There is a strong chance that there are no actual "drones" involved and these sightings are just due to random people mistaking airplanes as drones/UFOs: https://x.com/MickWest/status/1971656713230270794
It's not just Denmark, drones have been sighted at multiple Norwegian airports as well, including confirmed sightings by both police and air force at the main air base in Ørland. (Source in Norwegian, https://www.nrk.no/trondelag/etterforsker-mulig-droneaktivit...)
Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia? For as long as I can remember there have been things like fighter jets at the borders and we scramble ours to intercept etc, and before Russian media was blocked here they used to report the we were regularly doing the same. It was never really headline news, even after the war in Ukraine really got going
But now that the US has become an unreliable partner and the EU is talking about the need for increased cooperation suddenly they exact same stories become big news and ministers use it as examples of our complacency, when two years ago they would have said it's nothing to worry about.
And indeed now I see it shared all over social media with more and more "people" calling for harder responses, a single EU military, even outright declarations of war against Russia.
There’s certainly some amount of propaganda effort being put in it on EU level into elevating the threat.
1. There are actors who would benefit from arms race. The money, the military careers etc. The whole NATO nearly became irrelevant before Russia started invading. Now all those generals have jobs again and Rheinmetall shares are going up.
2. There are actors for whom threat from the East is existential factor (it’s in the core of the political platform of nationalists in Baltic states - remove it and they are suddenly less competitive compared to neutral or pro-Russian parties). Current chief of EU diplomacy Kallas belongs to this group.
However I think Russia wants to make a point too. It’s hardly planning any war with NATO (I hope their intelligence isn’t as bad as in Ukraine), but they do need to convince European voters that war is possible if peace in Ukraine won’t come anytime soon (on their terms). And European voters are certainly not in the mood for big war, so the question really is, who is more convincing: von der Leyen & Co with their idea to support Ukraine until it wins, or Russia with it’s idea that further escalation may harm EU citizens directly.
I'll take the bait and answer. There are indeed actors for whom the threat from the East is AN existential factor. That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like and they don't want to repeat it.
Whether there's a mood for a big war, I am not sure. But there are states that are ready for it. And yes, it is within EU interests to let the fighting happen in Ukraine rather than EU.
Also, it's a nice collection of the subtler Russian points you have here, B+ for effort.
>That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like
Just as a reminder: Latvian Riflemen helped to create it by supporting Lenin in the crucial phase of revolution and suppressing anti-Bolshevik rebellion in Moscow. Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites. So this “oh, it was so terrible in Soviet Union” projection on Russia is a very specific nationalist narrative ignoring shared history of both nations, which included shared suffering from the same regimes and shared participation in oppression.
As someone who has been arguing for a war with Russia, I don't think there's been many attempts to manufacture consent for it.
In fact, I've noticed a lot of opposition to my view that I think is state organized, but probably by Russia. I've seen zero people like me online. I've seen zero repeated pro-war, zero capability-emphasizing arguments. Complete silence except for me.
No, I don't believe that it's tactically sensible to send troops where Russian troops are already entrenched or ready for war.
I believe that war should be conducted to exploit the enemy, not go at him in some idiot maneuver.
Our actions in Ukraine should be limited to stand-off weapons and glide bombs, mirror the Russian manner of aerial attack. We should also attack gas pipelines, ammonia plants, electrical infrastructure, etc. in Russia and generally shut the place down. We should of course also seize all Russian-flagged ships.
Exploits its dependence on transport and cheap energy, exploit Russia's size by seizing weak or undefended regions to force troop movements, attacking the troops with stand-off weapons while their being transported to the front etc.
Basically, we're playing tennis, and they're playing with both corridors in addition to the singles court. We should of course let them run.
I am absolutely opposed to sending ground troops against Russian positions or any region with sufficient defence, or capacity to resist. This risks the lives of soldiers needlessly and is not what war is about.
Do you also advocate the evacuation of the cities of whichever countries engage in the attacks you describe to reduce deaths in case Moscow responds by nuking those cities?
I don't see nuclear attacks from Russia as probable.
They know well that any attacks by them will be matched by attacks by us, so any nuclear exchange is just miscalculation on their part. It will end quickly.
It's important to understand that threats are irrelevant. If somebody says 'Eat this horrible snail, or I'll you shoot you' you just say 'No, you can shoot me anyway'. Same thing here. If they nuke us, so what? They can do that today too.
It's not in our power to decide whether they nuke us, and therefore it can't be a reason to limit any action against them.
Upon this there is of course also our own capability to nuke them, and due to Russian attitudes and their view of their place in the world any nuclear exchange with them will be short. They can choose to erase us if they are willing to erase themselves. That's their power, but the Russians won't ever be willing to erase themselves. They believe that they are on par with the US and a cultural beacon that is critical to the balance of the world, something without which there's nothing that matters. They will never choose to erase themselves.
Because of this-- mutually assured destruction and the irrelevance of threats, nuclear weapons only matters when one power has them and the other does not. It doesn't make sense for the Russians to erase themselves even if I stand at outside Moscow with an army, even if I have taken Moscow. There's never a slice when it makes sense. Thus the balance between nuclear power is determined entirely by the balance of conventional forces.
