I don't understand. That's how I'd expect most accidents to happen. Someone decides to anchor too close to an undersea cable, the anchor fails to hold and the drifting ship drags the anchor over the cable damaging it.
I'm not saying it wasn't sabotage, but there needs to be something a bit more than that.
Source: have dragged anchors - thankfully never near undersea cables
IMO very very likely sabotage, and brushed under the rug in fear of Russian escalation.
Sanction Russia? Fire a few missiles at Moscow? Write a sternly worded letter?
It's just added to the pile of "shit that Russia does without repercussions" which is opened when (not if) they actually cross the border to Finland and find out what happens when you fuck around with a country who's been preparing for Russian invasion for 100 years.
Plan is clear: continue suppporting Ukraine, continue Russian isolation.
But what can they do? Imagine you are the leader of a small European country like the Netherlands, and one day Russia decides to shot down your passenger plane with 300 people on board. You can do absolutely nothing.
But once a proxy war started, of course the Netherlands are doing their best to make Putin pay for the lives of these innocent people. He basically alienated many countries in this way and then complains of "Russophobia".
https://english.defensie.nl/downloads/publications/2024/09/2...
Or the Netherlands section here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aid_to_Ukra...
350+ APCs, 150+ MBTs, Patriot bateries, SPGs, F16s - I'm sure those on the receiving end do think that their Donbas proxies could have been a bit less trigger happy when the loaned them that Buk AA system back in 2014.
Those 298 inoccent victims, 193 of them citizens of Netherlands will be avenged many times over.
No russian starlink sats. No russian fiber lines. No anything. Just backwater countries, slowly bled dry to have that heap of loot called moscow polished.
The heap of pillaged academics with nowhere to go has wandered off towards the west.
All there is, is vandalism and downfall while high on nostalgia. The aggressive train station HasBeenHobo of international politics.
Is this true?
Or
Are we now in a world where we are all living in fear of actual military retribution for speaking out?
Can you give a link to some information on this please?
* Which pipeline?
* Last year (2023), not 2022?
But using your heuristics, that catamarang crew should probably have been interviewed.
The comment means nothing, neither mine nor the one I commented on so I won't even bother looking up the spelling.
It's more important to understand why the comment is there.
The GP asked what boat, parent effectively said "a boat" which doesn't answer the question. My comment was one of the least likely options, but hey I could have said sailboat...
Not an excuse either but realistically I on a daily basis speak two languages and often interact with people who can barely speak one of those two so I have some basic understanding of a third... Sometimes I can't remember which one spelling rules come from. Not an excuse, it's easy enough to look it up but just context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newnew_Polar_Bear#Damage_to_un...
The internal Chinese investigation indicated that was an accident.. LOL
I don't care to convince folks in this thread one way or another, but yes, there are reason a commercial ship would drop anchor while underway, including bad weather and a narrow / shallow channel. The circumstances from last year had both.
In most of these cases, it's Russian ships dropping their anchors in areas where the cables are known to be and then driving around in circles until they snag and break it. It's not even slightly plausible that they'd be doing it accidentally.
Whoopsy, well would you ever!