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Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

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Why would they do that though? Like if people start associating "support Ukraine" with "get randomly attacked" then perhaps carrying out attacks could get them to reduce their support. But if the public don't think it's related, then what is the benefit to Russia? Do the Spanish government secretly know and it's a pressure tactic on them?

The recent tactic is to spread distrust to own government by any means necessary - seemingly random failing infrastructure is hardly attributable to some foreign actor, yet it has implications on who gets in the government after next elections, especially europarliament. And as you can observe, most of the "anti-system" parties are pro-russian, openly or by agenda. edit: I'm not saying this accident looks like sabotage. The spread of propaganda after it happened it's a different story.

> Why would they do that though

You won't be the first or last asking why Russia does the thing it does. Russia is world's Dog in the Manger, why wouldn't we give it a bit of credit, though?

Out of all the EU countries Russia would be likely to sabotage (Germany and the UK come immediately to mind), you think the Russians would do this in… Spain which, to my knowledge, doesn’t seem to have much of an opinion on anything and is only in the news when they have heat waves, flash floods, or some public transport mass casualty accident like this one.

But yeah dude, we’re all Russian shills.

Ok so, devils advocate view here. Russians could do this exactly because Spain is on the fence and they would rather they were more antagonistic. They actually want war with Europe, so they can do whatever they like and claim it is Europe's fault for being aggressive. Don't forget, they don't really believe that they are losing the war in Ukraine. They could also be hoping to get Europe embroiled in its own conflicts.

It sounds unreasonable sure, but tbh I am not convinced that the Russian government is reasonable.

The Russian government isn’t reasonable (nor is it particularly competent), but neither is blaming the Russians for every bad thing that happens in the world. Sometimes trains derail. A track buckling due to shit maintenance is the Occam’s Razor most likely answer here.

You can call out the Russians for being pieces of shit without making them the boogeyman for literally everything. Doing the latter just makes you seem like a conspiracy theorist.

If it was a sabotage, we could indeed think with such a perspective. But even then, it sounds hard to believe because I am unaware of any specific grievance or animosity that Russia has towards Spain. If it was Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany, UK, Poland, some of the Baltics country etc. it would be easier to agree with you. (If it was indeed sabotaged). I am reminded of a politician's speech in my country - "They says that everything wrong in the state is my and my party's fault. Somewhere an accident happens in our state, they say we are to blame. When a natural tragedy happens, and people are hurt or die, they say it is because of us. When someone falls down, they say we are to blame. Brothers and sisters, tomorrow when one of their worker has a child unexpectedly, don't be surprised if they claim that we are responsible for that too!".

A large number of roads in my country developed potholes a few weeks ago. I bet it was the FSB sabotaging our infrastructure, and not the extreme frost and snow causing damage!

Russia is already doing enough damage and causing enough fear as it is. Let's not help them by baselessly give them credit for every single thing that ever happens.

The mention of FSB is downvoted is because it was near-immediately clear that this was not the cause. It's total amateurs doing wild speculation for who knows what reason - some stupid upvotes on a website or because it makes their life more exciting to feel like they're whistle-blowing some international conspiracy?

This is roughly on par with every celebrity death over the last 4-5 years being followed by idiots commenting "vaxxed?!"

They do seem to come out of the woodwork quickly. Tbf I remember even before the current war, HN had a lot of Russian users - I'm not entirely surprised they would naturally defend their country, even if they aren't oblivious to what is happening.

On other websitrs those are not real users, but bots. Bots that track each mention of a keyword (nowadays can analyse posts too).

I wonder if Dang has any tools to deal with that.

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