It sort of sounds like you believe that Washington (or any other country with enough nukes) could use nukes to kill every single Russian and that Moscow could use nukes to kill every single American. This belief gets repeated a lot on the internet: a full "exchange" of nukes is game over.
In reality, even if Moscow were cheating on its treaty obligations and had (in ready-to-use form) every nuke that the Soviet Union possessed at the peak of its arsenal, plus all the intercontinental missiles and bombers the Soviets had at the peak of their arsenal, Moscow could kill only about half of the US population. Since the Russian population is more concentrated in cities than the US population, Washington could kill about 55% of Russians with the arsenal it possessed at the height of the Cold War.
There is a bit of a wild card in these estimates: if the effect called nuclear winter turns out to be as bad as some say it will be, a lot more would die (mostly outside the countries that got nuked). Nuclear winter will probably turn out to be a nothing burger, but we cannot know that for sure, so there is some chance it would cause the deaths of most of the people in the world, but if Moscow's situation becomes desperate enough and there is a clearly identified enemy who is causing the desperation, it start to become rational for Moscow to bet that the nuclear winter won't be extremely bad (which it probably won't be).
Moscow might calculate that Russian are better at enduring hardships than the West is, so Russia will be able to recover from the nuclear exchange before the West does, so that in a model in which the only thing that matters is Russia's strength relative to the West, a nuclear exchange can make sense -- not now, but if the situation becomes more desperate for Moscow because of the attacks you describe.
I don't see how there's a Russian central authority upon the destruction of the great cities. It's state collapse. It's never going to get up. The cultural and intellectual elite's gone and there's nothing.
Whether the elite is gone depends on whether the elite sought shelter from a nuclear attack, like it did during the start of the invasion of Ukraine. Also, if you do manage to kill everyone in the ruling coalition during a time of existential war, a new ruling coalition forms that is just as committed to the war as the old coalition.
A government of a society like Russia (or the US for that matter or Britain) doesn't just collapse when it is hit very hard. Everyone rallies around the government, or more precisely, most people rally around and the rest either remain silent or get imprisoned or killed.
Hitler famously believed that the Soviet Union would collapse if invaded: "We have only to kick in
the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down," he said.
It didn't collapse, nor did China when Japan invaded and killed millions of Chinese and occupied all its coastal cities. Neither of China's two governments collapsed even though before the Japanese invasion the two governments were engaged in a civil war that was in itself the third most deadly war of the 20th Century.
The most powerful military in the world could force regime change on Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s or on Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s. This is because nationalism is a very potent force.
Yes, I could very well believe that they're funding online campaigns to stir up feelings of unease and distrust in our governments. It helps them even if we don't get sucked into an outright conflict.
I remember they’ve been observed (alongside China) flooding US social media with bots that spew inflammatory and divisive comments to help further divide the country around key events like the Charlie Kirk assassination or deportation or Gaza or whatever. I’m not sure how successful they are but I get the feeling it’s working.
I think there are some who want war. But for Europe and America it is much better for Russia to be a friend again (like part of the G8). The alternative is that they become a servant of China, and this will end with them making a deal to give China land in the northeast of Russia. All of this is a huge strategic problem for NATO countries, and democracies in general, especially with India out of such a coalition due to nonsensical tariffs over Russian oil (when Europe buys Russian gas) or Nobel peace prizes (Trump falsely claiming he helped resolve conflicts between India and Pakistan) or whatever.
Now are European leaders smart enough to play geopolitics properly? That I doubt. To be honest, I doubt if the democratic processes will result in leaders that are competent enough and mature enough to deal with all this. More likely for countries to keep electing unhinged populists from either side.
Well I think the benefit of containing the CCP empire is big enough to require NATO to still find a way forward with Russia. That’ll require a compromise around Ukraine though.
The “imperial” narrative is a made-up thing by contemporary Eastern European politicians. There are fringe political groups in Russia that think this way, but they have no significant influence and are mainly tolerated by Putin’s administration (it’s a destabilizing factor for internal politics). Russian empire ceased to exist in 1917 and whatever happened since then were not imperial projects.
No, that narrative is taken straight from the horses mouth, one V. Putin himself, who is about as mainstream as it gets. The Russian Empire from 1917 is not the one people have in mind when they refer to this.
Simple question: in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and there was peaceful “annexation” of GDR into FRG, in which West Germany effectively took over, with its constitution taking into effect in new federal states, the GDR assets being taken over by western economic structures etc. Was it imperial by its nature?
From Russian perspective it’s kind of the same (except the war part of course). Same language spoken, shared history etc. If you look at any empire, they colonize other nations. This specific conflict is framed as imperial by analysts based on the notion that the annexed territories are where a completely separate nation forged, which is being colonized. It’s not a historical but a propaganda narrative, that attempts to hide all the complexity of this topic.
It's not the same because one party is clearly not willing. That's all it takes: consent. If tomorrow morning Friesland decides by majority vote it wants to be independent of the rest of NL I'd be perfectly ok with that. Likewise I'm fine with countries deciding whether or not they want to join one alliance or another.
