in this thread.
A lot of the commenters blame Russia, and ... have you looked at the map?
Netherlands is one of the countries that are furthest away from Russia!
And then, there are countries that take much more active stance against Russia - Germany for example. Should Russia send a message it will probably be to the countries that stir shit.
There are over 200 acts of sabotage in Europe linked/suspected to Russia. There's plenty to go around for everyone, and somehow people are still hesitant to say we're in active hybrid war.
Just days after a similar (criminal) incident causing a train to derail in France: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/09/12/french-p...
"close to Renault's factory in the town of Cléon", which is now preparing to start manufacturing drones for the French military, in collaboration with Ukrainian military-industrial groups.
I don't think they look similar, the synchronicity notwithstanding. The sabotage in France was a 250–300 kg rail fragment (per your link). The objects in the Netherlands look much smaller, and look like they're intended to short-circuit two rails to trigger a signal fault. In one place they found car jumper cables with clamps attached to both rails,
https://nos.nl/video/2631081-startkabels-van-spoor-bij-meppe... ("Startkabels van spoor bij Meppel weggehaald")
Not asserting this is definitely a Russian op (given the amount of simultaneous farmers' protests and all in NL today), but their modus operandi for foreign operations of this kind involves paying random thugs a few hundred to a couple thousand euros to carry out acts of sabotage using whatever items they have on hand. The items don't need to match, the people involved don't need to know each other.
Correct, this is their exact MO and has been for decades. "Random thug" recruitment notwithstanding, part of the point of such ops is to prove to themselves that they can, in fact, reach out and touch a target - i.e., exercising the entire operational chain from C&C down to the minutiae of execution. A kind of integration test for sabotage, if you will. (Not saying this specific incident is or isn't anything in particular, just commenting on the general MO.)
If one were in a charitable mood, one could think of this as a "just in case" measure of ongoing capability assurance in the event of a broader conflict. In a less charitable mood, one might imagine it as preparation for proactive action. In either case, if you don't do this kind of sub-threshold stuff at least occasionally, you often discover that when a real conflict erupts, the capabilities you thought you had are in fact literally or figuratively rusty. (See the Russian army's logistical debacle early in the Ukraine war for a recent example.)
Most top tier nation states do some version of this; each one has its own style. The Russians are somewhat unusual in that they care less than most who knows or suspects them of this kind of activity.
France does some version or style of derailing Russian trains, you say?
France provides Ukraine with targeting information that allows Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia, including industrial targets. So France is directly contributing to attacks against non-military target in Russia, yes.
Source: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/81382
Hm, if Russia were to seriously deploy that logic to justify sabotage in European countries (insofar as a kleptocratic dictatorship is ever serious or logical), it could backfire a bit:
1. If France is a sabotage-justified enemy, then so is the US, which provides some intelligence to Ukraine.
2. In the other direction, Russia has been giving targeting information and weapons to Iran to attack the US forces. So if they're the enemy of the US, then certain members of the current Republican administration may have to tone down their "aid and comfort" for Russia lest it mean future treason charges.
Russia has traded Iran drones in exchange for Iranian artillery rounds to use in Ukraine.
And China has sent Iran anti air missiles and provides Russia and Iran with targeting data.
And North Korean troops all over Russia...
It's a shitshow.
Not exactly "random thugs", but this comes to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
>The sinking of Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique, was an act of French state-terrorism carried out on 10 July 1985. The event was described by France as a "covert operation" by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence agency, the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE). During the operation, two operatives (both French citizens) sank the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, Rainbow Warrior, at the Port of Auckland on her way to a protest against a planned French nuclear test in Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship.
If their foreign intelligence office hasn't made the kind of contacts and capabilities that could, they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
Low level sabotage under the guise of hooliganism wasn't invented in Leningrad.
or make it look like it was the Russians so you can get the public on board with a war against Russia?
Or make it look like you're trying to make it look like it was the Russians so you can get the public on board with a war against NATO?
Bet you didn't see the uno reverso false false flag coming
What's the logic? Russia sabotages NATO infrastructure, claims innocence, and this is somehow supposed to generate support for war against NATO?
Exactly this, and also they are trying to keep some deniability here, so variations are good.
Why would you want to keep it deniable? What's the point in this sort of sabotage if nobody knows you did it?
The ideal scenario is everyone suspects it's you but can't prove it.
You have both the desired threat, but no concrete biases for an official response.
Also an uncertainty limits action - it might be a random event, it could even be a false flag.
One of the problem's here is narratives are being spun by multiple actors and it depends on who you believe.
Right, but you absolutely need the suspicion. If it's too deniable, it rather loses efficacy. It seems in this situation it could be any number of actors, which rather dilutes any intended message.
> The ideal scenario is everyone suspects it's you but can't prove it.
Why? EU countries have shown time and time again they won't do anything. I mean for God's sake, Russia was caught sending THREE remote controlled flying bomb on a German airfield, with another one found by a passerby before it was launched.
They contained professionally made Russian explosives. There is no doubt who did it. This was not the first, or the 10th time they got caught. I mean Russia murdered someone in the UK with polonium, for God's sake.
The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd. They leave their fingerprints knowing there will be no reaction.
> The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd.
I mean they are. That is the reason they haven’t sent balistic missiles to the same airfield. They could have sent the same agents who placed those drones to the fence of the airport with a shoulder mounted missile and shot down the planes as they were departing. Or even shoot them down on the ground.
Or similarly they could send a submarine and disrupt the railway services of the Netherlands with missiles from that.
Those would be clearly attributable actions which trigger an immediate military response. That is the reason why they don’t do them.
You look at the actions they take and conclude that they don’t have any restraint or worries. But you should also be looking at the actions they could have but did not take to see that they are in fact restrained and probably quite a bit worried. If they werent they would play the game differently.
Because the Kremlin wants europe to take an overt action to justify mobilization. There are many better assymetric ways for europe to retaliate.
I think it's to slowly increase offenses _that won't lead to military response_. The response to each individual incident, worse than the one before, kinetic action can be delayed because "this was only a little worse than the last one".
This compounds because NATO needs to act collectively to effectively act militarily (maybe Poland could go it alone).
Europe could just conscript migrants for the AFU but alas it's politically impossible. Would at least prevent the domestic anti NATO propaganda.
The famous salami tactic (Yes, Minister)
Just send more aid to Ukraine and it will be raining oil again in Moscow.
> Because the Kremlin wants europe to take an overt action to justify mobilization.
Do they? Why? They're already in a stalemate of a conflict, why would they want more fully-mobilized enemies?
Russia wants an excuse to justify mobilization in Russia, not in Europe.
Really? Unless they are complete morons they realize something. If you take EU governments, any random country, as a general rule government expenditures go like this:
35% pensions (usually also has some health care here)
35% social security and health care
15% education
15% everything else, roads, bridges, government buildings, ... (army is in here @ maybe 5%)
They're also drowning in debt, of the non-tiny, only Germany does better than the US. So they can't realistically borrow to finance this for 5 years. They're trying to cheat, and treat the EU like a separate country (meaning get investors to treat the EU as a separate state that is not on the hook for the debt of member countries but levies it's own taxes, then borrow against that, but EU countries are cheating, for example using money the EU borrowed for military purposes to fund general expenses like fixing roads)
If the EU countries mobilize the army will go to 20-25% of government expenditures easily.
That means either pensions or social security HAVE TO go down 15% (or 7.5% each). That will cause a revolt since a great many people can't survive like that. At that point there will be no choice for a lot of people but to tear the government down.
That may be the plan of course.
Because being too blatant will galvanize the public and create support for open war.
The goal is to ensure all reasonable people know, while keeping enough deniability that Russian-funded right-wing groups can sow doubt about attribution and response policy’s
They don’t care whether it can be proven in court or by people paying close attention. They care whether it can’t be denied even by their aligned agents in western countries.
Maybe it depends on the country, but here the public automatically assumes everything like this done by Russia and these increase support for open war. I don't think Russia wants deeper European involvement in the war, so I'm having trouble understanding why Russia would be doing this. They're already having difficulties in Ukraine, how would angering the European public and increasing the support for further involvement help Russia achieve its goals?
Exactly. If anything, the country that would benefit most from heightened Europe-Russia tensions (as a result of these sorts of infrastructure "accidents") isn't even on the continent. I'm not ruling out Russia completely, but it would sure be stupid for them to effect this strategy. Additionally, Russians weren't the ones that blew up a pipeline at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.
The Russians have learned from the best.
Look up how successful the US has been in getting right wing crazy people elected as the heads of state in nearly every Central and South American country by funding right-wing groups, with the exception of Mexico and Brazil (but top minds are working on this).
Russia has been trying to get locals to elect governments on their side and even revolt and destroy their own countries to do so ... since 1917. They used the red army to make this happen in most of Eastern Europe, half of Asia, Africa, South America, Middle America ... and they're still at it in quite a few places (like Africa). They fought until their state collapsed to change the government in Afghanistan.
Just because the US does something bad, does not mean others don't do 100x worse. In both meanings of the word.
> Middle America
I thought I loved Red Dawn, I rewatched it recently, it's really stupid.
You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
If you wanted you could claim you have evidence, without having any. Doesn't matter.
"This better stop or there will be sanctions, and if its not within your power to stop it, tough luck" is a valid response.
Whether that's wise is another question.
Here's a recent example where Germany so far claimed that it tied the attack to Russia, but whether that's actually true is anyone guess (since there's little publicly verifiable information released so far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Leipzig_Airport_drone_att...
It wouldn't be terribly surprising if Russia was behind it, but on the other hand it wouldn't be the first false flag incident of this war either.
Well yes technically countries can just attack others. In practice they need to justify those attacks to their allies and populace if they want to maintain the status quo with them. That's where "they started it, we're only defending ourselves" is very helpful.
