It's worth mentioning that cable breakages happen quite often; globally about 200 times per year [1] and the article itself mentions that just last year, two other cables and a gas pipeline were taken out by an anchor. The Gulf of Finland is evidently quite shallow. From what I understand, cable repair ships are likely to use ROVs for parts of repair jobs but only when the water is shallow so hopefully they can figure out whether the damage looks like sabotage before they sever the cable to repair it. Of course, if you're a bad actor and want plausible deniability, maybe you'd make it look like anchor damage or, deliberately drag an anchor right over the cables.
Cable repairs are certainly annoying and for the operator of the cable, expensive. However, they are usually repaired relatively quickly. I'd be more worried if many more cables were severed at the same time. If you're only going to break one or two a year, you might as well not bother.
"Appears to be", in English, generally means "on first look/glance." It runs very close to "I believe such and such."
If I asked you for an answer to a math question, then you showed me the answer with how you got there, on a very quick glance I might say: "That appears to be correct."
It could mean they've seen more evidence to make that assessment, or are basing that assessment on the same evidence we have. Regardless, "appears to be" is hedging in the absence of certainty.
This is right. But I'd add that the fact that the speaker is the German defense minister adds an additional layer of meaning. Ordinarily such a person would not be expected to give such an initial assessment without careful consideration.
> Bundesverteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius vermutet im Fall von zwei in der Ostsee beschädigten Kabeln zur Datenübertragung eine vorsätzliche Aktion durch Dritte. Man müsse davon ausgehen, dass es sich um Sabotage handle, sagte er am Rande eines Treffens mit seinen EU-Amtskollegen in Brüssel. Beweise dafür gebe es bislang aber nicht. Er betonte: "Niemand glaubt, dass diese Kabel aus Versehen durchtrennt worden sind."
> Federal Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius assumes the case of to damaged baltic sea data cables to be the intentional action of a third party. One should assume it to be sabotage, he said while at a meeting with EU colleagues in Brusseles. Proof, however, is not available yet. He emphasized: "Nobody believes that those cables were cut by accident."
So while carefully not saying anything definitive and firm, he very strongly hints in the direction of sabotage.
In a political and intelligence sense "appears to be" is a rhetorical tool for propaganda purposes, or / and to cover you ass.
He could say "We have no evidence of this being sabotage and further speculation is not useful at this point”
which is what he says, from one perspective.
On the other he is framing a conspiracy theory:
"Something happened that appears to be sabotage and sabotage would be done by the enemy. " and the European media has been stuffed full of conspiracy theories during the entire conflicts.
Educationally you can look at the Nord Stream pipelines sabotage.
Nearly every EU and US source writes in big letters that Russia was behind it.
After a while, it became nearly impossible to keep that conspiracy theory alive.
Sweden and Denmark ended their investigation into the matter with no conclusion drawn
The present narrative is that the sabotage was done by a Ukrainian team with a shoe string budget:
A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage
Private businessmen funded the shoestring operation, which was overseen by a top general; President Zelensky approved the plan, then tried unsuccessfully to call it off
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
The sibling comments are very relevant, but I wanted to provide a marginally different perspective. You have to take not only what is being said, but _who is saying it_ into perspective.
In this case, this is a government official speaking to the press (i.e. in an official capacity). If they were to say "this was sabotage," that is a definite declaration that the government believes - again, officially and on the record - that an outside party has deliberately done material damage to their country. Given the general situation, it is not a huge leap to come to the interpretation that "this was an attack against our country, and possibly an act of war."
No government official would want to be within miles (or kilometers) of that sort of statement unless they have pretty much already internally decided from the top-down to escalate the situation. Almost no single government agent has the authority to escalate the situation in that manner. So what we end up with is "appears to be." This overtly says 'all available evidence points to this being the case, however something else cannot be ruled out.' (As a sibling comment suggests, it can also act as a type of propaganda). So it is not an official government declaration that another nation has damaged them, but they have reasons (probably both apparent and not) to believe what they are saying publicly.
It's inconclusive but only a little. There's a spectrum of conclusitivity through "possibly is", "might be", "could be", "very well might", "looks like", "appears to be", "almost certainly is", "is".
I suppose in today’s world it’s hard to know what was sabotage and what was an accident, and where the buck stops - particularly in marine matters. Was that anchor drag intentional? Did the operator know their charts were out of date? Did that trawl net really fail and snag like that?
Reflexive cynicism about the military isn't as warranted in 2024 as it might have been a decade ago. And it wasn't really warranted a decade ago either, when Russia was blowing up Czech ammunition depots, airliners full of Dutch people, conducting assassinations in the center of Berlin, and sending "little green men" to Ukraine.
It could be an accident, sure, but suspicion of sabotage is not paranoia.
And also, like, the German government (and European governments generally) DOES need to spend more on their military. They underinvested for decades and are now stuck needing to catch up very quickly.
Russia and Russia alone is responsible for "kick-starting" this war.
And providing Ukraine with aid so that they don't get steamrolled is not morally wrong. Nor is refusing to do so so that Russia can more quickly get around to torturing and repressing the population a moral right.
It's not like a line in the sand, admitted as such by both sides, was broken, one with explicit promises that it wouldn't be.
Indeed it's not, because that's an extremely distorted and misleading narrative. For example, on multiple occasions (notably 1994 and 1997) Russia signed treaties validating NATO expansion long after this supposed "explicit promise" (which also wasn't quite what you seem to think). We also have statements from the two most important players on the Soviet side (Gorbachev and Shevardnadze) thoroughly discounting this version of events.
Whatever source you got that narrative from is simply misinformed, or worse.
Listening to people who probably proclaim themselves "anti-imperialists" give full-throated defenses of imperialism never gets old.
>prepared to fight their proxy war to the last of them
The natural corollary to this ridiculous "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian" argument, which you guys never seem to acknowledge, is that it already assumes that Russia will murder every last Ukrainian and take their land. That's just a given, and you then try to blame the West as though they stuck their hand into a lawnmower or something.
None of this holds up to any scrutiny, though. The whole NATO expansion narrative barely exists in Russia, they don't talk about that, they talk about standard-issue Imperialist narratives like "Ukraine doesn't exist, it's not a real country, not a real language, not a real ethnicity, Ukrainians are 'little brothers' to the superior Russian spirit, everything good in Ukraine is Russian and everything Ukrainian is bad, and we Russians must liberate them from their mental delusions of being something other than Russian and restore Russia to our natural greatness & place in the world"
Please explain why Russia has the right to dictate foreign policy postures to their independent former colonies, or disregard treaties signed with them.
I get where you’re coming from; however looking at their post history I think vatnik/tankie rather than straight troll factory or FSB.
In any case, disputin Kremlin propaganda in an otherwise well-regarded forum doesn’t feel wrong. One certainly wouldn’t bother on Twitter, for example.
Not even Fox News would stoop to this level of harebrained whataboutism.
> goat ...lovers in Afghanistan
or outright, unfettered racism
> something that they have repeatededly said they consider a casus belli
or fawning gullibility.
Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO and until 2014 was dead-set against it. Same for Finland and Sweden until 2022. Whatever happened in those years to trigger such a change in public sentiment, I wonder.
> It must be because they thought, "hey, what better than to get in a costly war", have hundreds of thousands of their own die
“Meat waves” are a decades old Soviet military doctrine that has not changed, and Putin is an ex-KGB thug. Regard for human life isn’t in that picture.
>Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO and until 2014 was dead-set against it. Same for Finland and Sweden until 2022. Whatever happened in those years to trigger such a change in public sentiment, I wonder.
The 2014 orange revolution was carried out, for starters, to put a change to that. And even when later the current leader was elected promised to normalize relationships, he was "convinced" promptly to push for the opposite direction. As for Finland and Sweden, when told to jump, they ask "how high".
Cries of "Whataboutism!" is basically "our shit doesn't stink, let's focus on the others' farts, and treat them as some unique case of foul smell producers!".
Oh I see, tens of millions of people in pluralist open democracies got a secret memo from a paternalistic deep state to change their minds. It definitely wasn’t the repeated invasions, murder, looting, sabotage, rape, kidnapping, destruction, annexation that every one of Russia’s neighbours are utterly sick of.
You’re right about one thing, though. There’s definitely a stench here.
> Yeah, it's not like a line in the sand, admitted as such by both sides, was broken, one with explicit promises that it wouldn't be.
Ah, your oddly-vague wording must of course be referring to how Russia explicitly promised to respect Ukraine's borders [0], a line they are violently crossing as we speak. First with an undeclared guerrilla-war and annexation, and more-recently with a massive "surprise" invasion--after spending several weeks of lying about their buildup and pretending that other countries were just trying to make them look bad.
If you are sarcastically suggesting something else... Well, go ahead, share the evidence for whatever-it-is, the kind of documentary evidence which countries ensure is always abundant for any remotely important international promise. (That is in contrast to self-serving lies from the Kremlin, which rely heavily on refusing to explain.)
>Ah, your oddly-vague wording must of course be referring to how Russia explicitly promised to respect Ukraine's borders
After it was itself promised NATO wont expand eastwards and Ukraine will not be used to get their bases next to its borders. Not really strange how they broken this agreement after 30 years of broken promises, sanctions, open threats, an orange coup in their neighbor, among other things.
But sure, nothing more anti-imperialist by a coalition formed by the foremost imperialist power with its client states, expanding for "democracy"...
Oh look, exactly what I predicted in advance: A self-serving lie from the Kremlin, which relies heavily on your refusal to provide any form of evidence. In particular, the kind of written details which any nation (including the USSR) would have insisted upon getting in triplicate, for the kind of important thing you claim existed.