Languages and history have nothing to do with it, it is all about consent. If you plan to kill people in order to get them to join your idea what your country should look like you've already lost, then you're just another occupier.
I've lived in Poland under the USSR, it was pretty clear what the Russian position was on how they viewed the Poles - and anybody else that wasn't 'properly' Russian for that matter. I've lived in Romania, I visited Latvia, I visited Ukraine. Everywhere the sentiment is roughly the same: that they would rather die than live under Russian occupation again, they already know what that is like. And no amount of shared history or language (or forced relocation, which in many of those cases is the source of that shared history) is going to offset that.
You're if I'm not mistaken someone with Russian roots living in Berlin. Coincidentally, I know more people that are in that position. Most of them still have family back in Russia so they are very circumspect in the positions that they take. But they have zero illusion about Russia having good intentions in any of the wars they have engaged in since the USSR fell apart and it is patently clear by the indiscriminate attacks on the Ukrainian population that Russia does not care for the people that they in the same breath claim to call their brothers and sisters.
Russia is already at (asymmetric) war with the West. I think you mean traditional military engagement, which is a greater possibility with all of these recent NATO country probings.
Accelerationists + rando crazy people, war hawks, and defense contractors sure want it.
Without finding real perpetrators and verifiable evidence, it still lives in the domain of speculation and politicians can and will use fictional narratives to do whatever they want.
Open war should never be started "preemptively", however NATO needs to and is preparing diligently for possible need for defense. Eastern Europe won't be safe until Putin is gone and replaced by a moderate who isn't a nationalist expansionist.
> For as long as I can remember there have been things like fighter jets at the borders and we scramble ours to intercept
Russian air assets never crossed NATO airspace until this September, and the last time the Zapad exercises were held, Ukraine was invaded within months.
As such, most European nations are on extreme edge right now for a possible escalation.
> Russian air assets never crossed NATO airspace until this September.
Yes, they had. ACLED reports[0] that it occurred 50 times since 2022, and 4 of them had already been in Poland. It just never became a huge news piece until September, that's exactly what I mean.
Yes, we do actually know this. And anybody that pretends that we do not is either very naive, does not understand any of the technology or has not made even a cursory effort to find out.
Proof points:
- the drones that made it into Poland did not have warheads
- they flew over Belarus before entering Polish airspace
- they were under continuous control from the moment of launch
- they were prepped with longer range tanks than they would have had if they had been aimed at Ukraine
- quite a few of them were equipped with ways of sending back telemetry
So no, these were not strays. The best explanation is that they were an intel gathering mission with respect to the kind of response generated and the speed with which they were detected. Other possible uses for russia are to misdirect attention from wherever they might want to attack for real (say, the Baltics) and a way to reduce the flow of defensive measures to Ukraine by instilling fear in the population further West.
We know this very well, because of the range the drone are able to fly and the wreckage. Its amazing these days with the wealth of information that people do not do a few seconds of research.
1. Imagine: Your are Russia, are you going to launch drones with the fuel to fly not only into Ukraine, but also all across the map of Poland? Or do you dedicate that space to bigger warheads. Or lighter drones to increase their speed. That alone answers your question.
2. The drones found crashed, has modifications like bladdertank in the warhead section to increase their fuel. You do not accidentally get a drone all the way to Gdansk without increasing its fuel load. See point 1 again ...
3. Having a drone gone stray is not uncommon, but there is a difference between 1 going stray and 20 going stay. Your argument about jamming is flawed by the simply fact that we have the path the drones took, and unless Ukraine magically got the exact same drone misdirecting tech, active on multiple paths, again, check the map. See the issue there?
4. If the drones got jammed / flight spoofed, why did they not fly in a erratic course. You expect a drone that has its course altered to to suddenly start flying in different path.
5. The drone paths again, if the drone left the jamming or misdirection area, it will try to get back to to its intended area. They did not do so.
6. If this tech worked so great, why did we not have more mass drones flying in the wrong direction the following days? Drone attacks happen every day in Ukraine, they are not one off events. If the Ukrainians got this tech to work so good, to send 20 drones into Poland, why no repeat? You do not fix a flaw that the enemy found in just one day. Did Russia ground its drones the next day, the next week until they fix the issue? Added more antenna's and more hardware to make it harder to jam/redirect? No, they continue they typical pattern.
7. ... insert conspiracy that it was all planned and they do not use that tech again to not over use it (while giving the Russians time to adjust their hardware???). Sigh ...
People posting this nonsense that NATO is looking for a war or to ramp up incidents. Here is a simple answer: Who attack first? Was it NATO? Was not Ukraine? No ... Russia invaded a country for the SECOND TIME, triggering this mess.
You claim financial motives to trump up rhetoric ... our arms industries can already not keep up with the orders. We have backlogs that will take 10+ years to fill already, even with the expanding industry.
Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy but what else is new these days. Hate to tell ya, but the internet / social media is a battlefield these days, just as much as troops on the ground. Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic, its just a modern adaptation of old tactics. The new "remember we have nukes, we can get you", or the old USSR "see our planes flying into your identification zones"...
Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
If not, it's not manufacturing consent. It's just sparkling self-defense.
Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world. See {polonium poisoning Litvinenko, defenestration (multiple), Syrian actions, Ukraine invasion, etc}
Military resources are expensive and inefficient, so it takes some degree of political capital to develop and maintain them. I'd so much rather see that capital (human and otherwise) go into research and art and human flourishing, but that's not the world we live in.
) Driving refugees into liberal western democracies is a deliberate outcome of this strategy.
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
I hope not. That's never worked. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Wagner Group's comic-opera invasion all failed.
The Economist seems to view this as the end of a happy era for Europe, an era when the EU could focus on making the EU work well and provide a good life for its people, without worrying too much about external problems.
They're not wrong.
Putin's stated goal is to re-establish a Russian empire, out to the boundaries of the 19th century Russian Empire.[1] He's been saying things like this for years now: "Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them, he did not take anything from them, he returned [them (to Russia)]. Apparently, it also fell to us to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face."
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
> If not, it's not manufacturing consent.
Is it not? Maybe we have a different understanding of what manufacturing consent means. For me the consent could be manufactured long before the question is raised. I'm not sure why it needs to be called for immediately, why do you believe so?
> Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world.
Yes it has, consistently, but I feel a significant seachange in the landscape of various media channels, both mainstream media and social media, as well as in the rhetoric of politicians. And yes, they have been talking about increased cooperation, taking heavier action against stray drones etc.
And it all seems to have happened in the past 2 months, like a sudden spike.
I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.
Russia has gotten more offensive and attacking more frequently in the hybrid war, including a murder plots against Rheinmetall CEO [1], putting explosives in packages [2], etc.
It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims (1) testing Trumps commitment to NATO; (2) their invasion of Ukraine is not going well. The front barely moves annd Ukraine is starting to mass produce their own long-range cruise missiles and they are hitting oil refineries in Russia. Most likely he wants to instill fear in Europeans to support the narrative that Europe should keep weapons/money for their own defense, hoping that Ukraine will lose support.
> I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.
No, that's true. But they could be worried about their lack of strength without the US and recognise that there's no domestic appetite to move public funds towards strengthening the militaries, so publicising the "potentially imminent dangers" posed by Russia could be a way to do that.
> It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims
I was careful not to point any fingers as I'm not completely without doubt that the voices I see calling for more strength and unity in Europe aren't being paid for by Russia.
Barely 2 weeks, Russian drones violated both Polish and Romanian airspace amidst the Zapad military exercises (which themselves were the precursor to the Russian invasion of Ukraine).
There has also been a surge in hybrid attacks linked to Russian intelligence within Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began [0][1].
Your response was very clear that asking was not okay.
Look. We have seen a whole number of wars started based on dishonesty and disinformation, every one who asked questions was branded a traitor, a sceptic etc… until the truth came out.
But what we are discussing is serious, lives would be lost on a tragic scale.
I genuinely think space should be given to those who question the premise of war, especially one that is already begun on information.
What a dumb comment. It is fairly obvious that russia conducts all kinds of clandestine activity all over Europe, if anything the EU has shown - possibly too much - a lot of restraint in their responses to all this.
You’re not being trolled. I’m asking you a genuine question, but because you feel strongly on the subject and assume the we all see things the same way, you feel that there’s malice involved when someone appears on the radar and says hey I don’t see it that way.
Religious people have the exact same reaction when you question god, they just assume you are on some sort of attack when you are genuinely curious.
I am seeing a surge of downvotes and comments around this. I think this is the hallmarks of a spamouflage attempt. I've heard rumblings that it's been somewhat easy to buy/sell HN accounts for product launches, but never tried it.
There is a strong chance that there are no actual "drones" involved and these sightings are just due to random people mistaking airplanes as drones/UFOs: https://x.com/MickWest/status/1971656713230270794
When people have analyzed the flight logs, the sightings match with known planes: https://x.com/ThomasH_Synth/status/1972236703864586463
https://x.com/MickWest is a good source to follow since he and others are willing to actually track down the data related to UFOs.
It's not just Denmark, drones have been sighted at multiple Norwegian airports as well, including confirmed sightings by both police and air force at the main air base in Ørland. (Source in Norwegian, https://www.nrk.no/trondelag/etterforsker-mulig-droneaktivit...)
Some actual drones have been involved as they showed up enough to shut down an airport.
I imagine there are lots of false positives too, but they're not all false
Yet we keep finding actual Russian drones/parts of their drones in Estonia.
For five days from Monday till Friday, while they host some VIP international guests.
They could also have added this to the headline to make it more informative.
Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia? For as long as I can remember there have been things like fighter jets at the borders and we scramble ours to intercept etc, and before Russian media was blocked here they used to report the we were regularly doing the same. It was never really headline news, even after the war in Ukraine really got going
But now that the US has become an unreliable partner and the EU is talking about the need for increased cooperation suddenly they exact same stories become big news and ministers use it as examples of our complacency, when two years ago they would have said it's nothing to worry about.
And indeed now I see it shared all over social media with more and more "people" calling for harder responses, a single EU military, even outright declarations of war against Russia.