The response is typically sending diplomats home, cancelling agreements, and sanctions. Something proportional. Not immediate outright war.
Romania has reluctantly done exactly that after the drone incident and tensions have escalated. The Romanians closed the Russian consulate in Constanta as a response and sent the consul back to Russia. The Russians sent an hijacked Ukrainian drone that blew up after 5 hours in the port of Constanta just after this. Now they're slowly escalating by periodically sending drones into Romanian airspace or attacking cargo ships bound from/to Odessa while in the Romanian EEZ.
> You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
First order, maybe. But the clearer the attribution the more political capital there is to act. Just look at the article. We don’t know, and won’t know for a while, if this was caused by Russia or the FDF protestors or who. That is all confusion all kind of actors can use to criticise a government who puts more sanctions on Russia.
Because otherwise it would be an act of war. At which point they might as well have just fired a rocket into the country.
finish the thought: this means you need to retaliate. You either step up and hit back, or look weak and invite further problems.
random vandals -- that's just local scumbags being scumbags. These things happens, no need to start WWIII
This isn’t a show of power. Sabotage works best when your target doesn’t even realize it was sabotage. Similarly it’s best if you misattribute blame because then you’re fighting the wrong party and looking for ghosts.
Russia throwing journalists out of windows or paining with Novachok - that’s a “it’s us, you can’t do anything about it, don’t fuck with us” power signal that benefits from “plausible” deniability - you can’t prove it was us.
Russia is trying to avoid retaliation through stricter sanctions, for example.
It's not about demonstrating, it's about results and this is only training.
Doubt is always good.
They seem to be very good at "mob tactics."
No one can prove anything, for example, but anyone knows that people that piss Putin off, need to stay away from windows in high places.
The windows are entirely blameless. If a window gets near you, it’s already too late, you’re now just a message “pour encourager les autres”.
That’s because the distinction between the Russian mob and the government is nonexistent
If the main point is slowing/frustrating drone production?
It would honestly be kind of fair game to sabotage production of drones that would be used against you, even if they're made in a country you're not at war with --- if it wasn't for Russia having a lot of responsibility for that war in the first place (to put it mildly).
what do you mean "fair game"? by the same logic russia attacking ukraine is also "fair game".
"hei cmon im just atacking my neighbor its fair game, what else should i do"
Let's say I pay someone to punch you int the face every day. Then one day when you punch me in the face do I have a right to complain?
Your analogy is way off base. This is how you've framed it:
> Let's say I [the Netherlands] pay [!?] someone [Ukraine] to punch you [Russia] int the face every day. Then one day when you [Russia] punch me [Ukraine] in the face do I have a right to complain?
Ukraine is defending itself, and nobody is paying Ukraine to do that. Russia is the aggressor here. It's weird that I need to point that out. We're talking about Russia sabotaging someone for selling defensive capabilities to Ukraine. So a better analogy is this:
Let's say I punch you in the face every day. Then one day you buy a baseball bat from Gart Sports to defend yourself, so I go in and punch the manager of Gart Sports. Am I in the wrong?
Yes, very obviously, when you frame the analogy correctly, you are in the wrong.
> defensive capabilities to Ukraine
With you up until there. There's nothing defensive about drones. Retributive capabilities certainly, pre-emptive capabilities maybe, but absolutely offensive capabilities, not defensive ones. Attacking Russia back was a line that was definitively crossed in May 2024. You may argue it was justified, but not that it wasn't attacking. In terms of that stupid punching analogy (which wasn't yours to begin with, I know) this is going over to your bully's neighborhood with that baseball bat.
So when someone is firing missiles at you, it’s not defensive to blow up the launcher?
The Ukrainian drones are not blowing up launchers. They are blowing up refineries and warehouses.
Warehouse containing kit to build the drones, refineries producing fuel to fuel the tanks
I mean what I said: if you're being attacked by drones, then no one can fault you for trying to sabotage the production of those drones, even if they're made in a different country than the one which is sending them against you.
But, you can and should fault Russia for getting into that position in the first place, that their neighbor is attacking them back with drones.
I guess no one can fault the West for retaliating by paying people to light stuff on fire in Russia, for deterrence. And I guess no one can blame the West for sending Ukraine more missiles to fire into Russia, to end the war.
Amazes me how the right wing American view point is so anti the “Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back” of libertarian darling Malcolm Reynolds from 25 years ago. Reagan would be spinning in his grave with how Russia has owned the discourse.
but why are you attacked by drones thats the million dollar question...
Which I answered?
There was recently this german lady reporter who posed as actively pro-Putin for few months and it didn't take long for fsb/gru to come to her online.
It started small, just check this or that, little favor there but soon escalated to proper spycraft. Some other folks reported having death threats against family. Its for peanuts, few hundred euros mostly. They just need to find the dumbest and most desperate folks to commit acts of treason.
The chances of this being real are basically zero, or Russia would be getting double agented, and reverse intelling themselves, out the arse. Instead all we get are attempts to connect random events, of which there are endless viable suspects, to Russia.
It's fair to say that if one jumps in the middle of a fight, they should expect to get punched, but it's also fair to say that for now Russia has been avoiding throwing much in the way of punches.
How does some chump who gets paid to stick potatoes into tailpipes* become a double agent? Being a double agent requires the ability to hurt the side you're ostensibly working for. The potato guy can show Telegram chats where a guy called Alexey, or maybe an entirely non-Russian name, gave him a job.
* That actually happened. It was a false flag operation to discredit the Greens (party).
Here's the article in Germany about the incident: https://www.rtl.de/news/russische-spionage-rtl-reporter-unde...
I'm not saying such claims are not being published, I'm saying they're likely false because they make about as much sense as a country blowing up its own pipeline. Espionage outside of war is an extremely sensitive issue, and were any country trivially baitable, they'd end up getting played hard. Not only would it eliminate deniability, but you also open up the door to major counter-intel operations and getting more insight into the operations, potentially on a massive scale, of an adversary.
I suspect this is why there's endless stories, in pretty much every country, of dissidents handing over information to 'enemy states' who are in fact just domestic law enforcement. These people glow to everybody, and no foreign power's going to touch them.
This has been extremely well documented. They are just paying some losers a few hundred euros to throw a molotow cocktail somewhere, that's it. As for the Germans, you know that they investigated the NS incident and are prosecuting the Ukrainian perpetrators. Now when the perpetrators are Russian, everything is fake of course.
It's odd that you would jump to "Russian op" and hedging by _not_ asserting that it is "definitely" one; but it very well could also be and arguably even is far more likely an act by someone who would benefit form scaring the public and manipulating the affected governments. I'm not going to assert at all, one way or another who it may be because it could be several actors with interests in producing outcomes of fear among the public and animating and manipulating the respective governments and the clowns in the EU to take actions without thinking.
It is really a rather common playbook of stoking fear and even instigating war not for direct outcomes that has been used innumerable times over history. Only it seems that the majority of people are incapable of seeing, accepting, or maybe just internalizing when they are being played, lied to, and manipulated for the benefit of others at their own expense.
One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing by some minor event like this, are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions, and they could simply just send barrages of missiles to hit actually meaningful targets if they ever become sick and tired of all the CIA/MI6 clowns thinking they can salami slice their way into conquering Russia and once the Germans and Poles have been whipped up to be the battering ram of minced meat again.
It's why we have so many catastrophic and calamitous events in our history because people never ask themselves who may be benefitting from the act that is immediately used to manipulate people through fear. In spite of having been told and explained a long time ago and many times since, you should always ask you who benefits, cui bono. Russia does not benefit from scaring the populace into supporting the murderous and war mongering governments and the maniacal ruling parasites that control them in order to profit from war as they send your children in to the meat grinder.
> One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
Or one could choose not to take this in isolation from all the acts of brazen and identified sabotage Russia does, slashing deep-sea cables in international waters with their shadow fleets, organizing psyop campaigns throughout the entire continent that can be traced back right to their government units, and so on :-)
Keep on believing those lies like a good Fox News level cog
As they say, if you want peace then prepare for war.
Might wanna update your facts on that pipeline.
I'm referring to telecom cables in nordic and baltic waters, not nordstream.
I can’t read apparently, apologies
You will recall the propaganda steering suspicion towards the Russians on the Nordstream pipeline.
Who has the most to gain by blaming the Russians?
"brazen and identified" is doing a lot of work here. IIRC the cable thing was an anchor accident, and everyone is doing psyop campaigns (Western psyops being far more advanced and sophisticated than their enemies). Nord Stream was definitely not an accident and we know who did that.
Implying that Russia somehow invented or is the undisputed leader in "psyops" is a popular hallmark of a low-information civilian, a narrative promoted by arch-propagandists like Peter Pomerantsev and Anne Applebaum.
As many other comments have said, cui bono?
Just like North Stream 2? /s
\One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
They are known for actions that negatively affect them and everyone around. That's kinda their whole thing.
The ruling class in Europe needs this war for economic reasons. They're orchestrating and selling it to the public by constant fear mongering and provoking conflict.
Even in a relatively intelligent crowd like this forum, people are gullible and easily guided to hate the Other: red ("communists", Russia, China); brown (immigrants, Muslims, Iran); or green ("far left", environmental and civil rights activists). They hate us for our freedoms!
Be afraid, people, and keep funnelling billions of your tax money into the pockets of the rich who profit from literal conspiracy, mass murder and war crimes. No wonder we have endless conflict and fascism on the rise around the world. There's so much money to be made from war and hate, defrauding the public for generations.
How can we not see it, it's the same playbook again and again. One day we will have to face the true evil, the traitors of humanity, the enemy within.
