DDoS attacks slow down Citizens' Initiative signing in Finland

Nah it's was always fairly-tale. Russian FSB always cooperated with Visa / Mastercard and international banks when it's had something to do with financial fraud.

They only turn a blind eye on those who work specifically for them.

Because the Finns and Russians have form. A second invasion against Finland would be a second go at the Winter War, and while they may not be a nato member, they are a full fledged EU member and Ukraine has shown that the EU will absolutely step up.

The EU may not include the US or UK, but it does include every other nuclear weapon on continental Europe.

Agree. The submission sounds more like a conspiracy theory. Why does the submitter needs to write a news article? Because there is no source to cite (the given link is absolutely not a source for what the submitter claims, probably everyone can understand that even if over 999/1000 readers need machine translation to do so).

It's was already in today's printed newspaper that the parliament will put NATO membership on the session agenda. Nordea is the biggest bank in Finland so there could be all kind of reasons to DDoS them. But not having more people sign the petition seems a far-fetched one. Polls show that support to join raised from 30% in January to 53% in the last poll. The last poll started already before Putin's attack and especially the news that this time Europe does not only watch and make some symbolic declarations, so one can easily assume that support has gone up since then.

Should it become mainline news that this attack was directed against signing the petition, support will go up further.

My feeling is bringing down the petition site would be much easier than the bank that many but far from all potential sginers need for authentication. The petition site is little used after all and has not gained much attention before, certainly not internationally. 50,000 signers needed. Over 90% of the petitions get just a small fraction of that during the 6 months a petition can be supported. Nordea bank handles that many customers in just a couple of hours every day and they have been target of DDoS before.

Is it HN policy to accept self-written posts? I don't remember it until maybe a few months ago. I thought you need to either post a link or Ask HN.

Americans should know they are responsible for what is happening in Ukraine now because their government has continuously interfered with Ukraine and Russian for a long time. This aggression coming out of America seems accounted for by the American culture that they worship money and strength and don't care much about weak people that they exploit. Even though I was born in a western country under the influence of western media, I have an impression that American irresponsibility is appalling as I consider the following facts:

1. The current Ukraine contains historically Russian territories that were moved to Ukraine in the era of USSR. Russian government cannot ignore originally Russian people living there. And Ukrainian nationalists are quite dangerous people. They are repressing proRussian people in the east. This is not something that Putin made up. My Russian acquaintances who work in the west directly know acquaintances and relatives living in the east Ukraine who witnessed such repression, namely, torture and murder. They joined the overturning of the government in 2014 holding the same flag as that they used when they cooperated with Nazis in 1940's. American government seems to often fund and arm such group of (almost terrorist) people, as they did to Mujahidn in Afghanistan (closely related to Taliban and AlQuaida) when it fought against Soviet.

2. The US have actually interfered with Ukraine and was likely involved in overturning the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014, establishing a puppet. Most notably, there was evidence, leaked conversation between American officials about who they want as the next Ukrainian leader. They had this conversation before the overturn actually happened, which even those US officials themselves admitted, although they denied American support of the overturn. Joe Biden was at the top of the then US administration, and his son earned millions of dollars in Ukraine afterwards. Anyone would suspect his deep involvement from this.

3. Russia has always been threatened by the economic aggression by the US. Putin was at first friendly to orgarches and the US when he took the position of president, but he started fighting them when they tried to sell off the shares of the companies that possess Russian natural resources to American capitals in 2004. If this had happened, the Russian oil money would have directly flowed into the US capitals, and therefore wouldn't have been accessible to Russian people. Notably, I was impressed by how IMF forced a country to privatise their state-owned companies and then American capitals tried to absorb them. Fortunately, this aggression was stopped by Putin, and a half of the shares of Russian oil companies are now owned by the state. This appears to be the key to the reason why the American government regard Putin as enemy.

4. Western media are highly suspected to intentionally broadcast distorted images of Putin. A typical example is Navalny's assassination. He claimed that he rang FSB agents and recorded their confession of the attempted assassination, by pretending to be their boss on the phone. What is this stupid story? He barely escaped from the assassination by FSB, and the notorious Russian spy agents confessed their attempt of assassination on the phone? Well, I personally believe that Putin is killing his opponents when they threaten his power. But, after hearing many such crappy stories from the western media, I started to believe Putin's opponents are sponsored by westerners that try to economically exploit Russia. 5. The current Ukrainian president who was from the south but elected by people in the pro-EU part, Zelensky, provoked Russia to an unthinkable extent. He showed the will to get back crimea, to crush the rebels in the east, to join NATO, and to increase their armament to cope with Russia (even nuclear armament). The first three plainly violates the Minsk agreement, and undermines Germany and France who joined it. Based on this fact, any sensible people would think that he risked own people's lives. From the fact that he could boldly do this, I suspect that he was backed by the US. No other countries would have been able to give him confidence to do so.

All these stories and others that I hear consistently indicate American aggression. Thus, despite pro-western media in my country, I started to believe that, even though Putin is a dictator and killing his opponents, he tells more genuine things. Europeans should reconsider their relationship with the US that destabilise Europe.