There’s certainly some amount of propaganda effort being put in it on EU level into elevating the threat.
1. There are actors who would benefit from arms race. The money, the military careers etc. The whole NATO nearly became irrelevant before Russia started invading. Now all those generals have jobs again and Rheinmetall shares are going up.
2. There are actors for whom threat from the East is existential factor (it’s in the core of the political platform of nationalists in Baltic states - remove it and they are suddenly less competitive compared to neutral or pro-Russian parties). Current chief of EU diplomacy Kallas belongs to this group.
However I think Russia wants to make a point too. It’s hardly planning any war with NATO (I hope their intelligence isn’t as bad as in Ukraine), but they do need to convince European voters that war is possible if peace in Ukraine won’t come anytime soon (on their terms). And European voters are certainly not in the mood for big war, so the question really is, who is more convincing: von der Leyen & Co with their idea to support Ukraine until it wins, or Russia with it’s idea that further escalation may harm EU citizens directly.
I'll take the bait and answer. There are indeed actors for whom the threat from the East is AN existential factor. That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like and they don't want to repeat it.
Whether there's a mood for a big war, I am not sure. But there are states that are ready for it. And yes, it is within EU interests to let the fighting happen in Ukraine rather than EU.
Also, it's a nice collection of the subtler Russian points you have here, B+ for effort.
>That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like
Just as a reminder: Latvian Riflemen helped to create it by supporting Lenin in the crucial phase of revolution and suppressing anti-Bolshevik rebellion in Moscow. Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites. So this “oh, it was so terrible in Soviet Union” projection on Russia is a very specific nationalist narrative ignoring shared history of both nations, which included shared suffering from the same regimes and shared participation in oppression.
As someone who has been arguing for a war with Russia, I don't think there's been many attempts to manufacture consent for it.
In fact, I've noticed a lot of opposition to my view that I think is state organized, but probably by Russia. I've seen zero people like me online. I've seen zero repeated pro-war, zero capability-emphasizing arguments. Complete silence except for me.
By "war with Russia", do you mean sending troops to fight in Ukraine? Or Napoleon style march to Moscow? Because those are very different things.
No, I don't believe that it's tactically sensible to send troops where Russian troops are already entrenched or ready for war.
I believe that war should be conducted to exploit the enemy, not go at him in some idiot maneuver.
Our actions in Ukraine should be limited to stand-off weapons and glide bombs, mirror the Russian manner of aerial attack. We should also attack gas pipelines, ammonia plants, electrical infrastructure, etc. in Russia and generally shut the place down. We should of course also seize all Russian-flagged ships.
Exploits its dependence on transport and cheap energy, exploit Russia's size by seizing weak or undefended regions to force troop movements, attacking the troops with stand-off weapons while their being transported to the front etc.
Basically, we're playing tennis, and they're playing with both corridors in addition to the singles court. We should of course let them run.
I am absolutely opposed to sending ground troops against Russian positions or any region with sufficient defence, or capacity to resist. This risks the lives of soldiers needlessly and is not what war is about.
Do you also advocate the evacuation of the cities of whichever countries engage in the attacks you describe to reduce deaths in case Moscow responds by nuking those cities?
As different as the Russian mindset is, I highly doubt they would be MAD enough (pun intended) to engage in nuclear warfare.
I don't see nuclear attacks from Russia as probable.
They know well that any attacks by them will be matched by attacks by us, so any nuclear exchange is just miscalculation on their part. It will end quickly.
It's important to understand that threats are irrelevant. If somebody says 'Eat this horrible snail, or I'll you shoot you' you just say 'No, you can shoot me anyway'. Same thing here. If they nuke us, so what? They can do that today too.
It's not in our power to decide whether they nuke us, and therefore it can't be a reason to limit any action against them.
Upon this there is of course also our own capability to nuke them, and due to Russian attitudes and their view of their place in the world any nuclear exchange with them will be short. They can choose to erase us if they are willing to erase themselves. That's their power, but the Russians won't ever be willing to erase themselves. They believe that they are on par with the US and a cultural beacon that is critical to the balance of the world, something without which there's nothing that matters. They will never choose to erase themselves.
Because of this-- mutually assured destruction and the irrelevance of threats, nuclear weapons only matters when one power has them and the other does not. It doesn't make sense for the Russians to erase themselves even if I stand at outside Moscow with an army, even if I have taken Moscow. There's never a slice when it makes sense. Thus the balance between nuclear power is determined entirely by the balance of conventional forces.
It sort of sounds like you believe that Washington (or any other country with enough nukes) could use nukes to kill every single Russian and that Moscow could use nukes to kill every single American. This belief gets repeated a lot on the internet: a full "exchange" of nukes is game over.
In reality, even if Moscow were cheating on its treaty obligations and had (in ready-to-use form) every nuke that the Soviet Union possessed at the peak of its arsenal, plus all the intercontinental missiles and bombers the Soviets had at the peak of their arsenal, Moscow could kill only about half of the US population. Since the Russian population is more concentrated in cities than the US population, Washington could kill about 55% of Russians with the arsenal it possessed at the height of the Cold War.
