Cable-cutting tanker seized by Finland 'was loaded with spying equipment'

Note that generators need to run at constant rpm to provide the correct ac frequency. Your car has gears so that it can run at lower rpm at low loads and so you won't see the same effect.

The cable positions are public info, they don't need to spend time finding out where they are.

And it's not like the ships are badly designed. The Kuznetsov sister ship that was a casino for a while and now is Chinese works perfectly well. The problem with Russian navy is lack of maintenance, total disregard of safety and procedures, 0 fucks given about human life, uneducated, drunken crews and widespread corruption.

I recommend reading about K-429 - a nuclear submarine that sunk not once but twice. First time because it was ordered to do exercises while the hull was in maintenance. Despite protests of the crew. Second time in dock during repairs after it got recovered. Worker negligence apparently.

Fun fact - it's not the only Russian nuclear submarine that participated in 2 disasters.

Kinzhal and Zircon have been at least semi-reliably shot down. Iskander is very reliablly shot down. The main issue is that Ukraine just doesn't have enough Patriot batteries to defend the whole country, so the Russians stopped shooting where the air defense is.

They also use a bunch of S-300s as ballistic missiles (a secondary capability to their primary role as air defense) but primarily against cities that don't have air defense. But they're too inaccurate and inexpensive for the Ukrainians to bother attempting to intercept even if they had enough of the appropriate air defenses.

It's just a PR stunt. Notice how troll farms tried to hype doomsday scenarios, and how little traction such fears got in the actual national security circles.

They were looking to kill Zelensky and control the entire country.

In fact, they still are.

It was a war from the beginning.

That's a huge hindsight bias. Even the most optimistic scenarios from various secret services / think tanks predicted only weeks / few months of resistance at the most. If you read Ukrainian accounts, most weren't very optimistic either. You can also read up how many commanders in the south defected - having more such defectors could flip the war quite quickly. The question of whether to defect or not (or simply run) is something which many did on the spot based on their personal circumstances and outlook, it's extremely difficult to predict.

It naturally forms in the wider system through layers of control with people at each point doing the minimum required (well, the minimum they think that they can get away with) and creaming off any remaining resources.

The obviousness of reactions from the near top when enacted, against those that are too close to failures or deliberately act against the system, while often difficult to directly link to the top, yes, is very deliberate, and generally not ineptly executed.

In fact the individuals further down are often not really inept: they are can very good at doing what must be done with what little resource filters down while benefiting from what they can cream off, passing actual responsibility downwards, and keeping apparent responsibility for themselves (and their circles) when things go well. The comical ineptness is an emergent behaviour of the overall system that results from these behaviours.

This is in stark contrast to some other regimes, for instance the UK under BoJo the Clown and his next couple of replacements where the ineptitude was at times frighteningly and obviously present at and near the top, or over the longer term things like the post office scandal & cover-up which has dragged on for so long through an apparent endemic immorality rather than localised manipulation at each level.

It's a brazen display of what they themselves consider power and the rest of the world consider stupidity.

If you look at the map you'll see a strategic problem of Russia waiting to be exploited (and no plausibly possible factory building would help to prevent it) - when moving from the Ukraine/Russia border the Russian territory becomes more and more vast, and there is no good way to defend it from mass cheap attacks.

https://vm.ee/en/news/government-restricts-entry-estonia-rus...

https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2050380/latvia-to-a....

https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2050524/lithuania-d...

As you can see it can be done, is being done, and ought to be done across the whole of EU given the number of unexplained fires and explosions of factories, warehouses, and shopping centres in Europe, explosives planted in packages sent via DHL, an attempt to assassinate the CEO of Rheinmetal, cutting undersea cables, and disruption of GPS signal used by civil aviation.

its not about Ukrainian battlefield, its more if western missiles will be destroying Russian infra, Putin will strike objects/bases/infra in Eastern Europe, he was very clear about it during initial invasion message.

You have misread. At least here in Q2 (https://yle.fi/a/74-20133775) Yle writes that first the ship was asked to move to Finnish territorial waters, and only then it was boarded.

Closer to 90km. If it was 20, all ships to/from St Petersburg would have to pass through Estonian/Finnish territorial waters and we wouldn’t have questions around jurisdiction.

In terms of potential hybrid warfare targets, Kaliningrad looks soft. Many of the residents have little loyalty to Russia. A partial blockade combined with some sabotage and support of separatist organizations could accomplish a lot.

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/68606

Or perhaps you're confusing "clear" with "explicit": Consider a mob-boss surrounded by associates, casually observing into the air that "Example Ezio needs a fitting for concrete overshoes since I expect he'll be sleeping with the fishes."

