Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

So what's the solution ? Assign a surveillance UAV to every Russian ship parked "without a good reason" over a cable ? It would be expensive, but doable, and create a reserve of vehicles for wartime use.

The solution is to project strength and hit them where they don't expect. You are dealing with a thug, not a cost/benefit accountant, as Obama seemed to mistakenly believe. As long as they do things and we respond, nothing good will happen. They have already calculated the response and found it acceptable. Instead of this, go to the mattresses. Oh, your bridge has suddenly exploded? Shame.

"We" already screwed their pipeline, what's left? Provide Ukraine with the means to blow up the Kerch bridge maybe? They're the ones that could legitimately do that sort of escalation.

> what's left?

The other pipelines. Their shadow oil fleet. There are lots of options. But to my knowledge, only the British, French and Americans are capable of the long-range clandestine operations.

Their shadow oil fleet is operated by third parties and shell companies. We are dealing with a mafia state here.

https://windward.ai/knowledge-base/illuminating-russias-shad...

> Their shadow oil fleet is operated by third parties and shell companies

Would be a shame if they started having engine troubles in the middle of the ocean.

The "problem" of Western countries is that the political sphere operates under different moral compasses: like taking down a shadow fleet tanker would be a natural disaster... taking down many would mean many disasters.

The real question is, should security and defense concerns be placed on hold? If our basic freedoms and rights are being attacked, how big of a deal would be a shadow fleet tanker catastrophe?

Western countries have intelligence services with sabotage departments and in general are not above blowing up things their leaders don't like.

If the CIA or US Navy don't have the technical means to blow up the Crimea bridge with plausible deniability they haven't been paying attention.

The problem is we (The US) used to swing our """nation building"""/Imperialism dick all around, coup'ing and invading whoever we want, but after Vietnam and wasting trillions bombing sand for 20 years, a lot of us have softened on the idea of forcing our desires through explosions.

Add to that a natural conservative tendency in the US to jump at isolationism whenever there's an easy excuse (the guy you like is doing the "bad thing" so you don't actually want to stop him, the war is literally somewhere else and doesn't exactly involve us)

So it's hard for people like me, who used to be pretty pacifist, to decide that yeah maybe violence is the right option sometimes?

Also, the entire time we are trying to shake off bullshit "Democrats are warhawks" nonsense from the party that did the desert bombing just because Bush wanted to defend his daddy's memory. The same people who call the Dems warhawks spent the 2000s screaming that "you're either with us or against us" and calling anti-war people pussies so I guess they don't have very good memories.

So for various reasons, some good, the US is extremely gunshy right now. Even those of us wholeheartedly in support of Ukraine, wishing we gave them a thousand Bradleys and tanks, feel uncomfortable with the idea of boots on the ground. Meanwhile Europe has forgotten what intervention is, and seems utterly unwilling to do anything, lest they have to get off their holier than thou pedestal.

Appeasement definitely doesn't work, but the middle east is full of examples of "just bomb them all" also not working very well. Everyone is very nervous. It sure seems like Russia won't stop their horseshit until someone makes them stop, but that's going to require a million dead.