There is a bit of a wild card in these estimates: if the effect called nuclear winter turns out to be as bad as some say it will be, a lot more would die (mostly outside the countries that got nuked). Nuclear winter will probably turn out to be a nothing burger, but we cannot know that for sure, so there is some chance it would cause the deaths of most of the people in the world, but if Moscow's situation becomes desperate enough and there is a clearly identified enemy who is causing the desperation, it start to become rational for Moscow to bet that the nuclear winter won't be extremely bad (which it probably won't be).
Moscow might calculate that Russian are better at enduring hardships than the West is, so Russia will be able to recover from the nuclear exchange before the West does, so that in a model in which the only thing that matters is Russia's strength relative to the West, a nuclear exchange can make sense -- not now, but if the situation becomes more desperate for Moscow because of the attacks you describe.
I don't see how there's a Russian central authority upon the destruction of the great cities. It's state collapse. It's never going to get up. The cultural and intellectual elite's gone and there's nothing.
Whether the elite is gone depends on whether the elite sought shelter from a nuclear attack, like it did during the start of the invasion of Ukraine. Also, if you do manage to kill everyone in the ruling coalition during a time of existential war, a new ruling coalition forms that is just as committed to the war as the old coalition.
A government of a society like Russia (or the US for that matter or Britain) doesn't just collapse when it is hit very hard. Everyone rallies around the government, or more precisely, most people rally around and the rest either remain silent or get imprisoned or killed.
Hitler famously believed that the Soviet Union would collapse if invaded: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down," he said. It didn't collapse, nor did China when Japan invaded and killed millions of Chinese and occupied all its coastal cities. Neither of China's two governments collapsed even though before the Japanese invasion the two governments were engaged in a civil war that was in itself the third most deadly war of the 20th Century.
The most powerful military in the world could force regime change on Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s or on Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s. This is because nationalism is a very potent force.
> Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia?
Actors like … Russia?
Yes, I could very well believe that they're funding online campaigns to stir up feelings of unease and distrust in our governments. It helps them even if we don't get sucked into an outright conflict.
I remember they’ve been observed (alongside China) flooding US social media with bots that spew inflammatory and divisive comments to help further divide the country around key events like the Charlie Kirk assassination or deportation or Gaza or whatever. I’m not sure how successful they are but I get the feeling it’s working.
> and before Russian media was blocked here
Where? Not blocked in the US. Russia Today is accessible.[1] Old-school Pravda is reachable.[2] The video stream from Russia Today is working.
[1] https://www.rt.com/
[2] https://www.pravda.ru/
[3] https://www.rt.com/on-air/
Here in the EU, specifically The Netherlands. There was an EU Council regulation about it [0] and many Dutch ISPs complied [1].
0: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/350/oj/eng
1: https://merlin.obs.coe.int/article/9476
I think there are some who want war. But for Europe and America it is much better for Russia to be a friend again (like part of the G8). The alternative is that they become a servant of China, and this will end with them making a deal to give China land in the northeast of Russia. All of this is a huge strategic problem for NATO countries, and democracies in general, especially with India out of such a coalition due to nonsensical tariffs over Russian oil (when Europe buys Russian gas) or Nobel peace prizes (Trump falsely claiming he helped resolve conflicts between India and Pakistan) or whatever.
Now are European leaders smart enough to play geopolitics properly? That I doubt. To be honest, I doubt if the democratic processes will result in leaders that are competent enough and mature enough to deal with all this. More likely for countries to keep electing unhinged populists from either side.
Russia won't be 'a friend again' until they stop thinking of empires.
We tried the appeasement through trade route already and look at what it lead to.
Well I think the benefit of containing the CCP empire is big enough to require NATO to still find a way forward with Russia. That’ll require a compromise around Ukraine though.
The “imperial” narrative is a made-up thing by contemporary Eastern European politicians. There are fringe political groups in Russia that think this way, but they have no significant influence and are mainly tolerated by Putin’s administration (it’s a destabilizing factor for internal politics). Russian empire ceased to exist in 1917 and whatever happened since then were not imperial projects.
No, that narrative is taken straight from the horses mouth, one V. Putin himself, who is about as mainstream as it gets. The Russian Empire from 1917 is not the one people have in mind when they refer to this.
Simple question: in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and there was peaceful “annexation” of GDR into FRG, in which West Germany effectively took over, with its constitution taking into effect in new federal states, the GDR assets being taken over by western economic structures etc. Was it imperial by its nature?
From Russian perspective it’s kind of the same (except the war part of course). Same language spoken, shared history etc. If you look at any empire, they colonize other nations. This specific conflict is framed as imperial by analysts based on the notion that the annexed territories are where a completely separate nation forged, which is being colonized. It’s not a historical but a propaganda narrative, that attempts to hide all the complexity of this topic.
It's not the same because one party is clearly not willing. That's all it takes: consent. If tomorrow morning Friesland decides by majority vote it wants to be independent of the rest of NL I'd be perfectly ok with that. Likewise I'm fine with countries deciding whether or not they want to join one alliance or another.
