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...

This is a misleading framing. The two cables last year were not taken out by an anchor as an accident, it was literally a ship putting down its anchor just before the cable and then dragging it over the cable. In other words, sabotage. There's no point in trying to color any of this with rose tinted glasses when it's clear who's done it and why.

Well, you never know 100%. There is a small (really small) chance it was an accident. Just like there is a small chance that Al Capone was innocent man.

(But really, it clearly has “Russia” written all over it)

just to be honest, the Pipelines explosion, had "Russia" written all over it, except after investigation, and a possible culprit, i.e not Russia, then nobody wanted to discuss about it anymore. I think the hysteria is too high, people are thirsty for War, looks like..

> people are thirsty for War, looks like

Russians, yes

I wish I lived in a world where it's so easy to know who is good and who is evil and to pinpoint them so well.

You do. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not an ambiguous war. Russia is plainly in the wrong.

Yeah.

Lot of Russian Apologist.

Russia invades Ukraine -> It is Biden's fault, he ordered it.

Russia actually invading and killing -> It was NATO's fault for discussing admission.

Like, Russia is actually 'doing the bad things'.

> Like, Russia is actually 'doing the bad things'.

Yes, Russia is doing bad things.. But do we really need or want a third World War because of it? It’s not Ukraine’s fault that Russia invaded, but Ukraine bears responsibility for having been so corrupt over the past 20 years and for being irresponsible given its proximity to Russia. We still don’t know how much of the aid sent to Ukraine is being lost to corruption... So I am not willing to fight this War.

You should definitely stay home then. Other people are doing the fighting for you.

For me? Definitely not for me. But my country investing my pension, health infrastructure, education system to support their civilians. Even you and all other Ukraine that spend the day online here, are being paid by us. Still, no reason to Europe to go to war for Ukraine, but instead invest our military budget in our NATO partners and preparing to defend them.

If you ask European military leaders where we should invest and how we should prepare, they'll tell you that strong support of Ukraine is one of the best investments into European defense that you could make at the moment. They calculate that it's better to stop Russia in Ukraine than to face Russia (with additional resources from fully occupied Ukraine) in Poland or elsewhere.

Military leaders are pragmatic people and this is a pragmatic approach. We have a problem. We see that the problem has grown in time and will grow further if ignored. So it's better to deal with the problem now rather than waste valuable time and face an even larger problem in 5 to 8 years.

> Military leaders are pragmatic people and this is a pragmatic approach.

Military leaders are politicians. I am in the Military. The official position, is inline with what the political leaders want. Internally, the same Military leaders disagree with the politicians. Internally all say the same: There is no accountability and responsibility in Ukraine. Better is to concentrate our resources where matters: NATO. Ukraine is necessary strategically to consume Russian men, artillery, etc.. That's the military opinion that we hear internally.

> Military leaders are politicians. I am in the Military. The official position, is inline with what the political leaders want.

That's not the case in countries bordering Russia, starting from Finland and heading south, where military leaders take a lot of pride in being constitutionally independent like supreme court judges. Politicians would very much prefer to hide behind NATO guarantees and pretent that the risk does not exist and that the Americans would come to save us (without specifying any details), whereas military assessments are much more calculated and take into account hard facts like redeployment speed of a brigade or daily ammo expenditure. Assessments from military circles have so far been consistently the closest to how events have actually unfolded.

They case they are presenting is a no-brainer. It is by all measures significantly cheaper - by orders of magnitude - to support Ukraine in halting Russians in Eastern Ukraine than to fight invaders on our home turf.

Exactly. They need Ukraine to keep Russia busy. Other than people try to convince us, Men matter. Every single russian soldier that dies, fighting in Ukraine, is one less potential barbarian in their border, that's all truth, but people should understand, it's not about saving Ukraine, but about protecting themselves.

But that's what military leaders are saying too: by giving Ukraine better weapons to defend their homes, we hit two birds with one stone. Better weapons save Ukrainian lives and do more damage to the resources that threaten us too. Every tank Ukrainians blow up with our advanced missiles is a double win. A win for Ukraine and a win for us.

Even if you don't care one bit about Ukraine, it's still a really smart thing to do for our own sake.