The last thing ‘the ruling class in Europe needs’ is a pan European war! Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place. They actively don’t want outright war and Russia knows this, which is why Russia continually provokes and gets away with acts of sabotage.
>Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place.
The system is already unstable due to the rampart growth of wealth inequality, especially after covid, disproportionately affecting the purchasing power and CoL of the working class, while those with assets have seen their wealth ballon. All orchestrated by EU politicians and the ECB currency inflation policies and and allocation towards banks and corporations who spent it during covid on assets and stock buybacks and left the working class footing the bill with inflation and mass layoffs years later.
The EU elites are already worried about how they can manage this bottled anger of the working class, which is why you see more and more draconical EU "chat control" and "speech control" laws trying to get passed. Pointing the peasants to vent their anger towards Russia as the scapegoat, for the fiscal irresponsibility of the EU elites that lead to the current wealth disparity, is a good way for the EU elites to avoid the angry mob.
After all, most of the wealthy European elites and nobles didn't lose their wealth after WW1 and WW2 even though millions of peasants died.
Sabotage is sabotage, doesn't have to be the same down to the minutae to be called similar.
Most consumers know Renault as an ordinary car manufacturer but also worth mentioning it's a major manufacturer of armored vehicles for the French armed forces.
Just Like Saab in Sweden, except Saab dont sell any cars anymore unfortunately.
> Just days after a similar (criminal) incident causing a train to derail in France
From what I read, the similarity ends in “both involved trains”. This chain of attacks seems to have used short metal pipes (“Footage published by Dutch public broadcaster NOS on Tuesday showed police carrying what appeared to be metal pipes - about 1.5 metres (5ft) long”) to short a connection, making safety systems signal “there’s a train there”, stopping trains further up the track.
The France incident involved a piece of rails heavy enough to cause derailment (“The rail fragment was estimated to weigh between 250 and 300 kilograms”)
My money is on this being a rogue farmers protest.
Could be also rogue farmers paid by Russia. Easiest way for Russia to cause havoc in Europe is through exploiting existing political issues.
The easiest way to hide the incompetence of local european politics, be it expensive diesel or the upcoming economic prices is to blame it all on russia.
Volkswagen is laying off 100k of workers, because they can't make cars people can afford anymore... blame russia! Germans fed up with merz and vote afd? Russia! Macron doesn't even have 20% of support in polls anymore? Russia! Stub your pinky on the corner of the bed? russia!
It seems unlikely they would let any political divisions or legitimate grievances go unexploited. It is their cultural core competency for centuries. That does not mean the greivances being exploited aren't valid, or that the parties themselves don't aid in the fracture so they don't have to worry about competition with parties whose ideology is too close to theirs.
Edit: This is reductive, Russia has tons of culture besides this trait, but it is the fundamental strategy that allowed a landlocked state with no natural borders to survive and expand. When you learn a strategy to survive or cope with adversity, it sticks long after it is beneficial.
But all those political divisions are a result of national politics of those countries. People want higher wages, less taxes, affordable housing, more recently cheaper gas/diesel, and in the last decade (or more in some places), less foreign migrants. If no other political party will do anything about that, people are forced to vote for Alternatives (intentionally capitalized).
Especially after all the anti-russian propaganda being false ("three days of rockets left", etc.), after double standards ("ukraine is being attacked, we must help them!", vs "israel is commiting a genocide, we must continue selling them weapons", and "iran was attacked by our buddies, let's send nato (uk, etc) planes to shoot down their counterattacks"). Americans started a war that hurts us every time we go to a gas station and no politician even points a finger at them, no sanctions, no nothing.
It's not russia exploiting the divisions, it's the eu governments being incompetent to the levels never seen before, be it local national governments or EU levels (eg. 3eur customs on everything from china, chat control, etc.).
Look at this for example: https://cbnunfiltered.com/macrons-approval-rating-falls-to-h... macron has 16% approval rating, while 81% see him "unfavorably"... how shitty of a politician do you have to be to not step down when 81% of the country hates you?
If the governments listened to what people wanted and did at least something in that direction (again, top paragraph), people would not be looking for Alternatives (again, intentionally capitalized). Since they don't the Alternatives are the only thing left.
The way I see it, both things are true - European politicians and major parties have stirred anger by their incompetence, AND Russia has exploited this anger for their own purposes.
EU has huge flaws, but it's still better than Russia. Germans, French and the British may not understand it, but us unfortunate enough to live next to Russia do. There is a reason why Poland, Baltic countries and now even Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Russia is ruled by evil, murderous tyrants (as is always has been), while EU elite is merely lazy, greedy and incompetent.
I'll choose pro-EU parties over pro-Russian parties as long as EU is not bombing children's hospitals and massacring civilians. I can only hope citizens of other countries do the same, or otherwise there's a pretty good possibility my country will face what Ukraine has suffered.
It's unfortunate that so many alternatives to mainstream parties in big EU countries are also more or less pro-Russian. One should be able to vote against the flaws of European Union without voting for closer ties with Putin.
> Russia is ruled by evil, murderous tyrants
Yes, and Stalin was Georgian, Kaganowitch was Ukrainian (and orchestrated the Ukrainian Holodomor), Breshnev was Ukrainian and so on.
The alternative parties are not pro-Russia. They want to trade with a totalitarian regime just like we trade with Saudi Arabia. And they'll break their election promises anyway just like Meloni and Trump broke theirs.
Was Ukrainian really what was listed as nationality on the propiska?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazar_Kaganovich
Born in Ukraine, first Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Brezhnev
Born on current Ukraine territory (unless you wish to argue that it should belong to Russia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Brezhnev#Early_life_and...
"Brezhnev's ethnicity was given as Ukrainian in some documents, including his passport, and Russian in others."
> macron has 16% approval rating, while 81% see him "unfavorably"... how shitty of a politician do you have to be to not step down when 81% of the country hates you?
When elections come due, following the natural order. Otherwise maybe some bad actor could influence polls - which are easier to manipulate than official elections - to make you resign.
Calling them incompetent gives them the benefit of the doubt which they do not deserve.
All that's being said is, "Russia is known to exploit political conflicts to harm their enemies".
WHY those conflicts exist is irrelevant.
No one is saying it absolutely, unquestionably was Russian interference. Just that it could be. EDIT: OK, at least one person is saying that. But most people are likely thinking, "Well, could be, might not be... dunno."
Why those conflicts exist is actually very relevant when those responsible for them keep using "wawawa russians" as a diversion to avoid doing anything about the issues. If both my local politicians and foreign countries are working against my interests I am going to first vote for better local politicians because at least there I am supposed to have agency.
This is a completely all over the place gish gallop. Both can be true: there's real reporting on acts of sabotage that aren't made up, and there are domestic tensions happening independently of that. The skill is keeping both things in your mind at the same time.
You're being downvoted for a reasonable position. Both can be true.
> But all those political divisions are a result of national politics of those countries.
Do you claim that Russia doesn't invest in disinformation campaigns against the West?
They certainly seem to be implying it. And not only that, disinformation narratives often to to emphasize domestic political troubles that fan the flames of skepticism against mainstream institutions, and their reply to a topic about Russia was to go straight to that particular well.
When the mainstream institutions are obviously divorced from reality ( Nordstream - "Russians did it themselves", or every mainstream news segment in spring 2022 starting with "unprovoked full scale invasion of Ukraine" where even a casual glance at numbers involved (~ 180000) pales in comparison with what US used in Iraq I or II), you don't need disinformation narratives to elicit skepticism against mainstream institutions. A bit of common sense is entirely sufficient.
One could even argue the mainstream institutions were involved in disinformation narratives (e.g., in the case of 40 beheaded babies or widespread systematic rape on Oct 7th: did not bother to check the facts before spreading it wide).
Explosive-equipped drone attack on airport - Russia! Numerous arson attacks on businesses supplying Ukraine - Russia! Country invaded, cities destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed, raped, tortured - Russia.
Don't forget the 2014 Vrbětice explosions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...
Russia burned all their GRU operatives through massive incompetence and has had to switch to freelancers.
Old German politicians had many opportunities to say something about the genocide. They decided to support Israel instead and (maybe) this choice played some part in their demise. They miscalculated how angry was the people and basically fired themselves. Should know better after seeing the Democrats fall in the same trap.
When you are surrounded only by people that says "I don't care" every single time, you may forget that those aren't the people that you have to convince that "you care".
The similarity is also timing and geopolitical context. It doesn't have to be an identical method to merit the comparison as the means for sabotage can be variable.
Of course more similarity would be a stronger signal, but we shouldn't miss the forest (rail sabotage) for the trees (shorted circuit).
As far as sabotage goes doing it in a way that is disruptive but causes no permanent damage is a bit odd. As a protest, however, it makes perfect sense.
>My money is on this being a rogue farmers protest.
I'm French and I heard nothing of the sort, what makes you think of that?
Not the Normandy event, but the NL event.
Those aren't the first trains that had problems in Europe recently. Spain has been plagued with thousands of Train delays, cable stolen before a holiday, sabotages and rocks in the railway are also very popular. Russians are obsessed with trains, and the Kremlin even tried to buy the main Spanish train maker disguised as Hungarians, before to be blocked by the Spanish government.
About rogue farmers protest in France... well, exactly the same problem. They are always agitated by far right agents in special moments, and when people scratch a little, this people always are seen taking selfies and money from people associated with Putin. Farmers still didn't understood that are being used every single time, often again their own interests. See the Yellow Jackets movement for example.
I'm surprised people jump to Russia instead of the radical left. Left-wing environmentalist terrorists attached shunts to rail lines to short out the safety signals back in 2020 in the US [0]. Vulkangruppe has been conducting sabotage in Germany, and a 48-year-old named Daniel V was arrested on suspicion of sabotaging Germany's electrical grid because he hated fossil fuels [1]. The French had left-wing environmentalist terrorists sabotaging the rail network in 2024 [2]. The left has been conducting infrastructure attacks all over Europe this decade, but it's probably more politically expedient to blame Russia.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/pair-charged-interferin... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy5zw56lnx3o [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-leaning-towards-...
