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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of doing something like this?

Its not very sneaky, they got caught rather easily.

The damage is annoying, but deep sea cables have problems from time to time, its not like it created critical downtime or is unrepairable damage.

Is this just russia trying to give some sort of warning? A sort of, you have lots of exposed infrastructure, if you keep calling my bluff i might start going after it for real-zies?

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The estimated time to fix the electric cable is over 6 months. Underwater fibers have been quicker to repair as was with another recent case. Electricity exports from Finland to Estonia went down pretty significantly due to this. Estonia was to stop importing electricity from Russia within 1-2 months so this is Russia being Russia as we (Finns, Estonians et al.) know here living next to it.

EDIT: Hamuko basically said the same thing earlier, did not notice

It takes the Finnish–Estonian transfer line offline for about six months when it's still cold, and Estonia (with the other Baltic states) is about to disconnect from the Russian electric grid.

The data cables are gonna be fixed in weeks. Yi Peng 3 got detained for over a month for creating a 10-day downtime on two submarine data cables.

Slowly escalate without anything happening when people get used to it.

It's the maximum Russia can do without direct NATO repercussions basically.

If they could kill a top european politician, they would have done it already. What protects against that is NATO firepower.

I wonder what the reaction would have been if the assassination plot on the Rehinmetall CEO had succeeded?

Difficult to say but I'm guessing some kind of military response with adequate previous warning would have happened. There's no way NATO would have let slipped an assassination like this, this would open up the path to more assassinations if unanswered.

> Its not very sneaky, they got caught rather easily.

Getting caught is not a huge risk in the sense that Russians will still deny it, while at the same time it will raise the stakes in the public eye.

It's the same thing as with the continuous (but still deniable) nuclear sabre rattling.

A warning would be 'lay off or we might hurt your cables'. Attempting to break all the things counts as an attack, a crime, or if you don't want to say crime you might say, an act of war.

I wasn't aware Russia was at open war with NATO, but perhaps their desperation has grown to the point where they are at open war with NATO now.

They want to damage NATO members' infrastructure without resorting to an overt kinetic attack, which would likely be answered with a precision hit against Russia's own infrastructure/ships.

It’s just being annoying, something Russia excels at currently.

Incrementally stir shit to desensitize everyone to their doing shit. It is basically them mocking and openly defying the US-led rules-based world order. It sends a "see, what a useless world order if I can just do this with no recourse" message.

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