Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

If it's "he who shall not be named", gotta admit, that's a clever strategy: ramp up sabotage and see how NATO/EU will feel about their "red lines", and how well does that article 5 really work in practice. Is it worth more than the paper it's printed on? Let's find out!

People have been laughing at the West crossing multiple Russian "red lines" and the Russians not doing anything. So the Russians can follow a similar route: a cable torn here, a warehouse blows up there, maybe a bank website is hacked, water supply or power station company blows up "randomly". Is anyone going to launch nuclear bombs because of that? That's absurd, of course not, yet NATO/EU just looks weak and pathetic in the process.

Ideally, these countries should ramp up similar acts of sabotage on the Russian territory if they confirmed that's exactly who it is. A dam fails in Siberia, maybe the payment system goes down for a week, a submarine catches on fire while in port for repairs. Honestly I don't think they have the guts to do that.

Some regimes only speak the language of power. They have to be believably threatened; calling them on phone to chat and beg for them to behave, is just showing more weakness. Scholz just called Putin. Anyone remember Macron talking with Putin for tens of hours at the start of the war? A lot of good that did. When they see a credible fist in front of their nose, that's the only way they'll stop.

Macron is rallying for major support.

Poland is building an extremely strong army, and is having none of Russia's BS.

Rutte is head of NATO now, and he has peace as his nr. 1 goal.

There are so many ads for cybersecurity and military on tv here in the Netherlands.

Ukraine received ATACMS (long range missiles) a while ago. This is why they are able to invade Russia back.

We are "weak" because Putin has been destabilising our peaceful politics over the past 20 years.

Russia isn't a fucking bear, it's a drunk wasteland with plenty natural resources, but with fucked up leadership. The Russian oligarchy is desperate, and it's showing.

And yes, I _am_ mad. I am 100% going to protect the EU. What we have and what we had is beautiful, and my Russian friends and my Ukrainian friends deserve better.

I am picking up math, Nix, ML, geopolitics, nature, sports and more because of these idiots in Russia. And I'm exactly what they fear most. A transgender person.

I'm so, so done with Putin and Lukachenko's BS.

Really? Russia, with the 6th largest army in the world, had to pull in Iran and Pyongyang to not get invaded by the 13th largest [1][2].

Moscow is being a nuisance. That doesn't make NATO or Europe look weak, it makes Russia look pathetic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/world/europe/ukraine-russ...

The West didn't really help Ukraine in the first month [1]. We thought the Russian army was competent and would ride into Ukraine like we did in Iraq. It wasn't until after the weakness was made apparent that aid started dripping in.

Ukraine repelled a Russian invasion on its own. Our generations-old anti-air systems are downing their latest weapons. Meanwhile, our generations-old missiles are taking out their state-of-the-art systems.

To the degree Russia has been able to claim any victory, it's in not being demolished. That's the standard. Not winning. Simply surviving.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aid_to_Ukrain...

And it's even without mentioning the direct role of Boris Johnson in tanking the Istanbul accords.

That's exactly how the Russians perceive the EU. They are perceived as weak. There is no way they would have started the invasion if they were afraid of them. They are engaging in asymmetrical warfare because they are convinced they can demonstrate that to the world as well "look what we are doing there and well we get is phone calls form Sholz" [1]

> Scholz condemned the war of aggression against Ukraine

> The German leader called on Putin to withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine ...

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-scholz-calls-putin-for-first-...

That might look like a "power move" by Germany but it looks absolutely weak in the eyes of Putin.

Stil far from closing the gap between the 6th and 13th largest armies. Russia invaded an inferior force and got stymied. This would be like America's Vietnam being Cuba, where we fully committed the U.S. military and economy to the task and still continued to fail. The fact that Russia has never even established air superiority knocks it out of the category of running a modern military.

Europe has been weak. The difference is Russia is weak while trying its hardest. Europe is weak because it can't bother to try.

> That might look like a "power move" by Germany but it looks absolutely weak in the eyes of Putin

Nobody considers condemnations power moves. Also, Putin's track record in reading who's too weak to do what doesn't look too hot right now.