Several reasons:
- Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups always claim the action pretty quickly and openly in NL.
- If you look at the locations of sabotage, it’s all close to the ‘farmer heartland’. Most left-wing and environmental groups would do it in the randstad.
Most likely it’s farmers. They announced very heavy protests today and also burnt hay near highways to create smoke clouds. Possibly nudged by Russian operatives because the like to sow dissent.
But we’ll see.
Also, extinction rebellion goes after motorways blocking private cars, not trains which are a sustainable mode of transport they support.
No, I'm pretty sure this would have been a farmer splinter group. The last time they protested with tractors on the motorways it caused a deadly accident, they won't be getting away with that anymore. So they'll be looking for new ways to protest.
Also, today was Prinsjesdag, similar to the state of the Union in the US. It was a day to expect local protests. Nobody in the Netherlands thinks Russia is behind this.
Surely there is a lot of Russian-motivated sabotage going on in Europe, but there's another group that might be motivated:
exactly today, a major farmer demonstration was already planned. They way they usually go ahead in the Netherlands is drive with their tractors over the highways towards The Hague, where our government is based. Obviously this leads to massive traffic jams.
A simultaneous disruption of the Dutch railways would add some extra effect to the expected traffic chaos.
Quite easy to go from a misdemeanor to terrorism charge if you sabotage the train network. IMHO likely those ** farmers causing insane amounts of damage while getting a slap on the wrist every time, that has to end. At least the climate activists only block one highway which you can work around. Unless it turns out it's them. Then they need be treated the same but it's not their MO.
Or the other group, instead of actually being motivated are being influenced by the those who would benefit even more from the distribution of chaos.
Leaving aside the irony in seeing the "peaceful" EU (who bet it all on Uncle Sam) now going on full warmongering and wanting to spend 3% of its GDP on warfare, the serious issue here is the lack of will of politicians to punish the authors of such acts, which ruin society for everybody.
44 person injured and a young woman between life and death. Yet when the perpetrators are caught, we'll have journalists and judges relaying the official tune of the EU: "criminals are victims too".
They'll get a slap on the wrist and be able to ruin society again in no time.
When shall the left accept that people putting 300 kilograms of rails to try to kill people has only one solution: shackles and a heavy ball?
Where do you draw the line between "we're all beautiful butterflies" and "some psychos need to be scruffed by the neck and bowed into lifetime submission"?
How many deaths?
Yes. And in combination it completely rules out the suggestion that the Netherlands attack is some kind of local activist protest. (The France attack resulted in several grave injuries and could have just as easily resulted in dozens of deaths.)
that's a huge leap
We should see some claim of responsibility if it was indeed anyone other than the usual suspects.
Why? Russia gains nothing from taking responsibility.
No I agree with that, but if it's "activists" I would expect them to claim credit otherwise it's all pointless. The same doesn't follow for Russian fuckery, IMO.
Last week we had four train-truck collisions at Polish level crossings resulting in derailment and passenger death, and afaik 2 or 3 involved foreign truck drivers.
I do engineering on these systems and have some expertise on this particular class of event. We’ve had tabletop red teams, and the general outcome is that rail systems being designed to ‘fail safe’ is an easy target. Failing safe at an individual actual ‘fault’ is still the best option, but it could be abused at scale.
It’s near impossible to cause two trains to run into each other (unless you are physically operating one of them), but it is really easy to cause all trains in an area to stop because a cross check or a bit has flipped. In this case, they literally flipped a bit by short circuiting the track circuit.
If done at scale, it is still possible to bypass and run trains safely the old fashioned way. It is less safe, but would probably be the decision if this was happening at multiple locations everyday.
Why all this farmers know so much about how to sabotage trains suddenly?
LLMs, likely.
A Russian warship fired flares at a Danish military helicopter in international waters in the Baltic sea too.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwn8mjl31p5yo
on same day today: Nato jets down drone that entered Lithuanian airspace
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjx2zgk7edlzo
and another ru drone washed ashore in Poland https://www.reuters.com/world/poland-finds-suspected-russian...
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Russia is involved in many acts of sabotage in Europe over past 2 or 3 years, so this is a very natural first guess for us, European citizens. They also started increasing their activity recently.
Today is also Prinsjesdag. So pissed off Dutch is more likely. As it has been, for the last three years running with highways getting blocked on this day...
One, the other, or a mix of both! If I were a foreign agent wanting to sow chaos, I'd look for the easy to press buttons. Encouraging pissed-off Dutch citizens would be an obvious part of the plan.
Except that none of cases were proven. For one, recent attempts to blow up power lines in Germany were done by a German individual. Or remember how Russia was accused for blowing up Nord Stream. It never made any sense, but still European politicians and Western media fiercely pushed this narrative.
Get some critical media literacy and stop listening to NAFO trolls.
Where are you getting the "correct" narrative from?
By reading multiple sources by different parties and thinking for yourself. Truth is the first casualty of war.
That's the usual trope used as an escape for the question: where are your sources?
Provide them or stop being so defensive about it, being defensive just shows you got not substance to your claim. Show, don't tell, if you can't show then you might have to do some more thinking by yourself to figure out why you ended up that way.
And are these multiple sources 50% biased towards one side and 50% biased towards the other side? If so, how can you tell? And are you doing an average of what "the truth" is at the end?
You wait for 20 or more years for documents become unclassified and historians to do their job.
So in the meantime you have no real opinion about anything?
Not at all, I take ungrounded claims like this with a grain of salt.
Here's Deutsche Welle - what used to be the German international radio service - on the subject:
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-news-police-raid-vehicle-of-su...
German authorities believe a militant climate activist was behind a series of recent sabotage attacks on the country's power grid and are hunting for a 48-year-old suspect.
This suspect is now under arrest as also can be read in the following report by The Local (DE):
https://www.thelocal.de/20260908/german-police-arrest-suspec...
* German police on Tuesday arrested a suspected militant climate activist over a spate of sabotage attacks on the power grid that had apparently aimed to disrupt power from coal-fired plants.
The man, partially named in German media as Daniel V., 48, had spent days on the run since the first attacks last Tuesday in Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) states.
Police in the city of Cologne said Tuesday that officers had "apprehended the wanted 48-year-old suspect near the Weisweiler power plant" in NRW state.
"The man was carrying additional explosive devices at the time of his arrest but offered no resistance," they said in a statement.*
Now that I showed these sources - none of them exactly 'Russian-friendly' as you might know, otherwise read a bit more of their reporting on similar subjects - will you agree that this specific case was not directly related to Russia? That these 'climate extremists' do not need to be directed by the FSB or GRU to attack their own country's infrastructure because they have somehow convinced themselves that their 'climate activism' is a good cause?
After you agreed to this can you also agree to the fact that blindly claiming 'Russia Russia Russia' does nobody a favour, least of all those who want to be able to show where Russia is actually responsible for similar attacks? This is quite important because in the end it is not infeasible that Russia and its Soviet Union predecessor are actually responsible for these anti-Western activities through the decades of support - financial, ideological and sometimes practical - they lent to all manners of activism in the west with the goal of undermining western society.
Why is it unlikely that Russia would seek to obscure its involvement by recruiting (possibly without their knowledge that Russian was involved ) locals to carry out these acts?
If Russia was behind it, this seems like the most likely way they would proceed.
You're reasoning from the standpoint that Russia was behind it while I'm reasoning from the standpoint that this is not a given and as such does not need to be front and center. Once the culprit has been caught there is enough time to finagle out where he got his motive, mode and means. If this turns out to be something related to some foreign state it can and should become the issue, now with actual proof of their involvement. Starting out with 'Russia was behind it, we just need to find proof' is counterproductive because it ends up like the boy who cried 'Wolf!' or its modern urban equivalent: howling car alarms. Nobody blinks an eye because they've heard it so often it blends into the background and is most likely false alarm anyway.
None of the cases were proven is a bold claim.
It’s hard to prove these things of course but you have to ask yourself who benefits most from these kind of attacks and sabotage? Who benefits from a weakened and infighting Europe?
Hybrid warfare is by definition hard to attribute
You can use the same logic about shit happening in Russia too. E.g. EU meddling in elections in Russia. Western security apparatus was behind Crocus City Hall attack. Ukrainian drones are launched from European countries and EU is actively involved in planning these attacks . All these claims were made by Russian media and politicians. Do you believe these as well, considering EU benefits the most from the weak Russia?
Russia is waging an active war of aggression against Ukraine and has its sights set on the rest of Europe (countries that they feel belong to the Russian empire just as they did during USSR).
So yea I believe and actually support the EI pushing back and helping Ukraine against warmongers who have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of their own citizens on the frontline - for what exactly?
The war could be over tomorrow if they would just let go of their imperial ambitions - but of course Putin wants to immortalise himself as Russian emperor.
Like what? Any confirmed acts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_sabotage_operations_in...
These acts are subterfuge by their nature so you're not going to get Putin coming on TV and saying "lol it was me".
"There is no proof at this stage to link the flying bomb directly to Russia, which denies any role. But as well as the means and the motive, Moscow does have form. The BBC has seen details of the investigation into a plot in 2024 in which Russian-linked proxies in Poland and Lithuania not only handled drones and explosives but also delivered them to Germany."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgdmrxxkdxo
They have a habit of being involved. It's not exactly plucked out of thin air!
I'm trained by Russian occupation of my country.
There are some indications that make Russian saboteurs a very likely culprit. It would be unwise to look at every occurrence of sabotage as a singular incident in the context of the ongoing campaign against European political stability.