Putin’s plan for a new Russian Empire includes both Ukraine and Belarus https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putins-pl...

Such extremely hostile rhetoric is Russian mainstream.

Hitler’s rise was not a product of strict adherence to democratic norms. The Weimar authorities repeatedly broke with "normal process" including banning him from public speaking, suppressing Nazi media, outlawing the SA, relying on emergency decrees, and bypassing parliamentary governance. These anti-democratic measures not only failed to stop Hitler but eroded trust in democracy itself, creating the conditions for his eventual ascent.

Moreover, the KPD (the German Communist Party) played a significant role in destabilizing the Republic. They engaged in widespread political violence, targeting both Nazis and moderate leftists. They fractured anti-Nazi opposition by labelling the SPD as "social fascists" unworthy of cooperating with. The Nazi's Sturmabteilung was hardened primarily in response to KPD attacks through the Rotfrontkämpferbund (attacks that the authorities refused to prevent).

The left's infighting, combined with its own undemocratic tactics, significantly weakened any systemic resistance to fascism and helped paved the road Hitler later marched down.

No, the core of the beef between leftists and liberals is over "liberty," or something that a liberal would call liberty and a leftist would not. Namely, property rights over financial assets. Liberals see these as a kind of liberty: "you own a farm, property rights over the farm connect the labor you do in upkeep and planting to the rewards you reap at harvest." Leftists argue that this might be a nice but temporary side effect and that the core purpose of financial assets is to ensure that rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, thereby establishing, reinforcing, and perpetuating a class hierarchy where the people on the bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on top constantly get paid to exist. They would tell a different story: "Bill Gates owns the farmland, you do all the work, you pay him everything he asks for, and if it's not enough he replaces you." In turn, the liberal would contend that market competition keeps this in check and the leftist would contend that ever concentrating capital interests ensure robust competition on the bottom and absent competition on the top, slowly crushing any market competition favorable to the farmer. At this point, if it hasn't happened already, the liberal will start lobbing horrific tales of leftists abusing farmers and the leftist will start lobbing horrific tales of property rights being used to abuse farmers and the conversation descends into "whose atrocities are bigger / worse / more relevant" discourse.

If you haven't seen this kind of infighting, it's not because the philosophical rift doesn't exist, it's because actual leftism has been outside the Overton window of popular discourse in the United States for the last 50-70 years. McCarthy's Red Scare was the first push, dissolution of the New Deal Coalition was the last. Class Warfare rhetoric was frowned upon by the liberal + conservative majority and kept out of polite company. Now that populism is back in fashion, leftists have been looking to change that, but they have been having less success than the populist right. Watch this space, though.

As with the last time he was elected Trump has vehemently criticised a policy of his predecessor, and then immediately adopted the same policy as his own on being elected.

He did it over bombing Syria if they used chemical weapons, and he’s doing it over Ukraine now, making it clear he intends to continue fully supporting them, while also pushing for a huge increase in military spending. Both policies he and his party were adamantly against and did everything they could to undermine while in opposition.

A lot of us in the US don't subscribe to the idea of "either you're with us or against us". I don't expect every single country in the world to drop everything they are doing and rush to help us invade whatever country we want to invade. I think it is ridiculous to say the EU is not with us because they don't blindly follow us everywhere.

In hindsight, it was a bad idea to invade Iraq anyway.

The EU paid its "protection tax" by implicitly or explicitly endorsing any US actions. It's what always gave legitimacy to any US military action, what gave them the sheen of righteousness. The EU didn't "just watch", they did what they were expected to do.

Going forward, if Trump's anti-NATO agenda materializes, the US will have to find a different source of legitimacy for their actions or be painted as just an aggressor on the world stage.

Probably not, but that’s a separate—if fruitful—discussion. (Better candidates: NATO bombing Yugoslavia.)

What’s not debatable is that it has changed. Given how lightfootedly Europe is playing its hand, it’s surprising it’s taken this long to get Putin at their throats, Trump at their wallets and Xi gutting their industry.

The UK did a similar amount to the US per capita in Iraq, even though we had less to gain and, frankly, it has punched above it's weight in practically every war going since well before the US even existed. Including Ukraine for example, where we were the first to arm them in advance of the invasion.

This comes across as american ignorance, I'm sorry to say.

“Appeasement” is such a fake lesson from WW2. Chamberlain’s mistake was not negotiating with Hitler. His mistake was that he let wishful thinking cloud his vision.