It doesn't matter. It attacked one of the largest countries in Europe, captured territory and is still holding it and making progress. Right under EU's nose. It can brutally throw men in the meat grinder and doesn't worry too much about it. Calling Putin like Sholz did or like Macron didn't help. Showing him a fist that's ready to strike, only that works. Anything else is showing weakness.

> We are "weak" because Putin has been destabilising our peaceful politics over the past 20 years.

The weakness is not accidental, they've been weaving in their agents all over the place and shaping public opinion. Now they are engaged in asymmetrical warfare. Germany has been doing deals with the Russians buying gas and oil from them. Merkel laughed at the US for being worried about it:

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/aa2afe9f-0b5d-45b7-a647-cc61f6d01...

> If we’d known then what we know now, we would of course have acted differently

Yep.. When Merkel was German chancellor, I thought she was amazing. Not a big fan anymore :(

> It doesn't matter. It attacked one of the largest countries in Europe, captured territory and is still holding it and making progress. Right under EU's nose. It can brutally throw men in the meat grinder and doesn't worry too much about it. Calling Putin like Sholz did or like Macron didn't help. Showing him a fist that's ready to strike, only that works. Anything else is showing weakness.

Yeah. I agree. Putin is not interested in anything but power. And he doesn't listen to anything but power. Europe is slow and timid, but the impacts of ww2 are still deeply embedded in our cultural memory.

Also note that the Russian army was not "fully committed", it was not using conscripts (there was a small scale deployment of conscripts, but after the public scandal they were quickly removed from Ukraine) and did not fully pull forces from all its military districts.

Meanwhile Ukraine was fighting in the total war mode from the first days (they do not pull "recruits" from streets in the broad daylight into military buses just for the fun of it) with huge external support. And having the well trained by the West ideologically charged army backbone with 8 years of practical warfare experience has helped immensely in the first months.

Calling and talking with Putin as acting as some kind of "power broker" or "decider" (Bush junior's classic). I think that's the context there. That's after years of hand wringing, should we help, or shouldn't help, maybe help, but not too much and so on.

> Europe has been weak. The difference is Russia is weak while trying its hardest. Europe is weak because it can't bother to try

I agree, and I don't know if now it finally woke up or it hasn't yet. It's not over till it's over, as they say.

Which is a myth - oft repeated, but with precisely zero substance.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41813032

Regardless, you can believe that the West did not provide any assurance to Ukraine during the Istanbul talks and that Russia has blown its own pipeline. It's your right.

It was speculated as a possibility by that article, but then it was looked into by others, quite thoroughly, and the narrative fell apart. That happens, you know.

The Foreign Affairs article in the aforementioned thread has a pretty good writeup about the whole thing, if you are interested.

You can believe that Russia has blown its own pipeline

You can change the subject as many times as you want, and speculate, falsely, about what you think other people believe about random topics, all day long if you want.

But this has absolutely no bearing on what we were just talking about.

The problem is that defensive capability cannot be just built all of a sudden if it turns out to be needed after all.

Of course the reason that has become a problem is Putin's aggression and authoritarian rule.

But Europe has indeed been weak in the sense of not having maintained defensive capability. Perhaps that is, both fortunately and unfortunately, changing. (Fortunately for obvious reasons, unfortunately because it means significant spending on something that should not be necessary even though it is.)

Hopefully EU societies will remain strong and resilient in the sense they've been strong all along: strong civil society and democracy.

Equipment from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s isn't "almost everything they can outside of nuclear weapons."

But you're 100% right, Ukraine should have received more, especially because we asked them to surrender their nuclear deterrence.

There is still a lot of equipment Ukraine could use, like long-range cruise missiles would help them a lot to stop from being attacked by Russia long-range cruise missiles.

It doesn't happen anymore for legal reasons.

NATO will 100% not be the first to declare war despite even very serious provocations. Maybe they'll take a leaf out of Russia or Israel's book and declare a 'special' or 'limited' operation though...

To say that Russia is just being a nuisance.... They have just won a war. That is clear as day now.

Trump's election is the nail in the coffin. Immediately we saw Schultz call Putin and Zelensky declare that the war will be over early next year - implying a negotiated settlement.

It's done. The Russians won. Exactly what they won is all that is to be decided.