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025/01/research-e...
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/sabotage-deutschland-bka...
Who did it is irrelevant. The more important thing is who the propaganda is blaming. Then we know what the elites (behind this piece of propaganda) want.
I knew before clicking it will be one of the things they say. people are sheeps. they will say whatever they think is right up to a limit. then they will break this limit and punish everyone that is deviating from it. this is what happened in nazi germany, soviet union, china and in the US under biden and I can already see the premises of the next term of US presidency through the lindsay clancy reaction from millions of women. to me it feels like we broke this limit in the modern developed world now. sad that as humans we cant use our brains for better than following what our hiveminds say is truth
Right. Instead, we should do whatever someone writes in an anonymous forum.
So today's the yearly presentation of the new budget, with protests expected in several places. Whether this sabotage campaign is (part of a) misguided protest action or something else is yet to be determined.
https://nos.nl/liveblog/2631038-nog-steeds-nieuwe-sabotageac... (Use google translate to read)
That does mean that I would not automatically jump to conclusions about Russia or war or whatever; since much of national public policy is presented today, it's also a popular day to express disagreement, and apparently some farmers had already announced they would be doing so today.
(I'd assume the BBC reporter to be aware that Prinsjesdag is today, and that they'd mention that fact in this article, but apparently not.)
You'll find the answer in who is organizing these groups.
Egging them on online, sure, but these groups have always existed and we're plenty stupid without Russia's help.
https://nos-nl.translate.goog/liveblog/2631038-hooibalen-in-...
"Radical Farmer Leaders" are mentioned as stimulating these actions today.
Might be related to today's yearly 'Prinsjesdag' in the Netherlands:
The day on which the reigning monarch of the Netherlands addresses a joint session of the States-General of the Netherlands (consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives) to give the Speech from the Throne (Dutch: Troonrede), similar to the annual State of the Union in the United States or the British State Opening of Parliament. This speech sets out the main features of government policy for the coming parliamentary session.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prinsjesdag
>Might be related to today's yearly 'Prinsjesdag' in the Netherlands:
Russia may have heard about that annual event as well, of course.
maybe, but it's a step or two up from blocking roads?
Stopping traffic on railways isn't much different from stopping traffic on highways, is it?
Depends on how it's done I think: breaking stuff vs sitting on it. And sitting on a highway is also quite visibly claiming the action, that is not clear in this case.
If this is XR, would be very dumb and against their message.
>Speech from the Throne (Dutch: Troonrede)
Is "troonrede" essentially just the Dutch pronunciation of "Throne read"?
More akin to the German verb 'reden' I think: talk. It's a talk from the throne.
Yes and no. "rede" is a noun and has two syllables (ray-də) and means address (as in Gettysburg address). It's an archaic word, nowadays we would use "toespraak" (speech) or "lezing" (lecture). The word does share its origin with the modern English "to read", but no Dutch speaker would interpret "rede" to mean the same as a parent reading a child a bedtime story.
And troon == throne, obviously.
Farmers protesting new nitrogen emissions regulation. They are also setting hay bales on fire next to highways. The rail sabotage is relatively harmless, the tracks use block signalling so if you use a conductive metal bar or jumper cables to connect the rails, the system thinks a train is present and the preceding signal will stay red.
The harm is in the cost. Not the actual danger. Or are they going to pay for the damages caused due to lost productivity?
Protests are much less effective if they can just be ignored. At the very least "lost productivity" is a very abstract harm and not something that endangers human lives directly.
That does depend on the productivity being lost. No doubt many of the people who were unable to commute that day would have been doctors and nurses.
I think it would be of a stretch to actually claim that this specific incident caused loss of life, but it’s possible to see how such wide sabotage, especially conducted over a number of days, could result in compromised emergency services and result in loss of life.
Protests also tend to be more effective if the protesters involved actually make some clear demands about what they want. Simply breaking shit isn’t much of a protest.
And on the same day that a (very likely Russian) UAV had to be shot down in Lithuanian air space.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjx2zgk7edlzo
NOS thinks it's individual farmers getting a bit too frisky: https://nos.nl/artikel/2631141-boerenactivisten-mogelijk-ver...
Why do people automatically jump to conclusion that it was Russia in the comments? They haven't even released any evidence or investigation yet in official sense.
There are over 200 incidents of suspected Russian sabotage in Europe in recent years. [1] They continuously drum up the EU as the enemy. I think it's prudent to take them at their own word, and accept we're at active hybrid war with them.
We should assume by default now that every single act of sabotage is linked to Russia, before any investigation even. Then if evidence points elsewhere, we can update the suspect for that single event.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/germany-leipzig-airport-explosive...
Because we had seen the same old tricks a thousand times before.
Nobody wakes up some day saying I know exactly how to stop a train without being caught. Or: I know exactly were to cut to enter in this restricted area that normal people never had heard about it just to steal a few copper cable here and there (or worse, fiber optic cable)
Random actions are truly random. This acts aren't random. They need instead planning, precise knowledge that is not available to most people, and direction to coordinate them in several locations at the same time
Do you have evidence that Russia did this ?
Highly likely associated with yearly national budget fiesta. No reason for foreign interference, we can easily mess it up on our own.
European governments (and American) have been drumming up fear and hatred of Russia for more than 50 years.
It's my default assumption at this point that all blame placed on Russia is either from those trying to stoke those feelings, or those who have been swayed by them.
That is not to say that Russia does nothing, but I think it is blamed for more publicly known events than it is actually responsible for.
European governments (and American) have been drumming up fear and hatred of Russia for more than 50 years.
Let's see Russia is actively committing genocide against Ukrainians, Actively commits war crimes against civilian infrastructure, Invaded Crimea, Shot down MH17 and murdered 283 innocent people, constantly broadcasted plans and imagery of nuking American cities, assassinated people in the UK using extremely dangerous nerve agents, is actively boasting about and planning sabotage within the European uninion against civilian targets...
So yeah,,,weird that people would be worried about them?
What's always conveniently left out of lists like this is the greater context in which it occurred. Any state will go to great lengths to protect themselves and ensure their survival.
Ukraine is an excellent example. Look at all of the ways they're attacking Russia internationally, even using "terroristic" tactics. It's justified because they're fighting for their survival.
The West has been bent on Russia's destruction since the cold war, and it didn't end with the fall of the USSR.
I won't bother with a point by point, but take the death toll of MH17. The US has probably killed 10x that amount of innocent people as collateral damage while striking weddings and religious services. And yet it's not brought up in lists about how dangerous we are.
As for whether Russia has anything to fear from the west, well, just look at Venezuela and Iran. It's a good indication of what we'd like to do to them.
> What's always conveniently left out of lists like this is the greater context in which it occurred. Any state will go to great lengths to protect themselves and ensure their survival.
Putin isn’t worried about Russia’s survival or livelihoods. The country would’ve been an even richer Norway with all the natural resources and opportunity to trade with both mature European and emerging Asian countries. Instead they can’t even go a decade without invading any neighboring countries or a week of not threatening nuclear annihilation. It’s a national inferiority complex.
I would be surprised if it wasn’t by Russia. Russian infrastructure is being systematically destroyed by Ukraine with funding, training, intelligence and materiel from Europe. This is an attempt to discourage European support by disrupting Europeans.
Likely organized by farmer protest groups (FDF for example) to protest against emission restriction regulation. They are known for their dangerous stunts, including driving their tractors on the highway and spraying manure on government buildings. These actions are tolerated by the Dutch police, which willingly and purposefully refuses to punish these acts.
It's crazy how much deference is given to farmers compared to every other occupation.
If the garbage men started dumping the contents of garbage bags in public places I bet they will not be given a free pass.
Look to Birmingham in the UK for evidence of the same deference. Many have been on strike since 2025. The city was a rat infested public waste dump for nearly 3 months until the government hired private firms to do the waste handling while the public worker strike action continued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Birmingham_b...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqxlxv0vvnxo
You can go a long while without your trash being taken away for you.. you can't go very long without food.
Most of the food the farmers produce in the Netherlands is exported.
Meanwhile, trash piles up quickly: https://nltimes.nl/2023/02/07/utrecht-garbage-strike-comes-e...
I think this deference is largely inspired by the police not knowing how to deal with these huge tractors.
Rubbish. They don't want to. The tractors have license plates, allowing them to be pursued after the fact, and the NL police have firearms if they want to get spicy.
There have been a number of attacks in Europe of the form "deranged person drives vehicle into crowd". I'm sure the police wouldn't sit back and shrug if that was done with a tractor. The vehicle doesn't have magic properties, the driver has police protection.
The protestors tape their license plates. And I'm happy to report Dutch police generally doesn't draw guns on people who are no direct threat.
And how is the "vehicle driven into crowd" even relevant here? Nobody's using these tractors to kill (intentionally), but they're just many and hard to stop.
> The protestors tape their license plates.
One weird trick: simply commit an offense in front of the police, and suddenly they can't do anything because it's "too hard".
> If the garbage men started dumping the contents of garbage bags in public places I bet they will not be given a free pass.
I mean, they wouldn't have to, they just need to stop cleaning it up. Such an action likely will be given a free pass, anything other than that is strikebreaking which is either illegal or heavily discouraged depending on jurisdiction.
It's almost as if food security is much more important than most other jobs.
Don't believe everything you read.
This is russian sabotage + russian trolls now trying to make it look like it's something else
Who's the troll here? Do you even know what you're talking about?
Farmers and right wing people in all of Europe are actively being disinformed by Russian intelligence service and either wilfully ignores it or too incompetent to realize it.
