These things happen sometimes, ship anchors sometimes damage cables, but not this often and without serious problems in the ship. Russians are attempting plausible deniability.
These things happen sometimes, ship anchors sometimes damage cables, but not this often and without serious problems in the ship. Russians are attempting plausible deniability.
NATO's political unity and ability to respond is tested with these attacks. Russia does them one after another gradually escalating. Russia maintains plausible deniability or does so small operations that they can always walk them back.
Eventually, some country invokes Article 4 or 5 consultations. Russia hopes that US, Hungary, or Germany waters down NATO response. The conflict continues, but between individual countries not under NATO. NATOs as a organization may continue, but raison d'être is gone.
NATO and Europe did quite a lot to normalize relations with Russia. Russia was invited and became participant of the NATO program Partnership For Peace [0].
The program contains 6 areas of cooperation, which aims to build relationships with partners through military-to-military cooperation on training, exercises, disaster planning and response, science and environmental issues, professionalization, policy planning, and relations with civilian government
Very nice, but the secret services that took over the empire did and does not fancy a rule-based, harmonious order based on mutual relations, human rights, freedom of press etc. As any autocracy or kleptocracy understands, that is very much a threat to their power, beacuse - Population will demand political influence.
- Mindset. A criminal thinks in terms of I win, you lose. Might makes right. Complete opposite of what makes up the dna of the free world.
The imperative is on us to understand that message really well. It goes slowly unfortunately. It is hard for us to grok.Notice how on our part, helped via tech oligarchs, there is an incessant bombardment to undermine support for those values. Kremlin troll factories are a thing, but the Chinese are speading up rapidly in the information sphere too. Especially youngsters are targeted.
The war has already begun, but we don´t want to see it. And that is dangerous.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
It takes one hour to listen. Take notes and verify the facts afterwards. No disinformation there, much less Russian.
Just one rebuttal, but there are many more to be found on the internet.
https://euideas.eui.eu/2022/07/11/john-mearsheimers-lecture-...
You may also want to be careful (or not):
- all countries engage in these things
- how things are seem like how they seem, but this is very often not the case...and rather than consciousness raising warnings for such situations, it very often does the opposite
As always, I recommend a meta-perspective on geopolitical stories, it is much more fun than being a Normative, poorly constrained imagination actor like the vast majority of people.
Geopolitical affairs are indeed difficult to follow. It requires deep internal domain(s!) knowledge, which does not fit your average corporate media business model. The niche outlets that do have a capable editorial board are threatened by takeovers [1, 2] from the likes of Axel Springer [3]. 1 Billion USD for Politico. An idiotic sum for a buyer that small, Wikipedia might pique your interest [3]. That is not to say that Politico is useless now, but you can count on journalistic degradation over time.
But sweeping statements are not of help to get a sharper picture. Instead they risk promoting false equivalence and may turn participants(!) of democracies into passive nihilists. Which is precisely the aim of the foreign influence we are talking about.
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1. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/06/axel-springer-politico-...
2. https://countercurrents.org/2021/09/a-right-wing-german-news...
And if you do now: do you wonder if this is 100% coincidence, or oversight? How often do you hear the idea even discussed, as compared to, say, how often we hear about "misinformation", and the need for more "critical thinking"?
I am glad this situation has a substantial humorous aspect to it, otherwise I'd probably get stressed out about it.
Can you cite anything that he has actually said that even resembles this?