Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

> "it’s obvious this wasn’t an accidental anchor drop.”

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.

Weak?

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.

EU as a whole has actually been weak in terms of military capability and perhaps also civil defence. The end of the Cold War and the long peace had allowed a lot of us to believe that there wouldn't be a foreseeable risk of military conflict or a need to seriously prepare against aggression. Many European countries cut back significantly on their military spending and capability. And that seemed like a reasonable and popular thing to do given the circumstances. (Countries in Eastern Europe were perhaps the exception and didn't cut back, at least not so much.)

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.