We are all being disinformed, whether it's by a foreign or our own government. This is not a problem unique to Europe, right-wingers, farmers or Russia. The goal is to have us fight while the powerful become even more powerful. It is important to be aware of this fact, it is not just "the other side I don't agree with" that are affected, and thinking of them as willfully ignorant or incompetent is what the powerful would like you to think (infighting is the goal).
You are right in the sense that there is likely an underlying meddling causing these farmers to act this way. It does not excuse their actions.
can you explain how Dutch farmers are being disinformed by Russian intelligence services? I am REALLy curious.
Russia spends a huge amount on manipulating western citizens via the internet, let's not play dumb about that. You may not think that it has any effect, but apparently Russian intelligence does.
So the gas prices are all in their heads put there by Russian trolls, as are the other government policies that affect them?
Fair, but I want to know how they specificially disinform and target Dutch farmers. That was the claim.
Last that I checked, Dutch farmers are in an existential struggle with the government. I wonder how Russia disinforms them.
We're all being misinformed by various interest groups. If you think you're immune and have some perfect understanding of reality, you're kidding yourself.
Too bad Russia 'had to' go to war in the first place.
It is good for Russ.a even if they didn't even organize it: everybody thinks it's them, but they might not have even spent anything on it.
I don't think it's good for them. The more people see Russia as the enemy, the stronger the support for Ukraine.
I believe it will only accelerate the end of Putin and his regime, so I don't actually think this is good for Russia if it wasn't them.
Ockham's razor may be? Big protests are common on Prinsjesdag, particularly when sensitive decisions or policies are made. A local protest organisation is therefore significantly more likely than an organized foreign sabotage. If I were Putin and had foreign agents in the Netherlands I certainly wouldn't expose them this physically.
To be fair, Russia also sends people out to inflame active protests and try to push them into greater extremism.
It is russia, no surprises.
One has to be an idiot to assume otherwise at this point
> German journalist Angelique Geray posed as a fan of Vladimir Putin on social media while investigating how covert Russian agents operate in Germany.
> Geray spent several months creating a fictional online persona. Using the alias Katya, she presented herself as a pro-Russian influencer, trying to build a following organically and establish contacts on social media.
> “Katya” posted videos of herself posing in a striped Russian sailor shirt, professing her admiration for Putin, and walking around the Bundestag with a Russian flag. Before long, agents contacted her and offered her unspecified assignments and sent her payment in Bitcoin.
> Geray and other RTL journalists were able to observe the recruitment process firsthand. New agents were initially given simple tasks — taking a photo, picking up a package, or obtaining a SIM card. They were later drawn into more serious operations, though these “disposable agents” knew only their own roles and did not understand the overall plan.
> Jović invited “Katya” to meet. During their meeting, he spoke about his pro-Russian activities and hinted at the involvement of Russian intelligence agencies. Asked directly whether intelligence agencies in Moscow were directing his social media activity, he said, “Nobody knows. Well, I don’t know — in theory. In practice, I do know.” Later, when Geray approached him under her real name as a reporter, he denied taking part in a pro-Russian campaign.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/09/14/an-undercover-german...
Russia is at war with Europe.
Europe is not yet at war with Russia but it will be in time.
We should just build up enough nuclear deterrent to prevent Russia from attacking us.
We've been dependent on the US for this but this was also by the US' own design. They didn't want many countries to have nukes. So the whole 'Europe is not doing its bit' is not really justified.
We don't need more tanks and soldiers because if we go at Russia like Ukraine does, so many people will die that it doesn't matter who wins. We just need to be able to destroy Russia so thoroughly that they won't think about attacking us, just like they don't attack the US. Mutually assured destruction has kept the world safe for almost a century but now with the US no longer committed to NATO we just need to build our own.
Except... it finances and arms Ukraine. Yeah, Europe is at war with Russia.
Yet again.
The plan is to turn Europe into a Pro Russia right wing empire before that happens though. AfD etc.
A multi-pronged plan, starting with funding Brexit to weaken Europe.
I live here. It is the disgruntled farmers whodunnit. There is no measure these onions wont take to defend their stranglehold on our little land. Block the highways with tractors. Sabotage the railways. Intimidate politicians. All because we are sensibly trying to limit their ability to pollute our soils with nitrogen and ask them to leave some space for people to build houses on but nay tmust all be spent towards producing cowfeed yuck
It's easy enough to make a human level self driving car, that's not the problem. The expectation is not human level it's much closer to perfection. Security is the same way, the expectation requires near zero defection. Western governments have slowly accepted compounding marginal decreases in security assuming it doesn't move the needle much. Now they are reaping the consequences of their ignorance of security posture.
This is getting concerning. Multiple locations and deliberate disruption suggest this may be more than random vandalism. Hopefully investigators find out who is behind it and why.
Oh, these wannabe intellectualist.
Russians been messing with your elections, blowing up factories, inducing illegal immigration, destroying infrastructure and openly threatening to turn Europe into a radioactive dust. Meanwhile people: "hopefully investigators find out".
Seriously, this is ridiculous
It's baffling honestly. EU running around like a Metal Gear Solid NPC "What was that noise?" "Who's footprints are these?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjPpX1g1juo
Came for the news for nerds, got a blog from the BBC propaganda machine.
Anyway, I am surprised the BBC blogger didn't add north koreans and some linked it to porn on the internet.
the railway was hacked with a metal tube... perfectly suited news
A similar hijack will soon(ish) become impossible, as the current train protection system will be replaced by ERTMS.
Basically, the current system works by injecting a small current signal on one rail and trying to sense it on the other rail. A train's axle shorts the rails together, so sensing it means a train is present. Or, in this instance of sabotage, a jumper wire.
ERTMS L2, which is being installed over the next decade or two, primarily uses axle counters and train position reporting, so a jumper won't do a thing. You can still fool an axle counter, but that's rather easy to fix: just drive a known-good train over the section.
lol, nice try.
Europeans don't realise how close war is to their homes. Russia won't stop unless it's stopped.
Or maybe they do realise it how close it is. It is not a certainty yet, but we can see russia circling.
No idea when it would start but there are only two outcomes I can see:
* Russia doesn't use nukes and get flattened. They don't have the troops, material or finances to deploy on even half the frontline.
* Russia use nukes and get flattened (and so does a chunk of EU). French doctrine when it come to nuclear warfare is quite agressive. Not idea how london would react, but major russian cities and/or ressource hubs would see retalations on kind.
I don't know how much support or opposition from the population such actions would have, but people are getting fed up with external threat burning so much of our governments time and attention on external issues (brexit, babysitting trump, russian threat) that internal issues get further pushed to the future.
>Europeans don't realise how close war is to their homes.
I would add 'Western-' to that. The Eastern Europeans are keenly aware, have been for years.
- Dutch person.
We are at war with Russia, but just as with climate or mass immigration, we refuse to address it.
Define Europeans - us Poles absolutely understand the danger. In fact I'd say we're already at war with Russia, the way they attack our democracy, our institutions and politics daily. But someone in Portugal might not see it the same way we do.
Russians are Europeans.
Many, maybe even most Russians would like to be part of Europe, even if they would complain about the terms that would enable them to join pan European organizations. For now they are just potential Europeans.
Russia being part of Europe is a fact and not a preference. It seems like you want to see Europe as being united against Russia instead of this being an internal European conflict, which it is.
....half of Russia lies in Europe, if someone born in Moscow isn't European what are they?
Yes, obviously - but I'm not sure how that's related. Or maybe actually in fact it speaks of the fact that some terrorist acts within Russia were commited by or on the order of the Russian government.
Europeans are just mentally incapable of reasoning about security matters. It's essentially forbidden to research.
They're trying to dissuade European NATO members from continuing their support for Ukraine.
Things are going badly for Russia. The war has lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany and Ukraine is actually taking back territory. Over half a million Russians are dead and probably a million wounded. The economy is imploding due to the enormous expenditures (30% or more of GDP is spent on the war). Just like in WWI Russia is running out of men to continue the fight. It either has to give up or escalate.
I believe Zelensky made a big mistake insulting Putin when things were going stellar at the front a couple months ago. By making it personal Putin is doubling down until he defeats Ukraine or Russia is destroyed in a war with NATO.
Sad to see so many people here in the comments jump the gun and think of Russia.
Some local context: Today is "prinsjesdag" when the budget is announced. Protests are common, particularly when sensitive decisions are made. There are multiple organized protest movements in the country that have used physical force in the past and some of them had announced protests for today.
Could it be Russia? Yes. But local protests seem significantly more likely. Moreover, if I were Putin I wouldn't expose my foreign agents this physically. I would use them in much more insidious ways such as actually starting or supporting these protest movements. In a similar vein: Could any shooting in the US be caused by foreign agents? Maybe. But usually there is a much simpler explanation; guns and bitterness.
If this was a protest it would be clear who did it. The farmers' have no incentive to mess with infrastructure without being visible for their cause.
yes they do, it hurts their image more directly if you claim it's you.
So why do it then? Just to sabotage their own country? That makes no sense.
It makes more sense that this is a continent wide action taken by Russia, considering the similar event in France just a few days ago.
Protests draw attention to your cause. This doesn't draw attention to anything, it is straightforward sabotage. Neither is it in line with how typical protestors operated before.
You are jumping to the assumption that foreign agents wouldn't be exposed, but any willing idiot can be bought to conduct such activity. Recent research in Denmark showed that sabotage comes, most likely, from locals, persuaded by foreign actors.
So two things could be true at once. A local 'protestor', disengaged through some issue (whether climate, farming or anything else), persuaded to join some 'resistance' by anyone.
I don't expect this to be supported by local protesting groups, like FDF or XR, either. Way too risky, media-wise.
It could also be kids doing it "for the lolz", like in slovenia:
https://www.rtvslo.si/crna-kronika/na-zelezniski-progi-iz-ce...
similar thing happened next to a minority area where they put railroad ties (the big wooden things, usually supporting the tracks) on the tracks themselves, and well, that even got politicized for the location reasons.