Also, why haven't you paid me the $50,000 you promised, you disgraceful deadbeat? You say you don't remember it? It doesn't matter if I can't provide any kind of document or recording that would be standard for that kind of thing, it must have happened--or else why would I keep bringing it up?
Neither cable goes to Ukraine. Is Finland fighting someone’s proxy war, too? How about Germany? Sweden? Lithuania?
How about Russia? Whose proxy are they?
Anyone parroting that phrase is simply repeating Kremlin-sourced propaganda, intended to wrench at the weak minds of “useful idiots” and supply a pretext for what they truly wish: lily-livered appeasement that rewards aggression with recognition.
Life under Russian occupation is one of rape, torture, kidnapping, looting, execution. Would you like to be raped and tortured? How about your family, in front of you, before they are executed? No? No.
That is why Ukraine fights.
“Proxy war”, my ass. Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression is existential.
Quite the opposite. Ukraine has been prevented from joining NATO by the west, especially Germany and France, for fear of angering Russia. This course of action has led to war. The proper course of action in hindsight would have been to have Ukraine join NATO asap back then.
Ukraine wasn't a candidate for NATO membership in 2014 or 2022, and this was agreed to in all major treaties/agreements with Russia. It's still not a candidate, and can't be while it's actively engaged in war.
NATO membership has never had anything to do with it. Note how Finland has joined NATO since 2022, and faces no repercussions from Russia, despite a third of their land-based nuclear missiles within 400 km of the Finnish border.
Although Russia has obstinately described NATO expansion as a threat, Putin was actually more concerned about the loss of Russia’s perceived sphere of influence in former Soviet republics which were aligning themselves with the West economically and politically
So it wasn’t about NATO, it was about maintained a decaying sphere of influence.
Boris Bondarev, a Russian diplomat who later resigned in protest of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, recalled that the draft treaties had shocked many Russian diplomats and that he immediately viewed the demands as non-negotiable.
Even the Russian diplomats knew it was posturing while Russia added to the 100,000 troops already staging on the border with Ukraine. Demands made at the point of 100,000 guns pointed at you are not good faith negotiating positions.
What right does Russia have to formalized neutrality, to control Ukraine’s foreign policy? Do you think that, since “Germany is just a vassal state” that Russia deserves one too?
Yes, Ukraine has been a candidate for NATO membership. In 2008, during the Bucharest Summit, NATO members agreed that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the alliance. However, no formal invitation was extended at that time.
COMMONS LIBRARY
In 2010, under President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine adopted a non-aligned status, halting its pursuit of NATO membership. This policy shifted after the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, leading Ukraine to renew its aspirations for NATO integration. In 2019, Ukraine amended its constitution to enshrine the goal of joining NATO.
NATO
In September 2022, following Russia's annexation of parts of southeastern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine had applied for NATO membership under an accelerated procedure.
WIKIPEDIA
As of November 2024, Ukraine remains a NATO partner country and has not yet achieved full membership.
Between 2010 and later 2022 (i.e., not in 2014 or in February 2022) Ukraine was officially not pursuing membership, and France, Germany and the US were all unofficially making it clear that NATO membership was not being pursued and would not be offered.
Ukraine applied for NATO membership after Russia's invasion. It cannot therefore be a cause of Russia's invasion. At the time Russia sponsored and supported internal revolt in Crimea and Donbass, it was 2014 and Ukraine was officially and unofficially not in or applying to NATO--so how can that be the cause of Russian intervention then?
Thank you, though, for using ChatGPT to support my contention that NATO membership had nothing to do with Russia's invasion.
Also, to clarify one point: No one is a candidate for NATO who is currently engaged in hostilities. While Ukraine was in a state of war against Russian supported forces in Donbass and Crimea, it was ineligible to even apply. It may have put the goal of joining NATO in its constitution, but it was a non-starter until that conflict was resolved.
BTW, Russia has shared borders with multiple NATO countries, starting with Norway in 1949 when NATO was founded, and the Baltics since 2004. A neighbouring country's membership in an alliance is not a casus belli.
Compare: "The serial-killer is responsible but not alone, this second stabbing could have been prevented by not trying to protect yourself from being stabbed again by the same serial-killer!"
That may be true in the most narrow and mechanical sense, but the way it presents blame is very wrong.
That’s bullshit. I’m sorry, but I’m tired of apologists falling to Russian state lies. Falling over to Russian lies is not independent thinking.
The first rule of kremnology is that Russia always lies without a shame, as lies are usefull and they incur zero cost on the liar.
Russia invaded because they felt Ukraine was showing a bad example of slavic people becoming a democracy.
Also Russia has always had an affinity towards Ukrainian genocide. See Holodomor.
Also there is the narrative of lost colonial honor, Crimea, Catherine the great, and other idiotic pseudo-historical ramblings of a demented autocratic propagnada.
> The first rule of kremnology is that Russia always lies without a shame, as lies are usefull and they incur zero cost on the liar.
you’re describing international relations, none of this is specific to russia. people are indoctrinated from birth into nationalist propaganda. when these mouthpieces speak they aren’t lying, but it’s not the truth.
We may find it ridiculous to be afraid of NATO or the USA
Russia isn't "afraid" of either -- it just considers them to be annoyances.
Its regime pretends be "afraid" of both, for the benefit of its internal and external propaganda, and of course to entice its people to sign up for the meat grinder. But that's just its delusion, which we are under no obligation to honor or validate.
It's not convincing. It's a man wrapped up in defending a worldview he's held for 5 decades against real world experiences that directly contradict it.
Putin's actions do not line up with this portrait of him as a hyper-rational long-term strategist acting on the interests of the Russian state. They line up very well with what you would expect from an aging, deeply conspiratorial cold warrior with widely publicized nationalist beliefs [0], a desire to have a legacy that compares against the likes of Peter the Great [1], and the type of delusional thinking that is the near-inevitable result of not having anyone that is willing (due to brownnosing) or able (due to corruption) to tell you hard truths [2].
Even when someone like Tucker Carlson sits down with Putin and practically tees him up to blame the war on US, he goes on ridiculous historical tangents to try to justify why Ukraine isn't real, as opposed to saying anything related to NATO. And that's not a fluke. Russian internal narratives are vastly more focused on nationalism than on anything resembling "NATO made us do this".
You also just have to look at the assassinations carried out on NATO soil - including using chemical and radiological weapons - blowing up Czech ammunition depots, etc. Years and years of unilateral kinetic escalation directly against the west. And then no response whatsoever when Finland and Sweden joined NATO.
Captured, no. Never estimate the human potential for naivete self-deception.
What we do know is that they've been in close contact, and that he is sincerely grateful to them:
In John Mearsheimer's 2023 book "How States Think", the foreword acknowledges him receiving a small financial support from Valdai in conjunction with Best Book award for his 2019 book "The Great Delusion".
Not joining NATO is just a way of deferring the genocide. A regional power has no chance to stand against a global superpower on its own. If not NATO, then a different coalition.
I understand what you mean but Russia is not a global superpower. They are not the USSR. Acting and speaking as though they are is part of how we got into this mess, the US and Europe didn't show any real backbone during the decade following the initial 2014 invasion, or during the Syrian crisis before that, or the 2008 invasion of Georgia before that.
One strand of BS I've seen is "Ukraine now is a different country than the one we promised never to invade."
If that's really how it works, Russia should be ejected from the United Nations and apologize for fraudulently casting votes in the UN Security Council, because it's a different country than the USSR.
Fair, but even if they are not a global superpower, they are a tier above most of their bordering countries. 2014 was a direct result of Germany being dependent on Russian gas.
I wouldn’t argue that EU and the US did not screw up in 20{08,14} though. We did. Massively. We did underestimate Putins long game - had we known how far he wants to go, and I’d argue most post soviet countries knew, this would’ve been nipped in the bud.
Acting and speaking as though they are is part of how we got into this mess,
Actually it was Putin's acting and speaking as if he could partially restore the glory of the former Soviet empire (whose collapse he called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century") that got Russia into its current mess in Ukraine.
He does, in any case, consider the current Russian Federation and the Soviet Union to be continuations of "historic Russia". So it's not Western rhetoric. And it isn't the West that is making him invade Ukraine and menace other countries.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. Of course Putin is an imperialist. But for two decades his grievances were treated as though they had legitimacy, or as though Russia should be given the same level deference and appeasement that the USSR was. Even holding Putin's opinions constant, the US and Europe should have pushed back harder against the aggression rather than pretending it wasn't happening.
You could always just bootstrap a nuclear program in Ukraine instead.
They gave up their nukes in exchange for protection from Russia and the US. Both countries have failed to keep up their end of the bargain, so it's sensible for Ukraine to get back what they gave up.
Great idea. Uncontrollable wars? Rising extremism all over the world? New generation of politicians who never experienced real diplomacy? Moralism, division, hatred... of course... the only things to save us all: the nukes. Let's just get it over with!
A somewhat more-amusing proposal I've seen: Ukraine declares "war" against a NATO nation (e.g. Poland) and then immediately surrenders. Then it starts negotiations to secede while keeping NATO membership without a gap.
The folks parroting that phrase live inside an echo chamber. They’re so entrenched they never think to consider that their words might have an interpretation unfavourable to the Kremlin.
Imagine trusting the labels given out by the same country which sent their troops and tanks across the border in 2014, and then spent years smirking and lying their asses off about not being involved. Plus shooting down a civilian jet killing ~300 people.
"Oh, sure, they engage in extra-sketchy forms of state-sponsored violence and chronically lie about it... but that just means they know the material! They'd never lie to me, because we have a special spiritual connection."