As you yourself just pointed out a few lines line above this, there's no need to take a leaf out of anybody else's book: all the US' and NATO wars of the past decades have been presented as "special operations": e.g. the war against Serbia, the war against Iraq, the war against Afghanistan, etc.

You are moving the goalposts, though. Support between 2014 and 2022 wasn't even remotely close to:

> They send almost everything they can outside

Also even now they aren't exactly sending everything they can, rather everything they want to.

Did they do that during the first few months of the war? I recall them having more volunteers than they could use in the early days.

But if it doesn't declare war, it now looks weak. That article 5 isn't worth very much all of the sudden. At the same time it's stupid to start WW3 over a village in the Baltics, a town in Romania, a cut cable or a few blown up warehouses. The Russians took the same "red line" idea and are playing it against the NATO and the EU. I can't interpret as any other way. And on one level, it sort of works.

> Maybe they'll take a leaf out of Russia or Israel's book and declare a 'special' or 'limited' operation though...

I'd like to believe. But remembering how much hand wringing was needed to send a few tanks to Ukraine and some F-16. Somehow, I doubt they'll be able to do anything as bold as a "special" military operation against Russia. Heck, they can't even provide air defense for Ukraine's skies. (As in use NATO's own defense systems to stop the Russians destroying apartment buildings). That's the point the Russians are providing. They are destroying NATO's reputation without even trying to too much, and I posit, so far it works.

If you accidentally pick a fight with a BJJ fighter, hope they are a black belt instead of a purple.

Or to paraphrase Vladimir Kara-Murza, democracy will come to Russia. So far the west has been better off letting Putin tie his own noose.

Unfortunately the noose is a tie and it's soaked in Ukrainian blood so far.

Of course Ukrainians should be grateful for the help they got, and no doubt they are. But they should also be worried about how little they got and based on that rate where this war will eventually end. I am afraid it will end with bleeding all of Ukraine. I wish Western leaders, especially West European leaders were more bold. Where are the Margaret Thatchers, François Mitterrands, and Helmut Kohls of yesteryear. We got milquetoast Sholzs and Macrons instead.

Putin has destroyed Russia's population pyramid and driven away all sensible educated people. Their society is screwed for a generation.

Trump is a wildcard and may try to pressure Putin if he thinks it will get him the Nobel Peace prize he so desperately desires. But even the most conciliatory Trump cannot save Russia now.

Not nearly as much as the drop in the Soviet Union / Russia. European military spending is significantly larger than Russia’s.

US cannot claim a single victory in the past 4 decades, it's been debacle after debacle.

Militarily? You've got to be joking. Russia is still struggling with the military part of the campaign.

Russia's "top of the line" weapons are routinely being potted by decades-old NATO kit. They are a spent force, conventionally. The military turned from a fighting force into a propaganda tool, aimed at projecting masculinity to a domestic audience over maintaining martial capability.

The problem in the West is there are a lot of Soviet-era talking heads who make money when Russia gets attention. There is no money to be made if Russia is a loser. So it's in the interest of that foreign policy wing to trump up Moscow as if it's a competent military versus the dumpster fire that it is without Pyongyang and Tehran.

Turns out looks and optics are much less important than money and munitions.

Another approach which is more likely to work is for NATO countries to step up and really hurt Russia through every means short of war. That mainly means finding a way to reduce their fossil fuels export income.

The west won the cold war without firing a shot or blowing any bridges or sinking any ships.

I do agree Putin will change course if he feels he can lose power but it's not clear how pressure on Russia leads to that. He holds the country in his iron fist. He's not going to care about losing some ships or bridges as long as he thinks that he can come up ahead in the long run. He'll just use that as motivation to send even more soldiers to Ukraine and ramp up arms productions.

Which is happening now.

EU is about to impose sanctions on the shadow fleet of Russian tankers.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20241111IP...

So it would seem.

> There's nothing left to squeeze out of it and they're headed for a meltdown in 2025/2026.

Promises, promises. By the time 2026 rolls around, nobody will remember this comment to tell you how wrong you were.

I mean, you could be right. Who knows. The point is the future is uncertain, and using predictions as proof or arguments is stupid. Nobody knows what's going to happen 2 years out.

Did you know ahead of time they would get NK soldiers, NK artillery ammo, Iranian drones? What if Putin finds some clever ways of compensating for the losses? He's actively trying to improve his situation, not just sitting on his ass watching, as these predictions imply.

