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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

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European intelligence services assess the three documented ships as operating “with high confidence“ on behalf of Russian interests. Their movement profiles are “very conspicuous” and show “little evidence of commercial activity.”

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...of course they know, but for whatever reason they didn't find a smoking gun so far (e.g. drones on the ships or drones taking off/landing) - or maybe they did but keep it to themselves.

> Official inspections were “symbolic”—not all containers opened

...this might to be the core of the problem.

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> or maybe they did but keep it to themselves.

Yes agree. There is no incentive that intelligence services would communicate their findings, in fact it's the opposite lol

Of course European countries' intelligence and military know about this.

The question we should ask ourselves is why they let it happen... My take is that the "Russian scare" serves the EU's agenda. You'll notice how European leaders and the EU are stroking fear at every opportunity.

Eh, no matter what is done about the drones there would be people who complain about 'fear- and war-mongering', and most likely it would be the exact same people who now complain that the government is 'letting this happen' ;)

Imagine the German military would shoot those drones down over Germany, the self-proclaimed 'pacifists' would be all about 'escalation', 'war-mongering' and 'militarization'. There are clear and very restrictive rules what the military and police are allowed and not allowed to do in cilivized countries, and those restrictions are in general a good thing and shouldn't be changed on a whim.

> the self-proclaimed 'pacifists' would be all about 'escalation', 'war-mongering' and 'militarization'.

They have a right to protest and the government is free to ignore them and do its job. This is not a serious argument and the kip about "civilized countries" is ridiculous, frankly.

Drones don't fly from Russia. They are launched more locally. The vessels mentioned in this article could be taken over by special forces today if the neighbouring governments decided to. So again why don't they? I can't find any sensible answer to that apart from "because they are useful".

I don't know if they can seize those vessels - I'm no maritime law expert, but just to give you an idea how tricky the legal topic can become once a vessel is seized:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/german-court-blocks-...

We're now basically stuck with an old Russian shadow-fleet rust-bucket anchored at our coast which we cannot get rid of.

Of course they can. This is military in international waters, you can do what you want and worry about being sued by whomever later (good luck with that). The French special forces took over an oil tanker and brought it to France no later than October [1].

Again, trying to find too many excuses why it is not possible usually indicates that in reality they don't want to for whatever reasons (alreayd mentioned my theory). Or ask the French to do it as they seem to at least have a working defense chain of command...

Generally, whatever happens, or not happens, in those situations has been decided, and we should never take any public narratives at face value.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2j1gynjddo

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