Languages and history have nothing to do with it, it is all about consent. If you plan to kill people in order to get them to join your idea what your country should look like you've already lost, then you're just another occupier.
I've lived in Poland under the USSR, it was pretty clear what the Russian position was on how they viewed the Poles - and anybody else that wasn't 'properly' Russian for that matter. I've lived in Romania, I visited Latvia, I visited Ukraine. Everywhere the sentiment is roughly the same: that they would rather die than live under Russian occupation again, they already know what that is like. And no amount of shared history or language (or forced relocation, which in many of those cases is the source of that shared history) is going to offset that.
You're if I'm not mistaken someone with Russian roots living in Berlin. Coincidentally, I know more people that are in that position. Most of them still have family back in Russia so they are very circumspect in the positions that they take. But they have zero illusion about Russia having good intentions in any of the wars they have engaged in since the USSR fell apart and it is patently clear by the indiscriminate attacks on the Ukrainian population that Russia does not care for the people that they in the same breath claim to call their brothers and sisters.
Putin is like Hitler. The only way we get to this reality is for Russia to lose on the battlefield now.
I don't like this reality either, but it is what it is.
Russia is already at (asymmetric) war with the West. I think you mean traditional military engagement, which is a greater possibility with all of these recent NATO country probings.
Accelerationists + rando crazy people, war hawks, and defense contractors sure want it.
Without finding real perpetrators and verifiable evidence, it still lives in the domain of speculation and politicians can and will use fictional narratives to do whatever they want.
Open war should never be started "preemptively", however NATO needs to and is preparing diligently for possible need for defense. Eastern Europe won't be safe until Putin is gone and replaced by a moderate who isn't a nationalist expansionist.
> For as long as I can remember there have been things like fighter jets at the borders and we scramble ours to intercept
Russian air assets never crossed NATO airspace until this September, and the last time the Zapad exercises were held, Ukraine was invaded within months.
As such, most European nations are on extreme edge right now for a possible escalation.
> Russian air assets never crossed NATO airspace until this September.
Yes, they had. ACLED reports[0] that it occurred 50 times since 2022, and 4 of them had already been in Poland. It just never became a huge news piece until September, that's exactly what I mean.
0: https://acleddata.com/expert-comment/acled-data-show-least-5...
From the ACLE:
"mostly crashes of Russian and Ukrainian stray drones and missiles"
The recent incident in Poland and Romania was drones that were not strays or crashes.
Yes "mostly" crashes, meaning not all of them.
> The recent incident in Poland and Romania was drones that were not strays
We don't actually know this do we? The report states that the technology to push drones off their intended path has been ramped up significantly.
Yes, we do actually know this. And anybody that pretends that we do not is either very naive, does not understand any of the technology or has not made even a cursory effort to find out.
Proof points:
- the drones that made it into Poland did not have warheads
- they flew over Belarus before entering Polish airspace
- they were under continuous control from the moment of launch
- they were prepped with longer range tanks than they would have had if they had been aimed at Ukraine
- quite a few of them were equipped with ways of sending back telemetry
So no, these were not strays. The best explanation is that they were an intel gathering mission with respect to the kind of response generated and the speed with which they were detected. Other possible uses for russia are to misdirect attention from wherever they might want to attack for real (say, the Baltics) and a way to reduce the flow of defensive measures to Ukraine by instilling fear in the population further West.
We know this very well, because of the range the drone are able to fly and the wreckage. Its amazing these days with the wealth of information that people do not do a few seconds of research.
1. Imagine: Your are Russia, are you going to launch drones with the fuel to fly not only into Ukraine, but also all across the map of Poland? Or do you dedicate that space to bigger warheads. Or lighter drones to increase their speed. That alone answers your question.
2. The drones found crashed, has modifications like bladdertank in the warhead section to increase their fuel. You do not accidentally get a drone all the way to Gdansk without increasing its fuel load. See point 1 again ...
3. Having a drone gone stray is not uncommon, but there is a difference between 1 going stray and 20 going stay. Your argument about jamming is flawed by the simply fact that we have the path the drones took, and unless Ukraine magically got the exact same drone misdirecting tech, active on multiple paths, again, check the map. See the issue there?
4. If the drones got jammed / flight spoofed, why did they not fly in a erratic course. You expect a drone that has its course altered to to suddenly start flying in different path.
5. The drone paths again, if the drone left the jamming or misdirection area, it will try to get back to to its intended area. They did not do so.
6. If this tech worked so great, why did we not have more mass drones flying in the wrong direction the following days? Drone attacks happen every day in Ukraine, they are not one off events. If the Ukrainians got this tech to work so good, to send 20 drones into Poland, why no repeat? You do not fix a flaw that the enemy found in just one day. Did Russia ground its drones the next day, the next week until they fix the issue? Added more antenna's and more hardware to make it harder to jam/redirect? No, they continue they typical pattern.
7. ... insert conspiracy that it was all planned and they do not use that tech again to not over use it (while giving the Russians time to adjust their hardware???). Sigh ...
People posting this nonsense that NATO is looking for a war or to ramp up incidents. Here is a simple answer: Who attack first? Was it NATO? Was not Ukraine? No ... Russia invaded a country for the SECOND TIME, triggering this mess.