Comparing Russia to Serbia, the cliff of inaction seems almost insurmountable.

Current Russian interest rates are 21% on cash, 15% on 10 year bonds[1] and the government is increasing spending on the war.[2]

The wheels aren't going to come off immediately, but they've been reaching the peak of their ability.

Or to put it another way: you're not clever for going "nah uh" and there's no such thing as magic. For the next 3 years Russia's economy is being tossed at the war entirely, and every dollar which is is coming at the expense of everything else.

And this is all based on the heavily massaged Kremlin figures: they're not easy to lie about, but they're certainly also only ever going to be reported to try and shape a message of the type you're now parroting: you can't win so don't even try, Kremlin-strong, authoritarianism is just plain tougher then you decadent westerners.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/government-bond-yield

[2] https://cepa.org/article/russia-budgets-for-its-forever-war/

There is nobody in russia to make democracy happen. Their "opposition" is just different shades of putinism.

Ukraine still holds a part of Kursk region after months of Russia failing to take it back, is that what winning looks like?

We are doing no such thing. Unfortunately.

Technically no, but a more forthright assessment would be: "Russia has been winning the war of attrition, but very slowly, and only for the past year. At current rates, it would take several decades to reach Kyiv. Meanwhile, for the sake of these extremely modest gains, it's spending about 10 percent of its GDP."

Context it is everything.

Oh come on now, you know this isn't true. The US and it's allies have a mountain of military tech they haven't sent for a variety of good and bad reasons. Ukraine regularly begs for more and better weapons, if they were "sent almost everything" would they be begging for more?

Europe mostly learned its lessons after WWII and is more interested in commerce and trade, not in battling over colonial possessions and ethnic partitioning. The games that the US (in Iraq, Syria etc.) and the Russians are playing have had nothing but negative effects on the world. US poked the hornets nest in Iraq/Syria and now Europe has had a refugee crisis for 10+ years. Russia butchering Ukraine the same.

Just claim your advisors to South Korea are taking care of extra-territorial combatants from that war. No reason to declare a war on Russia when it's clearly part of the existing conflict.

The 2000s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were pretty successful. The holding of Afghanistan and Iraq, not so much. Russia doesn't seem to be having nearly the level of success in invading Ukraine (although invading Crimea seemed to be pretty successful).

Which is why I think it's insane that both US political parties have made "trade war with China" a major policy plank. I think the CCP is as awful as the next person, but cutting trade now means cutting leverage later.

If what you say is true then there should be no problem with China to stop supplying Russia in return for the west not cutting a similar amount of trade with them. However I think you'll be surprised to find there are things that China cares about more than commerce.

We sent a couple hundred tanks, out of 8k. We sent a couple hundred Bradleys, out of 6k. We sent literally expiring missiles. We sent the tanks missing it's best armor, because we are squeamish about giving away uranium I guess. We sent a few extremely dated F16s, instead of the thousand F35s we have. One of the main ways things were donated to Ukraine was former Soviet powers donating their old trash and getting IOUs from NATO to replace it.

With this sample platter of western equipment, Ukraine has dragged a supposed bear to its knees. With this smattering of 80s vintage, anti-soviet equipment, Ukraine has forced Russia to massively draw down their old soviet inheritance to replace the 2500 Russian tanks lost (plus several hundred essentially donated to Ukraine a couple years ago) and 1000 AFVs destroyed, and nearly 4000 IFVs destroyed.

Like it's not some bombastic victory of course because both sides are so short on equipment that it's basically 1 million men vs 1 million men, and Russia CAN build artillery shells in quantity, so they are advancing at a snails pace in some areas.

But the insane ROI on vintage NATO equipment is hilarious. The Soviets were always afraid of the West invading them, and it appears their opinion was accurate, they would have had a very very bad time. We built this stuff to mulch soviet equipment, and boy were we good at that.

The Patriot is old enough to have been embarrassed during the first gulf war by a SCUD missile. HIMARS/ATACMS is even older. The tanks and Bradleys we sent are the scraps that didn't get upgraded after Desert Storm.

If Europe won't protect Poland, Poland will defend itself.