So widespread? Doesn't look like vandalism to me
Why is it sad for you for people to assume that recurring events with the same source are a base assumption to be made?
A drone just crashed 1km from Wunstorf airbase in Germany too.
If we think about public infrastructure in an adversarial way, the same way we think about software systems; we could say that it's full of critical zero-day vulnerabilities.
Well this is natural, terrorism in Europe is almost entirely Russia-originating (and have always been, see drop to nearly zero after 1991 when Russia lost the capability).
Little by little, people are realising that Europe is at war. Politicians are trying so hard not to say it because of the implications, but there’s only so long you can keep your head buried in the sand.
We’re under constant attacks from Russia… drones, sabotage, cyberattacks, propaganda campaigns derailing our elections…
I’m sick of it.
It is indeed possible Russia is behind it, but considering a domestic farmers' terror group has told its followers to cause disruption today (as it is a politically-significant day), and those are definitely disrupting highways, chances are good they are also responsible for the railway disruptions.
And if this is supposed to be war, then by European standards it is incredibly mild.
We don't know whether this was Russia, it's just as likely it was the "farmers defence force" or climate activists.
Edit: some context as I'm looking like a Russian shill now, which I understand. Today is the day that the budget gets announced, and the farmer terrorist organization (farmer defence force) have announced actions - and have disrupted highways by setting bales of hay on fire, and all the disruptions happened where farmer concentrations are high.
Regardless, the situation is dire, and probably either the tankies or terror farmers are being helped by Russian destabilizing forces, it's too early to call this disruption an action from the FSB.
In the case of France it is pretty obvious, they would never attack random people in such a way. They either target public infrastructure or very specific politician/execs properties, not random people, and definitely not in a way that could result in deaths.
>or very specific politician/execs properties, not random people,
I don't know enough about dutch politics but in my country if the blue collar anti-regulation people wanted to annoy the white collar pro-regulation people without annoying other blue collar people stopping the trains would accomplish that pretty handily.
>and definitely not in a way that could result in deaths.
They laid pipes and jumper cables across the tracks causing the signals to be red.
Those famously anti-train climate activists…
Farmer advocates are not climate activists, surprisingly they have a negative correlation
Agreed
Don't you think those groups would have claimed responsibility by now?
no? if you are diligent you can say nothing and people will hopefully attribute it to your enemies and you get off with your own ploy of looking peaceful and harmless
In which case what do they gain here?
You can claim ownership via restricted channels, e.g. a phone call to key politicians, and rely on their self-interest to keep things quiet while understanding the threat.
In some cases, if the action is a bit too effective, you might even want to avoid it being pinned on you. Al Qaeda occasionally refused to claim ownership of things they very plainly did, and the Russians do it very often (e.g. when they shot down a Dutch passenger plane a few years ago).
Yeah, my bet is on the farmers. The locations where this happened are all pretty rural and farmers have announced havy actions today.
We in NL need to be more concerned about domestic terrorism than the Russians at the moment. Though I'm sure Russian money and bots are involved in some way.
You think farmers are willing to risk the murder of hundreds of their fellow countrymen as a form of protest? That’s plain terrorism.
Yes, they've already murdered people by causing accidents on the highway.
Are we allowed to call it terrorism now? Or just when it is farmers? I know that both climate activists and BLM have disrupted highways as well....
>caused accidents vs >"disrupted"
This equivocation is noted but not compelling
I used "disrupted" as that is the language that is used to describe these actions. When you disrupt something, you increase the likelihood of something non-standard happening including accidents. I believe the narrative was that if drivers can not pay attention to the road and keep control of their vehicles, then they should not be driving.
This was something that people decried about during the BLM and Stop Oil protests, see below for some of the accidents caused by those actions:
>M25 Police Motorbike Crash (November 2022): An Essex Police motorcycle officer was injured in a collision involving two lorries during a rolling roadblock. The roadblock was set up because Just Stop Oil activists were trespassing and climbing onto overhead gantries along the M25.
>Greenpeace bridge protesters blamed for crash on Fred Hartman Bridge https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/greenpeace-bridge-pr...
>Crash data raises safety questions about bridge protests on I-40 https://www.carolinajournal.com/crash-data-raises-safety-que...
Yes, I definitely think they are willing. I don't think all farmers are, not even that many of them are, but I think some are.
Some of them already dumped asbestos on highways, which to me is beyond what any reasonable person would do.
Definitely, and destabilizing by proxy is still an attack
if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
Russia started with the hybrid war psyops shit, they don't get to complain about false accusations.
I'm not defending Russia, it's just that the farmers terrorist organisation has announced major disruptions today and has also set hay bales on fire to shut down highways.
For context: it's "Prinsjesdag" in the Netherlands which is when the budget is announced, and there are major changes to agriculture subsidies.
We've had a bunch of these acts of terrorism in Germany in the recent years. Mostly power, but also train and industrial targets. They all came from the same source, which is very much not Russian.
Don't be naive. They definitely are Russian backed acts. Not all sabotage is done directly by their state security apparatus, funding useful idiots has been the Russian modus operandi since the Soviet times.
lol come on, I'm German. Of course a lot of the terrorism was probably (Vulkangruppe) or proven (the DHL and airport incidents, Tiergartenmord, SUV Bauschaum) Russian.
The only thing that is probably something else is that guy from the last week shooting wires over transmission lines (lone wolf ecoterrorist), and the Nord Stream explosion which likely was Ukrainian.
Anyone blathering about "the far left" is probably either far right or a Russian shill.
Ah yes, climate activists are widely known for hating public transport especially trains.
I wouldn't say they are widely known for hating the electric grid but hey here we are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_arson_attack_on_the_Berli...
Climate activists are definitely known for disliking fossil fuel plants - and there's one directly next to that.
I could see an activist naïvely thinking that this would sever that one power plant from the grid, making a clear anti-fossil statement. Still a bit of an odd choice (it's gas-powered, Germany has far dirtier lignite-powered ones), but not unthinkable.
uhu, sure thing boris!
What implications? Why wouldn't they want an, in this case real, external enemy they could use to distract the people from their own failures?
Perhaps the external enemy being able to do these things is, in fact, their own failure in a way.
Not really, I do not buy that. Ukrainian intelligence can sabotage train tracks deep within Belarus and Russia. And given how convient it would be to blame Russia here I wonder why they do not.
Yeah, not sure why not at least being upfront about the possibility is so hard. In Spain we've had train derailments, flocks of people being directed on social media to force themselves across borders, subterfuge deluxe everywhere and what not, yet the government is mostly silent and claim it's all unrelated, but it's hard to not also see the parallels across the continent and reach your own conclusions. But then also, don't wanna fall into some conspiracy theory trap either...
Russia isn't the only group interested in doing terrorism in The Netherlands. Recently the Farmers Defense Force and Extinction Rebellion have caused far greater disruption.
Could it be Russia? Obviously. But in my opinion the odds are less than a coin flip.
> Recently the Farmers Defense Force and Extinction Rebellion
Why derail trains though, especially in regards to the latter? Given it's one of the most environmental ways for transportation. Besides, groups like that tend to want to take responsibility, the whole point is to get attention to their groups.
You're assuming rational goals instead of thinking in radical acts of terrorism.
Throwing paint at a painting does not help the environment, but it does create radical flank effects.
Blocking the highways does not help agriculture, but it does bring their problems in other people's home / discourse.
You're misunderstanding why they do those things in the first place. You're referencing real activities here, how many of those activities you references people refused to take responsibility for doing?
Look at photos from these events you refer to, people are proudly holding banners and signs here, not trying to be anonymous and flee from police and intelligence services.
Have you never participated in political activism yourself, and you have no clue why you'd do those things you cite?
It's a spectrum. You derail a train and nobody gets hurt? Shout it from the rooftops! You derail a train and people die? "Wasn't me, guv."
Please, do suggest this to any of these environmental activism groups and see how they'll laugh at you. You seriously think these people think like that??
People fuck up, man. They don't plan to, but they do.
"Fucking up" in terms of "accidentally derailed a train more than wanted"? Sure, I used to do that too when I was a teenager...
Stop, not derail. The saboteurs aren't physically damaging the railways: they are shorting the rails together, causing a fake train to be detected.
But indeed, XR is the least likely subject. They have stopped trains before, but that was a human barricade, and it was a coal train.
Groups such as Extinction Rebellion are easy to steer off course by the state into taking meaningless actions such as gluing themselves to London Underground trains.
Perhaps this is just as well. If Extinction Rebellion really wanted to take down the entire transport network, they could do so by 'accidentally' touring the big stations with a leaky rucksack filled with lead paint fragments or ground up asbestos tiles, to then tip off the press. This would probably reveal an unfortunate truth, that there was plenty of aforementioned toxins already on the network, from brake pads and paint of yesteryear. Nonetheless, some closure for the guys in hazmat suits would be needed.
I think of it the other way: EU politicians want war but are not able to say it out loud and clear. Instead we get a bunch of "russian sabotage" all over the place with flimsy evidence to back it. Get the simple people into a paranoid state and use it to justify decisions which are already made. Classic FUD. And the people seem to swallow it.
Yeah mate whatever. Instead of scrolling twitter or whatever, donate some of your actual time to Ukraine and start getting up to speed with what Russia is really doing, straight from the source.
Otherwise you’re just going to continue being what is commonly called a “useful idiot”.
Edit: seeing your other posts, seems like you’re well beyond useful idiot territory and either a Russian agent or plain and simply a troll. Of course it’s always the ones you most expect.