Yeah, imagine trusting labels given by the same country that sent their troops and tanks into their neighbor in 2014, and then spent years smirking and lying their asses off about not being involved.
The last time it happened, the Russian ship had also been seen unnaturally going back and forth over the cable where the damage occurred. These damages do not happen by themselves. Considering the current international situation and the fact that it happened in a short time in several places unnaturally in a limited region, the Baltic Sea, you have to be very naive if you do not see this as probable sabotage.
The "Yi Peng 3", a Chinese ship that parted from a Russian Port, has been located near both cables just before they were cut. The ship was detained in NATO water, and now faces an investigation.
Currently, all points to a deliberate act of hybrid warfare
They can measure the location of the break to centimeters by timing how long a light pulse takes to reflect back to the emitter. It is called time-domain reflectometry.
Why are you assuming that would be released publicly? The person you are discussing this with is simply informing you of the existence and availability of the technology you're asking about.
They now the distance to the break from one end. They then use that with a map of the cable to determine the lat and long of the break and send a ship to fix it.
This process assumes the damage is accidental and doesn't involve the military. If Russia keeps cutting optic cables that could change. I can envision military ships getting real-time notification of fiber cuts and the current location of all foreign ships.
Yes. But in this case it's not known who did this. One NATO member is trying to pin it on Ukraine. But evidence is scarce. Personally I'm 50/50 whether this was russian false-flag or combined effort of some NATO members and Ukraine.
So long as we live in democracies, we are responsible for the actions of our governments.
You can certainly go "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos" during domestic discussions of displeasure of the ruling party. But, in international affairs, we are accountable for our government's foreign policies.
I'm Canadian. "We" are in a proxy war with Russia. "We" need to win lest Putin thinks he can just take sovereign nations like Ukraine without the rest of the world stopping him.
Appeasing dictators is a losing policy. "We" need to do everything possible by having Europe fund Ukraine, and now while "We" have Biden agreeing to do so, until Trump takes over and "we" have infighting between NATO nations about what to do about Ukraine.
Why is this analysis focused on the Baltics? That's p hacking, given that it happened to happen in the baltics.
Let's instead say there are roughly 20 ocean regions we would post hoc consider "the same". Now, given a breakage, what is the probability of at least two more in the same region and day? This is a Poisson distribution with lambda=200/365/20. The probability of two more independent breakages is 0.04 % for that specific day.
But again, picking a specific day would be p-hacking. Zooming out, an event that rare is expected to happen every seven years or so.
Now, "every seven years" is a far cry from "1 in 36 million." Whenever you get crazy p values like that, there is often an error or overlooked assumption in the analysis.
----
If you like this sort of thing, have a stab at forecasting competitions! I can recommend the Metaculus Quarterly Cup. The current one is in full swing so use the remaining 1.5 months of the year to practice and then you're set for when the January edition starts.
I see, this was in fact what I had in mind. The maths I posted represent the horizon of my knowledge in probability and was surprised how well o1-preview was able to output correct numerical calculations.
Having said that how would the odds look like if we factor in the fact the Baltic Sea is one of two zones with the most geopolitical tensions (along with Taiwan).
---
Thanks for the Metaculus recommendation. I was a bit disappointed in the lack of maths in the comments in general. Can you recommend something in the vein of Leetcode with various degrees of difficulty, from very basic to advanced problems ? I'm both interested in probability and statistics
That's assuming independence. I'm not ruling out sabotage but the world is often not fully independent. A storm or an anchor both may affect multiple cables if they're in generally the same area which would definitely make the probability far more likely than those stated. (edit typo)
I don't buy that number (no source is attributed to it), or rather, I don't believe there's a single incident causing this.
The C-Lion1 cable is predominantly North-East - South-West whereas the BCS cable is NW-SE. They do meet, but the C-Lion1 operator Cinia says their cable broke about 700 km from Helsinki, east of the southern tip of the Öland island. That's easily over 150 km south from where the cables meet.
Also, C-Lion1 was reported broken at 4m, and the BCS cable at 10am the previous day.
The grandparent comment is total nonsense which sounds smart but is not. Damages from accidents are not independently random either. Or do you think it is virtually impossible that 140 people die on the same airliner? It is likely the same ship cut both either by accident or intentionally.
I am leaning towards sabotage but that two cables were cut means very little.
Right, if it’s a case interview, then higher accuracy ought to prompt the interviewee to ask:
(1) Do the 200 cuts typically occur in clusters?
(2) What’s the typical density, eg are they usually collocated? (as an alternative to the above)
(3) Are there pathways that avoid the sea but connect Europe and North America (getting at density in the sea in question)
Etc.
That’s what makes this one so good—lots of opportunities to extend or roll-back difficulty.
I was surprised to see so many upvotes this morning and was disappointed when I realized it wasn't for another comment I made about the Anthropic Principle.
My take is that in face of coincidences supporting the emergence of intelligent life, we should expect to observe coincidences unnecessary for the emergence of life too.
An analogy: imagine you have lost the key to your mansion and try to cut one at random out of a metal sheet. If it can unlock the door, then chances are that you cut unnecessary notches (the analogy only holds for warded locks and the key you crafted is a master key).
No, because anchors can easily damage several cables close to each other. And that is how it almost certainly happened no matter if it was an accident or sabotage.
What are the chances that they break in close proximity spacially, but not temporarily? (I'm assuming that it would be headline material if the lines had disconnected within minutes)
Tangent: an attacker trying hard to provoke that kind of accident would likely not have a very fast success feedback. "Let's try once more, for good measure"
Still pretty decent, given the right circumstances.
For example, the 2011 earthquake in Japan resulted in damage to 7 cables[0]. But it wasn't the quake itself which instantly broke all 7 cables - they were destroyed by underwater avalanches triggered by the earthquake. Avalanches can occur hours after a seismic event, and some underwater avalanches go on for days.
I highly doubt that's the case here, but if you're asking about chances it's not as unlikely as you'd think!
You're right, that was not kind. Apologies. It was late at night and I'd read too many depressing news (and many even more depressing, warmongering comments). Not an excuse, just a human factor.
What I should have said:
By clever GP most probably meant funny (with a hint of self-deprecation) rather than smart (or even correct).
You can't even assume they follow a normal distribution. For all we know, ships drop anchor more on certain days or weather conditions. That's just the start of the rabbit hole.
I watched a rep from the operators of the cable claim that this particular cable is pretty tough, and anything other than deliberate sabotage would be very unlikely.
Right. It's indeed worth pointing out that while this certainly looks like Russian terrorism, it's really fairly bad terrorism, all things considered, and not particularly hard or expensive to mitigate.
It's basically a "Putin tax" on the industrial democracies in the reason. I don't see how this helps Russia at all, honestly. Putin has a real shot, given the state of US politics, at salvaging something approximating a "victory" in Ukraine and getting back to peacetime economics. Why rock the boat?
The goal at this stage is not the outcome of some minor outage, but signaling that they are prepared and ready to go ahead with major acts of sabotage. This is the local thugs smashing some furniture in your store as a warning.
You offered nothing to support the theory that Russia is behind this. This reminds me of the Nordstream sabotage, when many jumped to accuse Russia even though that made no sense at all. Perhaps wait for the official investigations. If they like what they discover this time, they might publish it.
> deliberately drag an anchor right over the cables
Can we not make the cables resistant to this? Like if someone drags an anchor over a cable, it instantly locates the break based on time-of-flight over the cable and instantly dispatches a drone from the nearest shoreline to spray nasty sticky shit all over the ship?
Cables can be buried and ploughed into the sea floor. This is usually done in the shallow last miles when approaching a landing on a coast, because there the risk for damage due to anchors, fishermen and other human activity is far higher. However, sometimes the ground can be unsuitable, and burying is expensive, so this isn't done for the whole length.
Doesn't need to be a drone, there should be coast guard etc of all neighbouring countries nearby that can dispatch a plane.
That said, radar systems and sattelites should be active at all times too keeping track of every ship on there, especially if they don't have a transponder active.
This is a misleading framing. The two cables last year were not taken out by an anchor as an accident, it was literally a ship putting down its anchor just before the cable and then dragging it over the cable. In other words, sabotage. There's no point in trying to color any of this with rose tinted glasses when it's clear who's done it and why.
> it was literally a ship putting down its anchor just before the cable and then dragging it over the cable
I don't understand. That's how I'd expect most accidents to happen. Someone decides to anchor too close to an undersea cable, the anchor fails to hold and the drifting ship drags the anchor over the cable damaging it.
I'm not saying it wasn't sabotage, but there needs to be something a bit more than that.
Source: have dragged anchors - thankfully never near undersea cables
The case last year with the gas pipeline, the Chinese / Russian owned left Kaliningrad, and then while sailing, dropped its anchor before the pipeline and cable, and then dragged it over them, and then raised it. It was apparently accidental, yet both the Chinese and Russians didn't want the crew interviewed, the Estonian and the Finnish authorities both shrugged and didn't really care, and the Estonian energy prices were severly impacted for ~9 months.
IMO very very likely sabotage, and brushed under the rug in fear of Russian escalation.
The Finnish authorities know exactly who did it, but what are they going to do?
Sanction Russia? Fire a few missiles at Moscow? Write a sternly worded letter?
It's just added to the pile of "shit that Russia does without repercussions" which is opened when (not if) they actually cross the border to Finland and find out what happens when you fuck around with a country who's been preparing for Russian invasion for 100 years.
> IMO very very likely sabotage, and brushed under the rug in fear of Russian escalation.
But what can they do? Imagine you are the leader of a small European country like the Netherlands, and one day Russia decides to shot down your passenger plane with 300 people on board. You can do absolutely nothing.
