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.

Listening to people who probably proclaim themselves "anti-imperialists" give full-throated defenses of imperialism never gets old.

>prepared to fight their proxy war to the last of them

The natural corollary to this ridiculous "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian" argument, which you guys never seem to acknowledge, is that it already assumes that Russia will murder every last Ukrainian and take their land. That's just a given, and you then try to blame the West as though they stuck their hand into a lawnmower or something.

None of this holds up to any scrutiny, though. The whole NATO expansion narrative barely exists in Russia, they don't talk about that, they talk about standard-issue Imperialist narratives like "Ukraine doesn't exist, it's not a real country, not a real language, not a real ethnicity, Ukrainians are 'little brothers' to the superior Russian spirit, everything good in Ukraine is Russian and everything Ukrainian is bad, and we Russians must liberate them from their mental delusions of being something other than Russian and restore Russia to our natural greatness & place in the world"

>Listening to people who probably proclaim themselves "anti-imperialists" give full-throated defenses of imperialism never gets old.

Yeah, nothing like nato when it comes to anti-imperialism...

The entire matter of NATO expansion is irrelevant, a dancing monkey to distract the credulous.

Not even Fox News would stoop to this level of harebrained whataboutism.

> goat ...lovers in Afghanistan

or outright, unfettered racism

> something that they have repeatededly said they consider a casus belli

or fawning gullibility.

Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO and until 2014 was dead-set against it. Same for Finland and Sweden until 2022. Whatever happened in those years to trigger such a change in public sentiment, I wonder.

> It must be because they thought, "hey, what better than to get in a costly war", have hundreds of thousands of their own die

“Meat waves” are a decades old Soviet military doctrine that has not changed, and Putin is an ex-KGB thug. Regard for human life isn’t in that picture.

>Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO and until 2014 was dead-set against it. Same for Finland and Sweden until 2022. Whatever happened in those years to trigger such a change in public sentiment, I wonder.

The 2014 orange revolution was carried out, for starters, to put a change to that. And even when later the current leader was elected promised to normalize relationships, he was "convinced" promptly to push for the opposite direction. As for Finland and Sweden, when told to jump, they ask "how high".

Cries of "Whataboutism!" is basically "our shit doesn't stink, let's focus on the others' farts, and treat them as some unique case of foul smell producers!".