Wont donate anything to Ukraine – hopefully the part of my family from there has managed to bring out their boys. Yes, busification is a thing over there, "mate". If the useful idiots here in Europe are strong enough to back a political decision to go to war with Russia, I'm out. But you can go and fight, "mate".
Edit: Seeing you're profiteering from the war [0], case closed I guess.
[0]https://sevenseed.eu/ "Seven Seed is a Brussels-based group dedicated to empowering the European startup ecosystem, focused on the technologies that matter most: Artificial Intelligence and Defence."
I’m not profiting from the war, I’m donating my time. Idfk what’s wrong with you.
(I mean, I know exactly what’s wrong with you… but you get my drift)
And Russia is winning, they already have neutralized if not subjugated the US, but most of Europe is also heading towards that outcome, and fast. Russia is not this near omnipotent 5D chess mastermind behind all of the scenes in all of politics all across the West, but they are terrifyingly good at exploiting existing trends and influencing trajectories just so and they have been at it with great continuity over many decades. It's starting to really pay off. At this point, it's hard to imagine how the next German federal government could be anything else than either a completely dead-on-arrival coalition of polar opposites that only barely hangs on to keep the AfD out of government but will be unable to do anything at all, or an extremely Russia-friendly government the AfD is part of if not leads that is pretty much certain to continue within the EU what Trump started within NATO. Both outcomes serve Russia well, and the establishment has pretty much handed them that opportunity without meaningful resistance.
NATO is certainly weaker with the USA having lost her mind. But Russia seems to have gotten herself into a total quagmire in Ukraine and she is bleeding badly with no end in sight. Nobody is winning here.
I'm starting to be a little worried about what Putin has planned for Europe.
Starting? I've been worried for more than 4 years.
A desperate megalomaniac is a dangerous thing.
pre-coffee and I kept reading that as "sabotage causes major Neanderthal rail disruption"
I was like hmmmm what timeline am I in now?
Robert J. Sawyer's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax
might be time to read it
It should be noted that today is Prinsjesdag and the new yearly budget is being presented, or however that is properly translated in english. Especially now that farmers are also lighting hay bales on fire next to highways the most likely explanation is nationals doing this
Checking some other calendars yields:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Nazi_Germany#National_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws#Text_of_the_law...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Days_of_Repentance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_of_Democracy...
Dutch person here. I never heard of these but Prinjesdag is big national news each year. Considering that this is happening in the Netherlands, it's about as likely related to the, eh, ten days of repetitice as it is to the moon landing
Prinsjesdag is held on the third tuesday of september. You are trying to insinuate some weird stuff.
A nationwide railway disruption on September 15th is some weird stuff, my friend
Out of all the ignorant comments in this thread that clearly do not know what is happening in the netherlands and are just assuming wild stuff, you made the most insane one. Congratulations.
Thank you.
I appreciate that you know what is happening near you and in your homeland. As the snowclone could go, "think locally, speak globally"? My epistemology in this regard is unfortunately limited to concrete measurements, such as the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
The English Wikipedia is such an unreliable source, that I could not even be certain whether Mary of Hungary was born in 1505.
I am sorry that I have allowed the bigger picture, or mere coincidence and happenstance, to cloud my opinion of your yearly ceremony and the annoying disruption to your daily commute.
"History may not repeat itself, but it does often rhyme." -- unknown
The little green men
As a european, for the love of god, can we address any single of our concerns by either the national or the supranational government?
It seems as if one ambiguates the other.
It's useful because if an issue is difficult, both levels can disavow responsibility.
in german there is a word for this
Zuständigkeitspingpong
competence table tennis
Sry to be pedantic (it is german after all) but,
"responsibility table tennis" would be a better fit.
Competence in english translates to the skill side of the word
> in german there is a word for this
I am not surprised.
> competence table tennis
Magnificent!
> It seems as if one ambiguates the other.
Interestingly this mechanism contributed a lot to Brexit in my opinion, whenever there was legislation the politicians wanted to enact but knew would be unpopular with the voters they'd blame the EU and wring their hands saying there was nothing to be done, while in the background gold-plating the legislation far beyond what the EU was even asking for. This also made it easy for populists to point to many absurd examples of the EU being comically bureaucratic, when a lot of the more nonsensical ones were literally domestic additions. When the referendum happened, the consequences were obvious to everyone.
While no Brexiteer myself, I personally would want to see the European Parliament get a lot more powers and influence before I threw my wholehearted support behind rejoining. Half the problem with the EU is that it's seen as not particularly democratic as a place for legislation to originate, and giving the elected organ more power (including the power to propose legislation in its own right, and dismiss legislation proposed by the Commission with much more prejudice) would go a long way to addressing that I think. The Parliament needs to be more, well, parliamentary in how it functions.
No, it seems governments can only ignore the concerns then complain the 'alt-right' parties get voted
...or blame russia!
(Some media literally blamed putin because people voted for afd in the recent state election in germany).
What would you have a troll army promote besides AfD narrative if your objective is to fuck with short-term well-being?
Cmon NATO do your thing
All the Russia conspiracism in here reminds me of the claims that they blew up their own pipeline. The cost/benefit analysis of that situation was so obviously out of whack that no serious person should could have considered it to be a possibility.
This case is more plausible than that one was, but not by much. How could the benefit from derailing a few trains possibly justify the risk of A) more sanctions, and B) triggering NATO's Article V? The benefit of these operations is what, slowing trains down by one day? The 2022 sanctions on Russia have lowered their GDP by 6% by some estimates, which is the equivalent of turning the entire Russian economy off for three weeks of the year, every year. The notion that Russia would risk war and/or crippling sanctions to mildly inconvenience a tiny share of rail customers in The Netherlands is simply absurd. Putin makes plenty of mistakes, but he remains a shrewd adversary, and he is certainly not stupid.
And Putin has trump in his pocket. Some oligarch just had to pay a couple of big bucks for his sons wedding...
https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-wedding-b...
Putin’s exit narrative requires escalation. Defeat vs Ukraine is a pathetic wound- “we would have won if it weren’t for.. europe” is preferable to narcissistic permanent victimhood.
Solovyov propaganda is pure nuclear revenge fantasy: https://youtu.be/dA4RP3uID6Q?is=ApmFQtgZvY7mWajP
Europeans really hates sabotage when it happens to them. Nobody blinked an eye when Nord Stream (a civilian infrastructure) was blown up.
FYI Nord Stream had one end in Germany, which happens to be in Europe. So Nord Stream was driving oil to Europe, and some Europeans mattered.
FYI Nord Stream did not transport oil, but gas (not to be confused with gasoline).
That’s not true. It was (and is) a huge thing in the German news and public discussion, especially now that it’s brought up again with recent arrests of suspects, the explosives targeting cargo airports, etc.
Not sure where you get your news from, but plenty blinked.
Putin must be really happy - whatever happens in Europe, he's blamed for it, making him look omnipotent. Most countries would love to have that kind of power.
It’s so much more likely to be the farmers, but it's easier to blame Putin and do nothing about it than it is to stop ruining the farmers and risk angering the cosmopolitan politicians whose votes in the parliament you need.
I don't think he's very happy that his three day "special operation" is approaching five years.
Yeah - looks more impotent than omnipotent.
Putin became a meme. He's almighty and weak at the same time. He's the Zar, Stalin AND Hitler in one person. He's been cloned at least a dozen times but seems to have a grave illness and will die soon. On the one hand it's funny to watch how people are losing their minds over it but on the other it just prevents a clear dialogue and assessment of a politician.
Makes you think. If Russia can get a bunch of teenagers to put pipes on the railway tracks or fly some drones near an airport, then so can AI.
It's surprisingly cheap to recruit a few mugs to cause a bit of havoc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_arson_attacks_against_Kei...
This is very much why I find most people's AI doom scenarios trite.
Humans are useful, easily manipulated operatives in the medium AIs are conversant in and we already have evidence of agents doing exactly this in arguing for PR requests (likely with prompting by an operator but still).
It's not a "bunch of teenagers", a regular pipe won't cause a train to derail, one would need heavy machinery to move that rail in France
Nothing was derailed, they put pipes on the rails that tricked the system into believing there was a train on the track, shutting it down
There are two sabotage acts being discussed; a train was derailed in the other one.
Surprisingly few people mentioning that AI might be the culprit here?
Also nobody is talking about aliens as an option?? /s
I really have no clue what this is supposed to refer to. LLMs with arms and legs, armed with pipes?
I don't understand. What does this have to do with HN, the typical topics, and the typical users who come here?
International politics is intellectually stimulating.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Fair, but I think potential international sabotage of transport systems in a wartime context is interesting. Even if speculative at this point.
You're right, this is a political topic.
What one can do is provide accurate information on the one hand, and maybe flag the topic on the other.
Nerds like trains. A fair few of us live in NL too.
By the upvotes - a lot.
Yes, and that's one of the reasons politics - which this is - used to be shunned on this site. It is like catnip for those who have an opinion - whether agreeing or disagreeing - on the subject and quickly turns into a mud fight. In combination with the down-voting system on HN this gives rise to a strong and unhelpful herd mentality where those with itchy down-vote fingers quickly make opinions outside of their desired narrative fade to grey. Unfortunately this 'no politics' rule has never been free from bias even before the rise of The Orange Man and seems to have been dropped off the radar ever since. This only serves to increase the level of polarisation, the bitter fruits of which are ripe for the picking right here in this thread.
I think AI was mentioned in the article...
A lot of the commenters blame Russia, and ... have you looked at the map?
Netherlands is one of the countries that are furthest away from Russia!
And then, there are countries that take much more active stance against Russia - Germany for example. Should Russia send a message it will probably be to the countries that stir shit.
There are over 200 acts of sabotage in Europe linked/suspected to Russia. There's plenty to go around for everyone, and somehow people are still hesitant to say we're in active hybrid war.