331–340 of 526 posts
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International politics is intellectually stimulating.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Not sure how MH17 shooting is relevant here. While the consensus is that it's likely a Russia controlled/allied battery shot it down - I'm not sure anybody thinks it was anything other than an accident, not an intentional act of sabotage.
> I'm not sure anybody thinks it was anything other than an accident How do you accidentally shoot down a passenger airplane?
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It seems unlikely they would let any political divisions or legitimate grievances go unexploited. It is their cultural core competency for centuries. That does not mean the greivances being exploited aren't valid, or that the parties themselves don't aid in the fracture so they don't have to worry about competition with parties whose ideology is too close to theirs. Edit: This is reductive, Russia has tons of culture…
But all those political divisions are a result of national politics of those countries. People want higher wages, less taxes, affordable housing, more recently cheaper gas/diesel, and in the last decade (or more in some places), less foreign migrants. If no other political party will do anything about that, people are forced to vote for Alternatives (intentionally capitalized). Especially after all the anti-russian p…
When elections come due, following the natural order. Otherwise maybe some bad actor could influence polls - which are easier to manipulate than official elections - to make you resign.
Europeans really hates sabotage when it happens to them. Nobody blinked an eye when Nord Stream (a civilian infrastructure) was blown up.
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Not asserting this is definitely a Russian op (given the amount of simultaneous farmers' protests and all in NL today), but their modus operandi for foreign operations of this kind involves paying random thugs a few hundred to a couple thousand euros to carry out acts of sabotage using whatever items they have on hand. The items don't need to match, the people involved don't need to know each other.
Correct, this is their exact MO and has been for decades. "Random thug" recruitment notwithstanding, part of the point of such ops is to prove to themselves that they can, in fact, reach out and touch a target - i.e., exercising the entire operational chain from C&C down to the minutiae of execution. A kind of integration test for sabotage, if you will. (Not saying this specific incident is or isn't anything in parti…
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The chances of this being real are basically zero, or Russia would be getting double agented, and reverse intelling themselves, out the arse. Instead all we get are attempts to connect random events, of which there are endless viable suspects, to Russia. It's fair to say that if one jumps in the middle of a fight, they should expect to get punched, but it's also fair to say that for now Russia has been avoiding throw…
Here's the article in Germany about the incident: https://www.rtl.de/news/russische-spionage-rtl-reporter-unde...
I suspect this is why there's endless stories, in pretty much every country, of dissidents handing over information to 'enemy states' who are in fact just domestic law enforcement. These people glow to everybody, and no foreign power's going to touch them.
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Yes, just like these [1] German border guards. Next time they should bring a sign like the one shown in the article. For those who don't read Dutch and can't be bothered to translate the article: Germany has restarted border checks which at the time of writing of this article had caused 171 accidents, some of which lethal. [1] https://www.gelderlander.nl/zevenaar/na-171-ongelukken-bij-d...
Whatabout is quite tiring, we are talking about the farmers you are defending as "rational", and absolving them from being the source of issues... Can we keep on topic?
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can you explain how Dutch farmers are being disinformed by Russian intelligence services? I am REALLy curious.
Russia spends a huge amount on manipulating western citizens via the internet, let's not play dumb about that. You may not think that it has any effect, but apparently Russian intelligence does.
Last that I checked, Dutch farmers are in an existential struggle with the government. I wonder how Russia disinforms them.