But once a proxy war started, of course the Netherlands are doing their best to make Putin pay for the lives of these innocent people. He basically alienated many countries in this way and then complains of "Russophobia".
350+ APCs, 150+ MBTs, Patriot bateries, SPGs, F16s - I'm sure those on the receiving end do think that their Donbas proxies could have been a bit less trigger happy when the loaned them that Buk AA system back in 2014.
Those 298 inoccent victims, 193 of them citizens of Netherlands will be avenged many times over.
What goes around comes around - the irony being that russia itself- has very little regarding hightech structure that could be sabotaged.
No russian starlink sats.
No russian fiber lines.
No anything.
Just backwater countries, slowly bled dry to have that heap of loot called moscow polished.
The heap of pillaged academics with nowhere to go has wandered off towards the west.
All there is, is vandalism and downfall while high on nostalgia. The aggressive train station HasBeenHobo of international politics.
NATO countries don't or barely respond because subversion requires a response.
Russia is constantly pulling low hanging fruit hoping for as much commotion, fear, etc. It's party of their destabilization and subversion tactics.
This is why authorities are not loud, but calm & stoic.
And it works, very few people around me are aware of the fact that Russia has blown up NATO ammunition depots, liquidated politicians and has spread bombs on mail flights.
During WW2 the British had a great slogan: /Keep Calm and Carry On/.
It actually helps the war effort, unlike public outcry, wild speculation & unrest.
For the non westerns the west is constantly bribing and threatening other nations to comply with their economic expansion drift. In the end we are all tribal nations. And even the west isntva tiny bit better than others. Unfortunately propoganda at all sides make people sticking to one side, condemning the other.
I guess its time for some lessons of the history of Finland.
Remind you of the collaboration with Nazi Germany. Also the forced removal of half a million people in Karelia. Treatment of native Sami people. discrimination and murder of many of those. Nothing different than any other country.
Don't fool yourself in thinking you belong to the good guys. Its the concequence of propaganda.
Russian propaganda is all about claiming nobody has any values, and using hand picked historical errors and misattribution evidence of this. The intent is to sow doubt.
I see you are repeating the favourite tropes while avoiding the point - a colonizer attempting to strike down again at an old victim.
The point is not about not making mistakes. Everybody does those. They key thing about being among the good guys is a) recognizing those mistakes and b) not intentionally repeating them. Also not treating your own citizens as worthless pieces of flesh to throw in to the meatgrinder is a clear ”good guy bad guy” indicator if we want to use low brow moral qualifiers.
I guess you conveniently forgot to mention that Finland joined Germany only because Stalin was about to roll over Finland and nobody else was willing to oppose the invasion. The key thing what displays the character of Finland as country, is that Finland never let Germany take our jewish population. The only thing that made Germany truly evil was the holocaust. Finland did not participate in the holocaust. Jewish men served in the Finnish armed forces. When Germans wanted to implement their holocaust in Finland, the finns said basically ”piss off”.
You are quite right on the historical treatment of Sami. You forget to mention that Sami rights as a minority are now quite well protected, and we feel quite bad of this historical ill trearment.
This is in contrast with Russian values, for example, where the state not only refuses to admit the historical mistakes made, genocide, but happily sends hundreds of thousands of men to a pointless meat grinder. This is what true evil looks like. One needs to be a very special kind of fool not to see state institutions clearly being ”better” or ”worse” and Russia being of the very worst kind. The propaganda attempt you posted tries to argue in an off-hand manner that Russia can’t be the worst since all are equally bad. The claim is false. There is a clear gradient of human quality in state institutions and the Russian state is objectively at the worse end of the spectrum, and sliding ever lower sadly.
> Remind you of the collaboration with Nazi Germany.
Let me quote Wikipedia:
After invading Poland, the Soviet Union sent ultimatums to the Baltic countries, where it demanded military bases on their soil. The Baltic states accepted Soviet demands, and lost their independence in the summer of 1940. In October 1939, the Soviet Union sent a similar request to Finland, but the Finns refused these demands. [1]
At that point Finland was neutral, but Soviet Union had a treaty with Nazi Germany and invaded Poland together (and also split the whole Eastern Europe between themselves in secret protocol of Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. See [2]
After the ultimatum Finland refused, Soviet Russia invaded, got repelled, and only THEN Finland allied with Nazi Germany.
> Nothing different than any other country.
One country invaded other. The other country defended itself. These are objectively not alike. Stop repeating russian propaganda. There is objective truth and it's not that hard to know it. People who try to make it fuzzy do it because they know it's not painting them in a good light.
Remember how Russia was pretending situation in Ukraine in 2014 is "complicated", and Ukrainians are "nazis" and these "green men" are just Ukrainian separatists, and westerners can't really know what's going on. They also pushed "both sides are bad, let's just ignore it" - and it worked back then. Thousands of people died because of useful idiots believing these lies. Nowadays Russia openly admits it was their army pretending to be Ukrainians.
Russia wants the West to react, to stop funding Ukraine and instead fund.. protection for their own homelands I guess. This is a known (theory?), and the game theoretic way to then respond is to, ignore that it happens. Dont stoke any fear or reaction from people or government.
again (we in the eastern part have very fond memories of russian oppression and enslavement of whole eastern block, shooting people on the streets and on the borders for the heinous crime of wanting to escape that communist paradise... thats why baltics, Finland or Poland have rather strong military, while slovakia and hungary have highly corrupt governments that only fear what democracy brings so they lean east for protection)
Generally misspellings like this kind of proves the point...
The comment means nothing, neither mine nor the one I commented on so I won't even bother looking up the spelling.
It's more important to understand why the comment is there.
The GP asked what boat, parent effectively said "a boat" which doesn't answer the question. My comment was one of the least likely options, but hey I could have said sailboat...
Not an excuse either but realistically I on a daily basis speak two languages and often interact with people who can barely speak one of those two so I have some basic understanding of a third... Sometimes I can't remember which one spelling rules come from. Not an excuse, it's easy enough to look it up but just context.
"In August 2024, an internal Chinese investigation indicated that the ship was indeed responsible for the damage, claiming it was an accident due to heavy weather rather than intentional sabotage.[23][24]"
The internal Chinese investigation indicated that was an accident.. LOL
Dropping anchor in a channel is something a container ship (especially one without other mitigations like this Newnew, I mean look at it) might do to increase stability and reduce the risk of drifting out of the channel.
I don't care to convince folks in this thread one way or another, but yes, there are reason a commercial ship would drop anchor while underway, including bad weather and a narrow / shallow channel. The circumstances from last year had both.
I can only upvote. How does the anchor come into contact with the cable if not by that exact sequence of steps? The ship isn't sailing through the Gulf with its anchor down, it has to go near the cable, drop anchor then drag. Otherwise the cable and anchor will not interact. This is the only way an accident could happen (almost).
New New Polar Bear (the Nov 2023 case) was definitely sailing down the Gulf with its anchor down. Estonian defense minister stated at the time there are drag tracks in the seabed for "over 185 km".
>I don't understand. That's how I'd expect most accidents to happen. Someone decides to anchor too close to an undersea cable, the anchor fails to hold and the drifting ship drags the anchor over the cable damaging it.
In most of these cases, it's Russian ships dropping their anchors in areas where the cables are known to be and then driving around in circles until they snag and break it. It's not even slightly plausible that they'd be doing it accidentally.
Have you filed your observations of the ships anchor at sea to the authorities? Because it does sound strange, if you indeed have a witness to this, that they dropped and then hoisted their anchors to damage infrastructure four times that day:
> Swedish-Estonian telecoms cable at 1513 GMT, then over the Russian cable at around 2020 GMT, the [Balticconnector gas pipeline] at 2220 GMT and a Finland-Estonia telecoms line at 2349 GMT.
Well, you never know 100%.
There is a small (really small) chance it was an accident. Just like there is a small chance that Al Capone was innocent man.
(But really, it clearly has “Russia” written all over it)
This is not nearly as obvious as this entire thread is making it out to be, unfortunately. I think it has to due with commercial shipping operations and procedures not aligning with our intuitions.
just to be honest, the Pipelines explosion, had "Russia" written all over it, except after investigation, and a possible culprit, i.e not Russia, then nobody wanted to discuss about it anymore. I think the hysteria is too high, people are thirsty for War, looks like..
Delivery of Russian gas was stopped by Russia in violation of contract. European gas companies demands $20 billion in compensation. Nobody had incentive to blow up empty pipes except Russia.
Of course, Russians used false flag as usual, to blame Ukraine, but Ukraine doesn't hide successful attacks on Russian infrastructure, because Ukraine has legal right to defend itself.
While a false flag operation cannot be ruled out, I don't think the case is as clear-cut as you suggest.
> Nobody had incentive to blow up empty pipes except Russia.
I disagree: Russian gas was the one leverage Russia had over Germany. Blowing the pipeline ensured that Germany wouldn't be able to get out of the conflict quietly - "Germany still receiving Russian gas" would not receive as much condemnation as "Germany repairs Russian gas pipeline".
> Ukraine doesn't hide successful attacks on Russian infrastructure, because Ukraine has legal right to defend itself.
True, but Ukraine doesn't have a legal right to sabotage the infrastructure of its allies. I live in Germany and I can tell you: that first winter was pretty bad for everyone, with plenty headlines about people who could no longer afford their heating costs. If it had been known that it was Ukraine's doing, popular support for the war would have sunk a lot.
how so, if Germany did shutdown almost all their nuclear power plants? Experts say that would be impossible to "simply turn it on back", because of lack of professionals capable to work on that and that each minute that we wait, harder will be to bring them back...
