Incendiary devices found at shipping hubs could be Moscow putting pressure on West not to support Ukraine
Yeah, that’s totally how countries react to terrorist attacks.
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Yeah, that’s totally how countries react to terrorist attacks.
In the words of a recently departed music star: "We'll put a boot in yer ass, it's the American way"
I'm curious whether the putin-loving republican party would change their stance if Russia were to blow up a plane, or claim it's a Ukrainian false flag.
Nothing that outlandish.
It will clearly be blamed on Jewish space lasers.
It's how we've reacted to their aggression so far.
Bullies always assume they're the strong ones and everyone else knows they're secretly really weak in comparison.
We watched for years as the nazis rampaged across Europe, it hurts to watch that again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17?wprov=sfla1
It’s how we’ve reacted to their aggression so far.
The United States really does not want to get into a direct conflict with Russia. There's no question that we'd win any kind of conventional conflict but the American people have no desire for another land war in Europe. We've been there and done that, twice, and while I think we would support our European cousins for a 3rd go around getting support for it would require that the Europeans commit themselves first.
On a tangent but speaking frankly Europe as a whole needs to plan for dwindling support from the United States. Regardless of who wins the 2024 US elections the voting demographics of the United States are changing fast. There are literally tens of millions of current and near future immigrants from all over the world who will never care about European security as much as the current voters do. Why would they? Why should they?
The average immigrant from Asia or Latin America will not have ancestral ties to Europe and as their impact on US politics grows it's inevitable that US support for European shenanigans will dwindle. As voters they will push the US Government to care far more about what's happening in India, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and various countries on the African continent.
This is going to happen even if the United States elects nothing but Progressive Politicians for the next 10 election cycles and Europe needs to prepare for it.
The people don't, but the geopolitical structure does.
So, we spent, literally a decade trying to squish China and Russia together as allies, because Russia is the shittiest ally you can have, and, much like in WW1, you can guarantee both erratic foreign policy and failure on the battlefield (Russia being Austria-Hungary in this case, as the Germans called it "being shackled to a corpse"), while also enabling isolation of both (Russia has a lot of enemies, like ... basically everybody hates them and wants to see them suffer).
You are 100% correct Europe needs to stand up and deal with this, and that was the plan, but between China's reticence to act and their current economic woes, and Russia's general failure in combat (they were never expected to be this weak), the US is actually in a position to act, maybe not sending in boots on the ground, but air and drone support.
The key is the Sino-Russian axis being isolated and weakened before anything meaningful happens. Nobody wants a real war, the goal is a cold war that results in China and Russia grumbling loudly at how mean the west is to them. That's working btw, it's going well, aided by China's economic issues and Xi's obsession with domestic power over all else.
The alternative is an actual hot war, and that's a lot worse for everybody.
I know the reaction is to think "why can't we all get along?" but the problem is, the stakes for states, are impossibly high, life and death, so you have to always play the right move, because other states will act in their own brutal self-interest (see Russia), and when there's no higher authority to appeal to, you either make the right move, or you end up on the dustbin of history.
Btw, China is fine with this: Russia ends up wholly reliant, so China can basically get as many resources as they want, and land/food/etc. Over time China eats Siberia, and Russia can't do anything to stop it, but the oligarchs get paid well for selling out their country. win/win/win.
That's an act of war.
Also a dick move.
Also potentially a war crime. Aren't civilians and civilian assets supposed to be off-limits?
They don't care. They're not only targeting civilians, they're targeting hospitals, schools, double tapping medical first responders, raping and torturing, executing POWs, they don't give a flying fuck
Little do they know that we have an impenetrable TSA army that have trained for this very moment, waiting to spring into action!
But in all honesty, I think the odds that Russia would want to bomb US passenger planes is about as likely as a land invasion from North Korea.
I'm not that worried about this.
It wasn't a good idea for Iran back when Iran tried bombing airliners as leverage.
I am even more comfortable saying that it'd be a bad idea for Russia.
Russia could, no doubt, bring down airliners one way or another if it were set on doing so, but:
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I think that it's very questionable that Russia actually benefits from escalation. That will only happen if Russia is (a) being irrational (not impossible, but diplomats can go bang on that), or (b) we've dicked up managing the escalation ladder. Russia doesn't come out on top in pretty much any kind of conflict with NATO, so trying to generate more conflict once Russia hits the "there is a response" threshold, which they are definitely past, seems like a bad idea.
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What's the worst that happens? Maybe a coordinated attack on multiple airliners, kills a few hundred, thousand people, destroys a handful of jets? I mean, sure, that's bad, but it's not that big a deal as interstate conflict goes. Like, if Russia wants to attack in some way, that's a pretty bad way to expend the advantage of surprise.
