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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

From the article, starting in the next paragraph after the one your quote was in:

> But what is the threat? In 1940 the danger of a German invasion of the UK was very real. But the chances of Russian tanks rolling up Whitehall are surely negligible.

> "It's not the tanks you need to worry about," says historian Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us.

> "It's the cutting of cables on the ocean floor. It's the hacking into systems on which so many things depend. The possibility for asymmetric war, for cyber war, is growing by leaps and bounds."

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Case in point, Russia has been fought to a standstill by its much smaller neighbor using asymmetric warfare. There is no reason Russia would not turn around and do the same to other countries.

One may argue it has already done so in the past via election interference, except now it also has AI in its arsenal, which won’t even need ICBMs to be delivered to its targets.

Dude, you have no idea about the modern warfare. The only country Russia is actually afraid of is the USA. And nobody except probably the USA or maybe Turkey is even remotely ready for modern war. Russia is having "military operation" right now. If they start the "war".

Second of all, the "much smaller neighbour" is any European country to them. Ukraine is the biggest country on European continent if we include the occupied territory. And it's actually has the most capable armed forces military-wise. Russia took over 116k sq km of Ukraine. All three Baltic states are 175k sq km combined and they literally can't defend themselves in case USA decides to withdraw.

And last but not the least, Russia's war is irrational. It makes no sense from any rational viewpoint. So relying on common sense in this case is wrong. You need to understand russian ideology and Putin's specifically.

Just leave it. There are so many Russian apologists on this forum it’s exhausting. You’d think the fact that Russia is in the middle of an unwise and unnecessary war of aggression wouldn’t itself be an argument for concerns of more attacks on NATO countries and allies.

But to prebut whataboutism, I also don’t like American imperialism.

> it makes no sense from any rational viewpoint

Didnt they start almost immediately trying to setup like mineral processing facillities in areas they were able to nominally gain control of?

Wonder what the impetus for this was, were the elites embezzling too much or low oil prices or something that motivated them to pillage to make up the difference? Or typical greed in the absence of any asscovery...

I’m not quite sure what the disagreement is here. I was just saying asymmetric or other unconventional warfare can be extremely effective, as Ukraine’s resilience has shown, and there’s no reason Russia could not adopt similar means. In fact it has been doing so in the past. Somehow that makes me a Russia apologist, as sibling comment implies? Genuinely confused.

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