That is a very abbreviated history. There are two pipelines, NS-1 and NS-2, both of which have two pipes each. NS-1 was operational until a turbine had to be repaired in Canada. The bureaucratic process to allow the repair was arduous, but finally it got done and chancellor Scholz did a photo-op in front of the repaired turbine.
Then the Russians played coy and came up with counter-bureaucratic reasons why the repaired turbine could not be installed. Presumably to put pressure on Germany, which was afraid of the 2022/2023 winter at the time.
Then two pipes of NS-1 and one pipe of NS-2 were blown up. Since no gas was flowing at the time, Russia had no reason to blow up its bargaining chip. Ukraine or the U.S. did have a reason.
Russia also delivered gas to Austria through a pipeline that goes through Ukraine and for which Ukraine collected transit fees until this year. Russia didn't shut down or blow up that pipeline.
From the point of view of the U.S. and Ukraine it does not make sense to blow up the Austrian pipeline because Austria is neutral anyway, so just let Ukraine collect the transit fees.
Germany of course must be pressured to be the second largest financial and weapons supporter for Ukraine, so hey, let's blow up the pipeline of our "ally".
Apart from Hersh's "the U.S. did it" theory, the Wall Street Journal recently blamed it on Zalushny. No other theories have emerged, but rest assured that if there were a credible Russia theory the Western press would shout it from the rooftops.
Putin has offered multiple times to either open the remaining pipe of NS-2 or to route gas via Turkey:
> Of course, Russians used false flag as usual, to blame Ukraine, but Ukraine doesn't hide successful attacks on Russian infrastructure, because Ukraine has legal right to defend itself.
This is completely wrong. It involved German/Russian infrastructure, and if confirmed, it would rank as the worst terrorist act in the history of the FRG (Germany) since the Munich Olympic Games. In fact, it could, should, or would lead to the activation of Article 5, as one of NATO's members was attacked.
A terrorist act is an act meant to cause terror. High natural gas prices, while they might be very inconvenient, are hardly terror in the same way as things usually described as terrorist acts, which usually involve civilians exploding at random.
Is this supposed to imply the story is implausible because the couple wasn't in on the plot and would rat the third guy out? If so, all 3 are suspects and presumably are in on the plot, so this argument falls flat on its face.
>The two other suspects, a married couple who do not have warrants issued in their names, have denied knowing Z. and said that they were on vacation in Bulgaria when the attack took place.
> The two other suspects, a married couple who do not have warrants issued in their names, have denied knowing Z. and said that they were on vacation in Bulgaria when the attack took place.
The Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD had infiltrants in Ukraine after MH-17 of a plot to blow up the Nord Stream, they tipped off the CIA, who in turn warned Ukraine not to do it, three months before it happened; source [0], translation [1].
Germany has issued an arrest warrant for a Ukranian national [2] who along with two accomplices was on board the yacht Andromeda, which was located at the blast site days before the blast and on which traces of the same explosive was found as used on the pipelines, as well as DNA evidence.
I suppose it's not "actual evidence Ukraine did it", but it's more than enough evidence to make a Ukranian national that since fled back to Ukraine a suspect.
> The two other suspects, a married couple who do not have warrants issued in their names, have denied knowing Z. and said that they were on vacation in Bulgaria when the attack took place.
:-/
So, one diver moved and installed 500kg of explosives in 4 places in front of a married couple?
The "investigations" you reference were by German media, whereas the wsj article was allegedly from German authorities. Moreover, while you accuse the wsj article as "hearsay", the same is true for the tagesspiegel you linked. The crux of that article's claim is that the company that rented the yacht had Crimean owners with ties to Russia, but no proof was presented. We're asked to trust the journalists on that, just as we're asked to trust the wsj journalists on the facts of the German authorities' investigation.
To attribute culpability, you need solid proof. I'm not saying that Russia did it - simply that there's enough evidence that Russia had means, motive and opportunity - which makes it a probable candidate.
Biden had a great deal of incentive to destroy that pipeline.
But far too many more obvious counterincentives.
Unlike the Ukrainians, NATO/US were smart enough to see that blowing up NS2 would be hugely stupid, providing precisely zero strategic advantage while simply provoking Russia to respond assymetrically (in exactly the same way as it is apparently doing right now). In addition to the huge methane release.
So if anything, the standpoint of "incentives" points squarely in the opposite direction (that is, against the idea that the US/NATO must have done it).
Your belief in the infallible nobility of NATO belies a vested interest in ignoring its massive, undeniable war crimes, crimes against humanity and violations of human rights at massive scale, as an organization, this century.
>Unlike the Ukrainians, NATO/US were smart enough
I do not concur with this glib assessment one bit.
Had. NS2 was almost two years ago. Your current Biden assessment may be correct, but two years ago there was a great deal more lucidity, when he stated that "no matter what, the NS2 pipeline will not be allowed to persist" ..
Nobody in the West wants any war. The usual tactics of Putin is to do what he wants whether on his or foreign soil, using poisoning etc. in a way that everybody knows it's him but he will politely deny. It's a kind of a silly game, the GRU could just have put a bullet in Lytvynenko's head but they choose a slow death to show off.
I’m not sure that no one wants a war. I can see some groups profiting from it.. I see some politicians being quite blunt about it—some in Germany, for instance, who are well-known lobbyists for the defense industry. Biden’s decision to allow the use of long-range weapons seems like a tactical political move designed to make Trump’s life significantly harder from day one. It feels irresponsible, as it appears that war is being used both to weaken the opposition and to enrich the defense industry.
>Biden’s decision to allow the use of long-range weapons seems like a tactical political move designed to make Trump’s life significantly harder from day one.
I have a different take on this, basically parroting Perun on YouTube. The lame duck period is the perfect time for escalatory steps, as the Russians always have the option of waiting until the new administration comes into office rather than responding aggressively. Trump will be free to re-impose whichever restrictions he wants, but he'll be starting from a stronger position. He'll have the "stop UA use of long-range weapons" bargaining chip, _and_ he'll be able to relatively costlessly blame Biden for the "bad decision" of allowing them.
A war in europe is not going to be profitable squared against the damage it will do to the global economy. Thats why the middle eastern wars were attractive for American coalition members. Defense contractors profit. You can demo new tech and tactics. And whatever damage you do in that corner of the world won’t really impact anything at home.
I don't know what goes on to comment. I'm not there and I don't fool myself into thinking that I know geopolitics just because I read some articles. My comment was replying to someone who said the Russians are the war thirsty people of the world. It's a bit rich because, there's a bunch of other ongoing wars in the world and people aren't just "bad" or "good"
Objective facts though: Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2014 and 2022. There was no formal declaration of war. There were widespread and indiscriminate attacks on civilians.
Which parts of those are "good" in your opinion? Do you believe Russia's "denazification" claim?
There are no international laws that legitimized Russia's invasion of Ukraine. If Ukraine was in violation of something, there's procedures in place to declare war legitimately - but before that there's the nonviolent approach, which Russia skipped.
No parts of the war are good - I didn't make any claims about the Russian war, I don't know what caused it or why it's going on, and I don't like wars. I don't believe most claims by either side, I doubt there's advantage in revealing the real reasons by either side - the articles we read are to craft an opinion either to support one side or the other and I don't think it's that simple - that's my whole point. I don't need to think a war is legitimate to have a reaction to someone saying there's one country with warmonger people and one country without. In general I think it's normal to side with the invaded party and I'm personally inclined to support that side - but it doesn't mean I tell myself I'm making some informed decision.
Not really, but to declare a whole population as "very bad thing", yes I need to approximate first hand observation. I have no need to declare a whole population bad though.
> Like, Russia is actually 'doing the bad things'.
Yes, Russia is doing bad things.. But do we really need or want a third World War because of it? It’s not Ukraine’s fault that Russia invaded, but Ukraine bears responsibility for having been so corrupt over the past 20 years and for being irresponsible given its proximity to Russia. We still don’t know how much of the aid sent to Ukraine is being lost to corruption... So I am not willing to fight this War.
For me? Definitely not for me. But my country investing my pension, health infrastructure, education system to support their civilians. Even you and all other Ukraine that spend the day online here, are being paid by us. Still, no reason to Europe to go to war for Ukraine, but instead invest our military budget in our NATO partners and preparing to defend them.
If you ask European military leaders where we should invest and how we should prepare, they'll tell you that strong support of Ukraine is one of the best investments into European defense that you could make at the moment. They calculate that it's better to stop Russia in Ukraine than to face Russia (with additional resources from fully occupied Ukraine) in Poland or elsewhere.
Military leaders are pragmatic people and this is a pragmatic approach. We have a problem. We see that the problem has grown in time and will grow further if ignored. So it's better to deal with the problem now rather than waste valuable time and face an even larger problem in 5 to 8 years.
> Military leaders are pragmatic people and this is a pragmatic approach.
Military leaders are politicians. I am in the Military. The official position, is inline with what the political leaders want. Internally, the same Military leaders disagree with the politicians. Internally all say the same: There is no accountability and responsibility in Ukraine. Better is to concentrate our resources where matters: NATO. Ukraine is necessary strategically to consume Russian men, artillery, etc.. That's the military opinion that we hear internally.
> Military leaders are politicians. I am in the Military. The official position, is inline with what the political leaders want.
That's not the case in countries bordering Russia, starting from Finland and heading south, where military leaders take a lot of pride in being constitutionally independent like supreme court judges. Politicians would very much prefer to hide behind NATO guarantees and pretent that the risk does not exist and that the Americans would come to save us (without specifying any details), whereas military assessments are much more calculated and take into account hard facts like redeployment speed of a brigade or daily ammo expenditure. Assessments from military circles have so far been consistently the closest to how events have actually unfolded.