Churchill just did much better in understanding his enemy. In this particular case, with an enemy whose goal was the eradication of whole parts of the world population, the result was that negotiating made no sense. But to say this is the lesson from Munich and to apply this as a cookie cutter template to any dictator is barking mad. Even more so in the age of nuclear weapons.

Beijing has no interest in this. If anything, it has an interest in becoming one of Russia’s sole buyers.

> you have to have a rule that says we can board any ship we feel like and that's super problematic

Why? China is literally doing this right now outside its territorial waters. It’s fine. America would too, if foreign trawlers started cutting its lines. Again, if one person is playing by restrictions everyone else has already abandoned, it’s not difficult to conclude who’s the sucker at the table.

There is no way out of the Baltic Sea without crossing the territorial sea of either Sweden or Denmark. Countries have full jurisdiction in those, cutting cables on purpose is at least a criminal act, if not terrorism. There's no problem handling this, even if you're fully playing by the books.

Russia would then need to switch to ships running only to Kaliningrad, which makes it even more obvious that it's an act of war.

The whole point of doing it with a tanker was deniability. Doing it with a Russian-flagged ship makes it overt. The anti-escalation logic applies in both direction: Russia wants to sabotage as much as possible without triggering a huge escalation, because they're not sure they can win that either (and nobody could win a nuclear exchange!)

That's not to say that nothing can be done, but that it's important to do the right thing, or we risk eroding the few hard-won rules we still have.

By attack undersea cables the ship are no longer exercising the right of innocent passage, and thus is not protected under the law of the sea.

The ship that was boarded, is registered in the Cook Islands (an associated state of New Zealand), owned and operated by a company in United Arab Emirates. And the ship's crew were Georgian and Indian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_S

China retains the right to board any ship in what it considers its sovereign territory, UNCLOS be damned. A similar reading by Finland would let it legally board any Russian ship transitting "its" straits.

Funny, how all the lectures about the "rules based order" and the "rule of law" from Western necons are shown to be total lies by their own words.

Interestingly, Turkey is allowed -- by the Montreux Convention -- to close the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to warships and in fact have been doing so since 2022:

>Turkey has closed off the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to warships from any country, whether or not they border the Black Sea, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The strait closures will still allow warships through if they are returning to a home base in the Black Sea, according to reporting from Naval News. This would include Russian ships in the country’s Black Sea Fleet. However, the decision to restrict warships, a power given to Turkey by the Montreux Convention of 1936, will likely limit Russia’s ability to move ships from its other fleets to the Black Sea.

https://news.usni.org/2022/02/28/turkey-closes-bosphorus-dar...

Common, everyone cried at all the demons when Trump asked Europe to reach 2% of GDP on military spending in 2018. Had we done it, we’d have DOUBLED our spending.

Russia is at 6.3%, USA at 3.4% (7x Russia’s in absolute spending), Europe at 1.3%.

Culture-wise, it’s unthinkable for Europe to come around and revive the military-industrial complex. We’re basically trying to win this war by crossing our fingers, like the French did in 1936 (the famous Congés Payés were offered in 1936, with beautiful photos of parisians going to the beach, while our German cousins were in factories manufacturing guns. Guess who won the war).

For example, Germany also increased its military spending, true - but from a low starting point, with an army even sometimes lacking basic supplies like dumb ammunition due to massive underfunding since the end of the cold war.

The (possible, maybe!) reintroduction of drafting will be agonizingly slow, as the military doesn't have the capacity anymore (and will lack it for years to come!) to even examine even a small percentage of each year, let alone equip and train them. There are no KWEAs (Kreiswehrersatzämter, drafting centers) anymore, and the new "Career Centers" have abysmal throughput.

We sold a very very significant chunk of our military bases and heavy equipment. Those are gone, the federal government often doesn't even own the land anymore. We have almost no working bunkers anymore, both military and public. Etc, etc.

Those are things which we would have to start to change immediately, as it takes ages until we see results. We do sorta, but on a tiny scale - it's not the massive investment you would expect for a country readying itself for conflict.

German politics / state departments are, IMO, in no way readying the public for the real prospect of military conflict. Pistorius, the German defence minister, basically screams into the void. Yes, many agree in talk, but the walk is quite underwhelming.

The defence ministry says we have to be ready for war until 2029. Most projects which are started now will, based on information by the same ministry, never ever be finished until before the 2030s. And yet, there is no hurry visible. We still have time.

It also accurately renders the actions of the U.S., Russia and China since the fall of the Soviet Union. I would love to move towards a rules-based world order. But the first step in doing so is admitting it isn't the status quo.