Maybe the idea could be that an attack couldn't be firmly attributed to Russia, especially if Russian intelligence tries paying people in country to do something, as was the case IIRC with those arson attacks earlier, but then it's at least more-difficult for Russia to use that as leverage. Like, trying to make use of the window where you both have plausible deniability so that the other side doesn't feel like they're on firm enough ground to act and actually feels confident enough that you were responsible to be affected by using it as leverage seems like a very narrow and dangerous place to act.
If it were a fantastic way to conduct interstate conflict, then this sort of thing would be the norm in interstate conflict, and it isn't.
As risky and escalatory as it is, I can at least understand using freight airplanes to deliver incendiary packages to shipping warehouses.
I'm not saying I think it's good, but I can at least piece together the rationale for such actions from Russia.
The same cannot be said for blowing up civilian airliners.
Just from a realpolitik perspective, domestic support for military aid to Ukraine is broadly down across the voting populace in most, if not all, of Ukraine's biggest ($$$$) partners. Eventually that will likely result in the election of candidates who reflect that view.
Want to know the fastest way to not just immediately reverse that, but have 75%+ of the voting populace support radically escalating Western involvement? Blow up one of their civilian airliners.
Shit, blow up a French airliner and I'd say it would be coin flip whether they deploy active duty military ready for combat operations, in theatre, within a month.
Sure, but that was accidental. If they could have avoided that shootdown, they would have, and while I have no doubt that a lot of countries were annoyed by them not paying compensation, they were also aware that Russia wasn't intentionally trying to shoot down an airliner.
If Russia, say, adopted a policy of sending fighters into Poland and firing missiles at any airliners they find in Polish airspace, that's going to garner a more-unpleasant response.
Sure, but that was accidental.
Putin:
Downing a civilian aircraft with a SAM battery, or MANPAD, near an active conflict, is galaxies apart from planting explosives on civilian airliners.
And I don't mean legally speaking, although it is, I mean they aren't even in the same universe when talking about blowback, politics, military responses, threat management, PR, escalation ladders, etc.
The secretive weapons were found to be electronic massagers modified with a flammable magnesium-based substance, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
One source said these incendiary devices do not get caught by traditional security controls
Well, I guess prepare for air security to care more about vibrators than in the past.
you mean all those nuclear missiles pointed at us on a hair trigger for the last 60 years were just their way of saying i love you?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/world/europe/russias-sarmat-missile-test.html
They can't shoot them.
The old ones, designed by ukrainians in the ussr, have expired, and the new ones are more likely to nuke Russia than anyone else.
They have a busted flush, hence all the attempts to scare us into giving them all of Europe.
That's just the Sarmat missile. It only takes one ICBM. I assure you that enough of their nuclear triad is functional to devastate the stability of human civilization across the entire planet.
You don't know that. Look at how poorly they've maintained their conventional military, the one they actually depend on. A nuclear arsenal is very expensive to maintain.
Which is why they will only use it once they've lost everywhere else, and to reverse an invasion of their terriroty that threatens their survival as a country. An actual last resort.
They know most of their missiles are flawed, and we have countermeasures for most of those.
It's like China's final warning, they swore they would nuke Kyiv if they attacked Russian soil, and Ukraine took Kursk, just like Priggy got halfway to Moscow and Putin actually fled.
It's the Russian way, talk huge, but always crumple in the end. Same way the Soviet Union went btw.
The oligarchs are not going to nuke the west, they keep most of their money and stuff there!
We don't have countermeasures for a nuclear assault from Russia. Don't be absurd. GMD, THAAD, and ABMD aren't designed as full countermeasures. They're designed to protect nuclear assets and command and control centers long enough to launch a return strike. You're fooling yourself if you think we can stop a Russian nuclear attack. Our main and only real countermeasure is the same as it's been for 60+ years: MAD and other forms of deterrence.
Yeah we do, not like you think.
We spent trillions over the past few decades while Russia was collapsing like a flan.
Russia thinks they have nukes so that makes them feel safe, but you know the US never, ever goes without having a solution beforehand.
Abm is 1 layer, we have a dozen others, because they don't cost that much and we have nothing but people having ideas all the time.
The whole point is that Russia knows, we can hit their launchers before they can fire (ours fire so much faster and aren't liquid fuel, and we have so many fast attack subs compared to their few borei).
They know they have a 50:50 chance at best to seriously hurt us, and Russia, the area of land they occupy, will be removed from the planet in that case.
They pretend they actually are strong because the Russian mentality is 'you are strong or you are a victim', which is why they constantly piss people off and make everyone hate them, because they'd rather be hated than have people think they're weak.
Ukraine destroyed that illusion, everyone expected them to walk across in days. We now know for a fact that Russia is a true Potempkin state.
And all the countries that have historical grudges with Russia? Ie, their neighbors?
When it comes, it will come at once.
👍
No, but it goes both ways. They have missiles aimed at us. We have missiles aimed at them. They probably aren't gonna be better off if they use theirs. As long as we structure stuff such that escalation from them is disadvantageous to them, and as long as they're acting rationally, they're incentivized to not act, whether in smaller things like bombing airliners or larger things like the missiles.