Hacker News Reader

I suspect the price of a ship compared to economic damages caused by the cut cable is negligible. This is what russia calls "assymetric war". The response should be more economic sanctions.

View on HN

There's generally enough cables that cutting one doesn't completely shut down some area of web traffic, it just gets slower, so it's hard to say.

But yeah, if Russia keeps it up, just blockade the Baltic Sea for ships heading to Russian ports.

Economic sanctions won't prevent the FSB from paying off ship captains to do these things. Seizing ships and imprisoning captains might provide some amount of deterrent. Clearly only way economic sanctions will have a behavioral impact on Russia is if the effects are so bad it triggers revolution which has its own dangers. Direct consequences for the people in the sphere of these actions is more prudent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com