Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

It's worth mentioning that cable breakages happen quite often; globally about 200 times per year [1] and the article itself mentions that just last year, two other cables and a gas pipeline were taken out by an anchor. The Gulf of Finland is evidently quite shallow. From what I understand, cable repair ships are likely to use ROVs for parts of repair jobs but only when the water is shallow so hopefully they can figure out whether the damage looks like sabotage before they sever the cable to repair it. Of course, if you're a bad actor and want plausible deniability, maybe you'd make it look like anchor damage or, deliberately drag an anchor right over the cables.

Cable repairs are certainly annoying and for the operator of the cable, expensive. However, they are usually repaired relatively quickly. I'd be more worried if many more cables were severed at the same time. If you're only going to break one or two a year, you might as well not bother.

1: https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...

"Germany’s defense minister says damage to 2 Baltic data cables appears to be sabotage" - https://apnews.com/article/germany-finland-baltic-data-cable...

He just wants more funds for his department.

Reflexive cynicism about the military isn't as warranted in 2024 as it might have been a decade ago. And it wasn't really warranted a decade ago either, when Russia was blowing up Czech ammunition depots, airliners full of Dutch people, conducting assassinations in the center of Berlin, and sending "little green men" to Ukraine.

It could be an accident, sure, but suspicion of sabotage is not paranoia.

And also, like, the German government (and European governments generally) DOES need to spend more on their military. They underinvested for decades and are now stuck needing to catch up very quickly.

Russia and Russia alone is responsible for "kick-starting" this war.

And providing Ukraine with aid so that they don't get steamrolled is not morally wrong. Nor is refusing to do so so that Russia can more quickly get around to torturing and repressing the population a moral right.

Russia is responsible but not alone. This war could have been prevented by not pushing Ukraine into NATO. It's THE reason for the war.

So then the resolution to this war is simple:

Russia returns Crimea, Donbass etc and Ukraine promises not to join NATO.

Strange that Putin hasn't proposed such a deal.

Not joining NATO is just a way of deferring the genocide. A regional power has no chance to stand against a global superpower on its own. If not NATO, then a different coalition.

I understand what you mean but Russia is not a global superpower. They are not the USSR. Acting and speaking as though they are is part of how we got into this mess, the US and Europe didn't show any real backbone during the decade following the initial 2014 invasion, or during the Syrian crisis before that, or the 2008 invasion of Georgia before that.