They case they are presenting is a no-brainer. It is by all measures significantly cheaper - by orders of magnitude - to support Ukraine in halting Russians in Eastern Ukraine than to fight invaders on our home turf.
Exactly. They need Ukraine to keep Russia busy. Other than people try to convince us, Men matter. Every single russian soldier that dies, fighting in Ukraine, is one less potential barbarian in their border, that's all truth, but people should understand, it's not about saving Ukraine, but about protecting themselves.
But that's what military leaders are saying too: by giving Ukraine better weapons to defend their homes, we hit two birds with one stone. Better weapons save Ukrainian lives and do more damage to the resources that threaten us too. Every tank Ukrainians blow up with our advanced missiles is a double win. A win for Ukraine and a win for us.
Even if you don't care one bit about Ukraine, it's still a really smart thing to do for our own sake.
Well, the situation changes really fast. To make Trump's life harder, Biden gave green to Ukraine to use their weapons as they want. This isn't what the countries around the conflict want, because it means eminent scalation to a nuclear war. So the general opinion among the experts (and Finland and Sweden started this week to prepare to War) is "yes, let Ukraine drain Russia's army, but they shouldn't win this War, otherwise it means 3rd World War". I care about Ukraine people and soldiers, but the a scalation in this War, isn't the right decision for both.
That's not how it goes. We are supporting Ukraine in a level that nobody does. Germany is investing the pension from everyone under 45 years old, education and health system, just to support ukraine. All Ukraine online warriors here in Hackernews, are here being support financially by us. It doesn't mean however we should go to War for it. The online warriors here aren't there too, but here in Germany, "figthing online" with +1 or -1...
> Lets say Russia wins, and re-integrates Ukraine.
It won't happen. If you think so then, you are not well informed about this topic. Russia has no manpower to "re-integrate" the whole Ukraine. Ukraine will always exist, but for the next years, maybe not as big as in 2014. Ukraine can still prepare itself to take the lost area back in the future. That's up to Ukraine, not to Europe.
Said that, one possibility, for now, which is part of the negotiations is Russia keep the conquered land, Ukraine joins EU/NATO. Realistically, it would be Ukraine joins EU and US won't block Ukraine applying to NATO.
> Now what does the world look like in 20 years when Russia is eye-balling Poland?
Poland, other than Ukraine, isn't one of the most corrupt countries in the World, and did their home-work. Beside it, other than Ukraine, Poland is NATO.
They murdered an entire town. Well several. Raped and tortured those they didn't kill. Kidnap children to Russianize them. Torture and kill POWs. The only difference between them and the Germans is that they haven't carried out industrial slaughter of Jews.
NATO was founded to defend against invasion from e.g. Russia, if it comes to pass. NATO has never and will never be an aggressor, see article 1 as someone pointed out.
If anything, Russia has put themselves in serious shit for invading Ukraine. If they hadn't started this, over 600.000 of their people wouldn't be dead or wounded.
Not to defend the regime in power then (nor now!), but if you ask Serbia they might offer some other lived experiences on how consensual Operation Allied Force was.
It was not because Serbia invaded a NATO country, if that's what you were asking.
Thought of course you knew that already since you obviously know what the operation was called, a fact basically nobody today knows (without looking it up).
I do know why NATO bombed Serbia. Often when it’s brought up, people neglect to mention why it happened. The result is we have thousands of people who believe NATO is evil because supposedly they’ll bomb cities for no reason.
But there is a reason, which curiously enough you neglected to mention. As the other commenter pointed out, it was to stop an active genocide which was being prosecuted by Slobodan Milosevic’s military and paramilitary forces.
> NATO was founded to defend against invasion from e.g. Russia
Exactly. Russia views NATO as an anti-Russian entity. And both sides have phrases that amount roughly to "the best defense is an effective offense".
Would you feel threatened if your neighbours set up weapons right outside your property line, ostensibly to defend in case you attack? And especially if they've already invaded your property twice (France and Germany both invaded Russia).
Russia signed treaty after treaty saying countries can make their own alliances. NATO has not put nukes eastward or any permeant allied presence, other than the armies of the allied states themselves in the region.
Russia refused to withdraw from Moldova to implement CFE II. This is not the action of a state worried that it's disadvantage in conventional arms will lead to invasion.
Bravo sir, this is Alexander cutting the knot of muddled relativism.
It may be strange to modern western minds but Russians still consider their imperial project as wholesome, good and nearly sacred. To get into the correct mindstate, you can read for example how Churchill venerated the British empire. The Russians hold this same veneration to their imperial project today. They also know western audience probably would not appreciate this reasoning so they need to invent laughable excuses like ”we were afraid of NATO expansion” that clueless western commentators happily repeat as the foundational reason.
It's not even that there was absolutely no active process of joining NATO when Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2014 and started all this. No; if Ukraine wants to join NATO, that's entirely Ukraine's decision. Russia has no say in it. Ukraine is sovereign and can join any military alliance it wants. Just as Russia is free to do so.
No nation has extra-territorial security interests that it needs to defend by attacking a neutral, peaceful and friendly neighbor.
You have been fooled into defending imperialism. Or worse; you're consciously defending imperialism.
Dismissing Russia's concerns is exactly what led to this war.
> It's not even that there was absolutely no active process of joining NATO when Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2014 and started all this. No; if Ukraine wants to join NATO, that's entirely Ukraine's decision. Russia has no say in it. Ukraine is sovereign and can join any military alliance it wants. Just as Russia is free to do so.
NATO stated in the 2008 Bucharest Summit that "Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance" and reiterated that statement in the 2021 Brussels Summit. I didn't even remember those details, it was easy to find with google and a vague idea that NATO had shown interest in Ukraine.
> No nation has extra-territorial security interests that it needs to defend by attacking a neutral, peaceful and friendly neighbor.
Then you know nothing of US doctrine. The Central Americans will tell you how the US will even invade just to lower the price of bananas - no joke.
> You have been fooled into defending imperialism. Or worse; you're consciously defending imperialism.
No, I really don't have a side in this. I'm simply presenting Russia's viewpoint as I understand it. I also understand the Western viewpoint as well, but there's no need to defend it in present company, we all agree about NATO, European, and US positions on the matter.
This is not "Russia's viewpoint", but a narrative to advance their ambition of enslaving again the roughly 100 million people who became free after the USSR collapsed.
The Russian viewpoint is that Eastern Europe would be much easier to conquer if they were internationally isolated and could be picked off one by one like in the 1940s. The current war against Ukraine is an excellent example of this; international cooperation is a leading reason for the failure of the invasion. All the complaints about NATO lead back to the fact that for Russia it elevates the cost of invading Eastern Europe. Without NATO, they would face only limited conventional forces in Poland. With NATO, an attack on Poland go as far as activating American carrier groups or even a nuclear response.
> > It’s not even that there was absolutely no active process of joining NATO when Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2014 and started all this. No; if Ukraine wants to join NATO, that’s entirely Ukraine’s decision. Russia has no say in it. Ukraine is sovereign and can join any military alliance it wants. Just as Russia is free to do so.
> NATO stated in the 2008 Bucharest Summit that “Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance” and reiterated that statement in the 2021 Brussels Summit. I didn’t even remember those details, it was easy to find with google and a vague idea that NATO had shown interest in Ukraine.
A little bit more competent Googling would fill in the context you’ve clearly missed:
(1) The 2008 statement was a way of mollifying Ukraine after acceding to Russia’s demand that Ukraine and Georgia be denied NATO Membership Action Plans at the 2008 summit. (Russia responded, by the way, to this accession to their demands by invading Georgia. Might have done the same to the Ukraine soon after, except by the time they were at a stable point with Georgia, they’d already managed to get a Russia-friendly government in Ukraine.)
(2) Ukraine publicly abandoned any interest in a foreign military alliance between the 2008 summit and the 2014 invasion by Russia.
(3) Ukraine abandoned its neutrality stance and restarted attempts to join NATO only after the 2014 invasion.
(4) The 2021 statement was, again, a way of putting a nice face for Ukraine on NATO again rejecting Ukraine’s attempts to join in the near term.
> Dismissing Russia's concerns is exactly what led to this war.
No. Russia invading a peaceful, friendly and neutral neighbor with unmarked military units is what lead to this war.
> NATO stated in the 2008 Bucharest Summit
FR, ES and DE made it clear that Ukraine would not be a candidate for NATO and nothing came of it. The first step in admitting a nation into NATO is a Membership Action Plan (MAP) - there never was a such for Ukraine. NATO membership for Ukraine was dead in the water in 2014, when Russia heinously attacked with unmarked military units.
But that is besides the point, really; Ukraine is sovereign. It is a sovereign nation that can itself decide which alliances to join. Ukraine is not beholden to Russia and Russia doesn't get a say in Ukrainian politics. Russia is not the Soviet Union and Ukraine is not the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.
> Then you know nothing of US doctrine.
Ah, yes. The "this one over there is a murderer too" defense. You're still defending imperialism, you're just defending imperialism with more imperialism.
> I'm simply presenting Russia's viewpoint as I understand it.
Russia's viewpoint is that Ukraine has no right so sovereignty. That's in direct violation with multiple treaties with Ukraine that Russia has signed.
Russia does not want an independent Ukraine. That's why they have been attacking Ukraine for 10 years now, first clandestine and then ever more openly. That's why they have been bombing civilians, that's why the formally annexed Ukrainian territory, that's why they will not grant peace to their neighbor.
Because without Ukraine, there can be no Russian Empire.
Dismissing Russia's concerns is exactly what led to this war.
Provided one accepts that those concerns are valid.