You claim financial motives to trump up rhetoric ... our arms industries can already not keep up with the orders. We have backlogs that will take 10+ years to fill already, even with the expanding industry.
Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy but what else is new these days. Hate to tell ya, but the internet / social media is a battlefield these days, just as much as troops on the ground. Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic, its just a modern adaptation of old tactics. The new "remember we have nukes, we can get you", or the old USSR "see our planes flying into your identification zones"...
Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
If not, it's not manufacturing consent. It's just sparkling self-defense.
Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world. See {polonium poisoning Litvinenko, defenestration (multiple), Syrian actions, Ukraine invasion, etc}
Military resources are expensive and inefficient, so it takes some degree of political capital to develop and maintain them. I'd so much rather see that capital (human and otherwise) go into research and art and human flourishing, but that's not the world we live in.
) Driving refugees into liberal western democracies is a deliberate outcome of this strategy.
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
I hope not. That's never worked. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Wagner Group's comic-opera invasion all failed.
The Economist seems to view this as the end of a happy era for Europe, an era when the EU could focus on making the EU work well and provide a good life for its people, without worrying too much about external problems. They're not wrong.
Putin's stated goal is to re-establish a Russian empire, out to the boundaries of the 19th century Russian Empire.[1] He's been saying things like this for years now: "Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them, he did not take anything from them, he returned [them (to Russia)]. Apparently, it also fell to us to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?
> If not, it's not manufacturing consent.
Is it not? Maybe we have a different understanding of what manufacturing consent means. For me the consent could be manufactured long before the question is raised. I'm not sure why it needs to be called for immediately, why do you believe so?
> Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world.
Yes it has, consistently, but I feel a significant seachange in the landscape of various media channels, both mainstream media and social media, as well as in the rhetoric of politicians. And yes, they have been talking about increased cooperation, taking heavier action against stray drones etc.
And it all seems to have happened in the past 2 months, like a sudden spike.
I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.
Russia has gotten more offensive and attacking more frequently in the hybrid war, including a murder plots against Rheinmetall CEO [1], putting explosives in packages [2], etc.
It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims (1) testing Trumps commitment to NATO; (2) their invasion of Ukraine is not going well. The front barely moves annd Ukraine is starting to mass produce their own long-range cruise missiles and they are hitting oil refineries in Russia. Most likely he wants to instill fear in Europeans to support the narrative that Europe should keep weapons/money for their own defense, hoping that Ukraine will lose support.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/threat-plot-murder-rhei...
[2] https://amp.dw.com/en/russia-linked-group-planned-parcel-bom...
> I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.
No, that's true. But they could be worried about their lack of strength without the US and recognise that there's no domestic appetite to move public funds towards strengthening the militaries, so publicising the "potentially imminent dangers" posed by Russia could be a way to do that.
> It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims
What is "it" here?
russia seems to be doing an awfully good job of that on it's own.
I was careful not to point any fingers as I'm not completely without doubt that the voices I see calling for more strength and unity in Europe aren't being paid for by Russia.
Just for a few days, for a big EU meeting.
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Barely 2 weeks, Russian drones violated both Polish and Romanian airspace amidst the Zapad military exercises (which themselves were the precursor to the Russian invasion of Ukraine).
There has also been a surge in hybrid attacks linked to Russian intelligence within Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began [0][1].
As such, it is a relevant question to ask.
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-europe-hybrid-...
[1] - https://investigations.news-exchange.ebu.ch/playing-with-fir...
When asking questions is not allowed, it’s called a cult.
You asked. I answered.
I never said you shouldn't ask.
Your response was very clear that asking was not okay.
Look. We have seen a whole number of wars started based on dishonesty and disinformation, every one who asked questions was branded a traitor, a sceptic etc… until the truth came out.
But what we are discussing is serious, lives would be lost on a tragic scale.
I genuinely think space should be given to those who question the premise of war, especially one that is already begun on information.
Not OP, but I don't get what part of their comment makes it clear that asking is not okay.
I see, here is the line
> As such, it is a relevant question to ask.
Yes. How does that imply asking is not okay?
What a dumb comment. It is fairly obvious that russia conducts all kinds of clandestine activity all over Europe, if anything the EU has shown - possibly too much - a lot of restraint in their responses to all this.
How is it fairly obvious, and why does it invoke such an emotional response?
Stop trolling.
You’re not being trolled. I’m asking you a genuine question, but because you feel strongly on the subject and assume the we all see things the same way, you feel that there’s malice involved when someone appears on the radar and says hey I don’t see it that way.
Religious people have the exact same reaction when you question god, they just assume you are on some sort of attack when you are genuinely curious.
You're a pro-russian troll and I have you labeled as such since:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44154270
There is no way you make comments like that if you are not purposefully trying to derail the conversation.
I am seeing a surge of downvotes and comments around this. I think this is the hallmarks of a spamouflage attempt. I've heard rumblings that it's been somewhat easy to buy/sell HN accounts for product launches, but never tried it.
Wow, learn a new thing every day. Thank you.
What process would you go through to "try it?" Where have you heard these rumblings?