And that its stated "concerns" were in fact its actual reasons for starting the war.
But there is no compelling logical basis for us to accept either of these premises.
I don't have time to fully dissect what you're saying about the NATO issue -- other than that you are leaving out some very important details which for some reason were not presented to you in whatever sources you are reading from. (Which is a polite way of telling you: your sources are apparently misinformed, or worse).
But the main point is: none of the NATO stuff ever amounted to an actual physical threat against the Russian state, or otherwise any rational reason for Russia's regime to start a war.
More to the point, it wasn't the real reason it chose to the start the war. It's just something it says, for internal and external propaganda purposes.
So no - we don't have to "accept that Russia's concerns are valid".
Yes, and Russia had similar "we won't be the first to be aggressive" language for many years as well. You can see that with new leadership comes new interpretations of when "peaceful means" are no longer sufficient.
From Russia's perspective, NATO has been infringing on both Russia's sphere of influence and on her buffer states. Russia has _twice_ been invaded by the Europeans, she hasn't forgotten that. And with Ukraine in NATO, there are no natural barriers between European powers and Russia.
Need I remind you how the US responded when the USSR set up missile positions in Cuba?
You were absolutely, unequivocally were dodging the commenter's question.
I don't care one way or the other.
If you plainly don't care, and won't answer questions, and since you obviously don't invest the time to keep even basic tabs on the actual situation on the ground anyway -- then it's extremely difficult to see why you're bothering to engage at all, here. It looks like you're just out to stir the pot, basically.
> You were absolutely, unequivocally were dodging the commenter's question.
Because I didn't answer in an hour? I'm not glued to HN all day to argue. And if I don't feel like engaging with someone looking for an argument, I don't engage them.
For. How. Long. Has. NATO. Been. On. Russia’s. Border.
Again, you are dodging the question.
Either you will say they aren’t, in service of your argument that russia invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO from coming up to their border, in which case you would be wrong since NATO has shared a border with russia in Europe for at least the past 24 years.
Or, you will say at least the past 24 years, which undermines your argument that russia only invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO appearing at their immediate borders, since they were already there. For at least the past 24 years.
We can do this all day.
I’ve got another question for you. Almost certainly you will dodge it, because it is blindingly obvious that you are not impartial as you pretend to be, and that you have a strong bias for the Putin regime and its illegal war and genocide, but let’s go through the motions anyway.
Some other guy already answered you on your post with the original question: "4 April 1949 the day NATO was founded"
> How did the Moskva sink?
Didn't the Ukrainians shoot it with either an anti-ship missile or a drone jetski? Is this some test to see "what side I'm on"? I frankly don't care - like I said I was demonstrating the other side of the coin. But I see that was extremely offensive to you. I'm neither European nor Russian, I really don't care who's right. But I do listen to both sides of the story.
> Some other guy already answered you on your post with the original question: "4 April 1949 the day NATO was founded"
Let’s go with that answer. If NATO has been on russia’s border since before Putin was born, how could russia’s justification for invading Ukraine, annexing territory, and slaughtering thousands of civilians possibly be that they were nervous about NATO coming closer to their borders?
It also doesn’t explain why earlier you said “And with Ukraine in NATO, there are no natural barriers between European powers and Russia.”
How does that make any sense at all? There have been “no natural barriers between European powers and russia” for decades already. It has nothing to do with Ukraine.
> Didn't the Ukrainians shoot it with either an anti-ship missile or a drone jetski?
Interesting! That’s not what the russian government said. Surely you’re not suggesting the russian government would lie, are you?!
> I really don't care who's right. But I do listen to both sides of the story.
This is hard to believe given the strong bias you have shown towards Kremlin propaganda.
Dude you need to calm down and realize the person you are discussing this with is not nearly as partisan as you. You are confusing discourse for propaganda and explanation for excuse.
Well, there was the Cuba missile equivalent of stationing missiles in Turkey. Which, seemingly as part of the negotiation to end the crisis, were removed from Turkey afterwards.
What Tomahawks, where? If this is supposed to be some kind of clever hint about weapons in countries that have joined NATO since the end of the Cold War, then unfortunately none of them have Tomahawks, or anything close to them, or anything at all beyond the domestic conventional forces, so this entire comparision bears no resemblance to reality.
NATO has deployed Tomahawks in the past and threatened to put them in Ukraine in the not so distant past. Tomahawks were used during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Tomahawks are designed to carry nuclear weapons.
I find your ignorance of this fact deplorable. Please inform yourself.
Would you find the deployment of Kalibr (the Tomahawk analog on the other side) to your borders, within 7 minutes flight time of your capitol city, to be an acceptable state of affairs - especially if the deploying party had recently torn up any involvement in the treaties designed to reduce their proliferation?
> NATO has deployed Tomahawks in the past and threatened to put them in Ukraine in the not so distant past.
Not true.
> Would you find the deployment of Kalibr (the Tomahawk analog on the other side) to your borders, within 7 minutes flight time of your capitol city, to be an acceptable state of affairs - especially if the deploying party had recently torn up any involvement in the treaties designed to reduce their proliferation?
>That is already a reality with Russian missiles in the middle of Europe, in Kaliningrad
Russians deploying Russian nuclear weapons on Russian territory, versus Americans deploying NATO nuclear weapons on non-NATO territory: whats the difference?
>Should we bomb Moscow to get rid of them?
That depends - do you want to die in a thermonuclear blast?
Because that's how you die in a thermonuclear blast.
No, not true. Nothing in any of the provided sources says that Tomahawks have ever been given to Eastern Europe nor that there is any intention to. Ukraine has requested them, but your own source says that Ukraine is "unlikely" to receive them.
> Tomahawks used in the illegal attacks on Yugoslavia
They put an end to 10 years of wars in Yugoslavia and brought a lasting peace to the region. In worst massacres, more people were killed by Serbs over a single weekend than died in the entire NATO aerial bombardment campaign that lasted several months.
> Russians deploying Russian nuclear weapons on Russian territory, versus Americans deploying NATO nuclear weapons on non-NATO territory: whats the difference?
Again, nothing you say is true. No-one has given anyone Tomahawks, but Russia has deployed their missiles to Belarus: "Putin confirms first nuclear weapons moved to Belarus" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65932700
> That depends - do you want to die in a thermonuclear blast?
That's the question Russians should ask themselves when they keep pushing westwards with their nukes and attacks on European countries. Do Russians want to die in a thermonuclear blast that they act so recklessly?
>No, not true. Nothing in any of the provided sources
Read my words again: the threat was made. Russia responded to that threat, as the notion that nuclear-capable missiles would be deployed on borders within minutes of Moscow was deemed intolerable, and thus the deployment was cancelled.
>They put an end to 10 years of wars in Yugoslavia and brought a lasting peace to the region.
How many years of war occurred between the coup-government of Ukraine and the territory of Donbass before Russia invaded? And, again, the duplicity of your argument is clear: illegal wars are 'okay' as long as they result in peace and quiet afterwards?
That's not working out much for Gaza though, is it?
> No-one has given anyone Tomahawks,
I didn't say they did - I said that the threat to do so was made, and it was made - and as a result, we have war and calamity in Europe where we could have had a real, lasting peace between aligned nations.
If not for that coup.
>Russia has deployed their missiles to Belarus
Ah, and the USA has deployed their missiles all over Europe - so do allies have a right to engage in military agreements, or do they not?
You can't have it both ways. This is the entire point of MAD, which you seem to think doesn't apply to Washington, but does to Moscow.
You are making things up at this point. Eastern Europe has no Tomahawks, and nor has anyone given any indication that this would change, nor does the extreme caution in supplying much weaker weapons give a reason to even speculate about Tomahawks.
However, supplying more advanced weapons to Ukraine would be justified, given that Russia has broken the promises given to Ukraine in exchange for dismantling their nuclear weapons. I hope to see it happen!
> How many years of war occurred between the coup-government of Ukraine and the territory of Donbass before Russia invaded?
Zero. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that there were no "separatists" in Donbas except for unmarked members of Russian armed forces and security services, fully under Russian command. And as in Yugoslavia, many lives could've been saved if NATO was more assertive in bombing the aggressor and establishing peace instead of looking the other way.
> Ah, and the USA has deployed their missiles all over Europe
American missiles stand where they stood when Nixon was still in office and countries that have joined alliances since the Cold War host none of them.
Believe it or not, this is the basis of international law.
You don't get to have standards for one nation but entirely different standards for another.
The USA can deploy missiles anywhere it wants - on its territory, or on the territories of its allies. But of course it needs to suffer the consequences if it decides to forward-deploy them on someone elses territory.
Same goes for Russia. Or, is there some other standard that you're applying that makes it okay for the USA to put nuclear-capable missiles on the borders of its enemies, but not okay for any other nation to do it?
The issue here is that you're shifting the goalposts.
Here's a boiled-down transcript what just transpired between yourself and the other commenter:
You: NATO seeks to deploy missiles within 7 minutes flight time of Russia's capitol. That's bad, threatening.
They: But we already have Russian missiles in the middle of Europe, in Kaliningrad.
You: But those missiles are on Russian territory, so that makes it OK.
There's simply no logic in your follow-up. Either the concern is missile proximity as you initially stated, or it isn't. And if it is -- you can't simply say it's intrinsically threatening and destabilizing when one country does it, but somehow benign and non-threatening when another country does (simply because in their case the missiles happen to be on their own territory).
Plus there's Russia's announcment of its intent to employ actual nuclear-armed missiles in Belarus, which no one has mentioned. Which would seem to make its complaint about non-nuclear deployments in Ukraine (which everyone knows will be exactly that) largely moot.
Are you aware that NATO expansion into Ukraine seemed very likely at the time of Russia's invasion?
Actually it was effectively impossible, as NATO's bylaws prevent the admission of states with active border conflicts. This is most likely (a large part of) why Putin invaded both Georgia and Ukraine -- to create permanent border conflicts, to prevent them from becoming NATO states.
So in fact there was no imminent possibility of Ukraine becoming a NATO state at the time of the 2022 invasion. Which makes perfect sense, as it was never the reason Putin chose to launch the full-scale invasion, anyway.
West Germany joined NATO during an effective border conflict about whether it should actually be just Germany, reunified with the eastern parts. However, that conflict never actually was a war, just part of the "cold war".
One thing I've learned watching politicians the past few decades is that laws are guidelines. If the political will exists, politicians will find a way.
The war started in 2014. There was even less imminent possibility of Ukraine becoming a NATO member back then, when Putin first sent unmarked military units to attack Ukraine.
But this person is just speaking the truth - I worked for an ISP with cable landing stations. These cables went down several times a year due to physical damage of non nefarious kinds. It's not obvious that this malicious. It certainly might be but it's not a slam dunk.
Yeah but in this case, we don't know whether the guy in question actually got shot, only that he died. In that case it's premature to assume "this is murder".
Is it though? From my understanding it's clearly sabotage, but who's responsible is open to some debate. Compare to NordStream, it's still not officially determined who's responsible.
Strong circumstantial evidence == minister said “I'm not the sea captain. But I would think that you would notice that you're dragging an anchor behind you for hundreds of kilometers”.
But for the French they all got rid of their colonies. Russia's historical land empire lives on, and the breakup of their most recent greater one is mourned by their current leader. Lets have some perspective.
I'm not interested in participating in your 'whatabout those evil European colonisers'. Pointing to historical colonies and injustice to excuse worse from Russia now isn't adding to the conversation.
If this wasn't an accident, given the recent Biden escalation that allows ATACMS strikes in Kursk in could mean two things:
1) Russia hastily retaliated, which is out of character. You can accuse Russia of many things, but not of retaliating instantly (against the West, in Ukraine they probably do).
2) False flag in order to drum up pro-war sentiment in the West.
If Biden escalates in the last weeks of his presidency, presumably to make it more difficult for Trump to negotiate, why would Russia take the bait and escalate? It does not make any sense.
"Escalate"? Allowing Ukraine to use the weapons it has to strike back at an aggressor in order to mitigate or reduce said aggressors ability to continue attacking is ... "escalation"? I don't think so.
If anything artificial limits have been placed on Ukraine that are not placed on other nations (or in some cases proscribed terrorist organisations) purchasing or being "gifted" weapons. Whether those weapons are from the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Russia, RoK, whoever.
Yes. Weapons hitting places deep inside Russia that haven't been hit before is escalation. Whether one favors the act or not isn't how a step is considered as escalation. Now the Russians might or might not take steps that the other side considers escalation.
Ukraine has been hitting targets "deep" inside Russia for a long time now - further than ATACMS or the export Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG can reach. Whether Ukraine use their own weapons or those purchased/gifted from others seems irrelevant. This is Russia saying "we can hit you with weapons provided by other nations, but you cannot be allowed to hit us likewise" - it's pathetic.
As for what Russia may do, they've been told publicly and privately by multiple nations: from the U.S., UK, and France, even China and India to wind their necks in with regard any nuclear escalation. However, they are very adept at asymmetric responses, and Putin has already said he would consider arming groups with anti-"western" sympathies - he probably already has.
Earlier hits were using Ukrainian drones, while the Atacms are reported as needing to be programmed by US military to hit the targets. So while it is Ukraine that supposedly fires them, it is the americans who will reportedly get them to their intended targets. I don't think there is any moral debate in Ukraine hitting Russia with missiles. After all it is a war fought by Russia against an Ukraine which has Nato proxy support. But it is an escalation nevertheless.
It is now up to Russia on how to respond. And as you noted, one scenario being talked about, at least in social media, is some groups houthis, hezbollah or others getting Russian missiles and those being fired at western targets, ships or others. And I assume it would be Russian military who would control the targetting in that case depending on the missiles used. Or the Russians don't go for direct escalation with the intent of not jeopardizing the chances of Trump ending support to Ukraine in few months from now.
But either way Russia's deterrence against Nato has been challenged yet again, and the chances of escalations and counter-escalations going out of hand remains a more nearer scary possibility in the unfolding scenario in process.
We need to make clear we have the cards. Russia invited us to slaughter the forces sent in in 2014 by making them deniable. They backed down when Turkey downed one of their jets. The instant they feel real force they back down.
It actually understands roman numerals, to a certain extent. E.g. `say LVIII` will say "58". However, `say MCMLXXIX` speaks some gibberish that ends in the word "six", for some reason.
It also knows how to say numbers up into the trillions but not more than that (although I feel like it used to).
> I'm hedging here; it feels to me that OCR-ing normal text that never left the digital realm should be 100% reliable, but I'm not a specialist in that subfield so I surely must be missing something...
A string set in a given font at a given size won't always render as a fixed pattern of pixels. The font describes the curves of the letter forms and how that's rasterized depends on lots of factors such as the zoom level, exactly how the font rendering engine is implemented, whether or not anti-aliasing is turned on which is further complicated by the fact that the text can be set in any color with any other color as a background, etc. And there are a LOT of fonts.
Lastly, OCR is not just about recognizing letter shapes but has to contend with how the text flows. It has to understand line-breaks, multi-column layouts, captions, pulled quotes, page-numbers, hyphenation and all the other weird shit that we make text do.
Thank you for the link! A pulsar or something "noisy but distant" in space is my goal, I think. The idea of being able to listen to distant stars is mind blowing to me, just amazing stuff.
> So do we sometimes lay cables on top of other cables down there?
I don't know exactly how often this has occurred but I'd guess it's relatively rare. The companies that operate in this space are very specialized and sophisticated. The locations of pretty much every cable laid in the last half century is very precisely tracked and one of the first things that has to happen when preparing a new cable route is to undertake a high resolution side-scan sonar survey of all or part of the planned route. In shallower water the cables are typically buried under several meters of the seabed.
> What governments do you have to go to to get approval to do this? Could I just run a string across the Atlantic Ocean?
At the very least you'll need to have landing agreements with the countries at the various endpoints. In international waters I believe there are some laws that apply but I gather that it's more about liability. You'd have a lot of difficulty running a string across the Atlantic. Controlling the amount of slack on a cable that's being played out is incredibly finicky work. Keep in mind that the point where your hypothetical string is touching down on the sea bed might be several miles behind where you are and that your ship is going to be bobbing around on the surface and you get an idea.
> If we do lay cables on top of other cables how high do they get stacked? Are there challenges to bring the lower cables back up? Does that happen? Or do we just keep them down there forever basically and upgrade the hardware at the terminal?
Cables are routinely brought up for repair or disposal. The ships that do this are called Agreement ships. In 1866 the second-ever transatlantic cable was grappled up to the surface and repaired (it snapped while laying it the previous year).
Modern cables are fiberoptic and do not increase their bandwidth once laid.
> Modern cables are fiberoptic and do not increase their bandwidth once laid.
That's not true: The amplifiers they use work at the analog (and in fact even optical, i.e. without conversion to electric and back) level, and it's possible to upgrade capacity by only modifying the endpoints, not the entire cable.
Well, the usable capacity of the cable increases, but the cable itself has been doing it's job perfectly all the time :P
I thought that endpoint upgrading of submarine cables was a sort of well known thing (at least amongst people that are aware their data goes and partly becomes a bunch of photons under the ocean, which I guess may be a lot of people here)
The throughput can be dramatically increased by upgrading the DWDM kit. The optical amplifiers in the water are technologically agnostic. The fibre can be a gating factor. For a while fibre with chromatic dispersion compensation was used and that actually limits the ability to upgrade the cable using modern coherent optics.
> Modern cables are fiberoptic and do not increase their bandwidth once laid.
No kind of expert at all, but I understood that better control over / perception of narrower bandwidths of light have allowed fiber-optic cables to improve their data throughput immensely. Is that incorrect? Or are you using a narrower, technical definition of "bandwidth" that I've not understood?
When I was in school, I interned at a company that specializes in communication systems used to send data over these submarine cables. There is a huge market in terminal stations that send and receive over these cables. The terminal stations that communicate over the lines cost in the 50-100 million dollar range, but the cables themselves can cost upwards of a billion. Being able to maximize the efficiency of existing cables is a necessity.
A large factor for the efficiency, is how “thin” you can make channels in the cable via frequency of the light. Multiple signals can be sent over a single fiber line if they use different frequencies. One system I was working on at the time was constructing 88 channels at 100gbs for a total throughput of 8.8tbs.
Another very interesting aspect, is that service providers might share a lease of the same underwater cable, not actually owning the cable themselves. The companies enter an agreement on the frequency ranges assigned to them. Any mess ups in settings can cause disruption in your neighbor on the cable, resulting in millions of dollars of fines.
1. Pay for best effort traffic level. E.g. A residential user paying for 1gbps service
2. Pay for guaranteed traffic level. E.g. a business paying for guaranteed 10gbps. Often this maps to paying for a dedicated frequency on a cable, but that's hidden from you, you are just provided an Ethernet port or two.
3. Pay for a dedicated frequency on a cable. Also called "lease a wave". As you noted this is the most common way to go undersea. But it's common over terrestrial cables too. In this case the purchaser is often responsible for their own optical networking equipment, and the service provider muxes together all their customers. Sounds like you know more about this than me. The service provider's equipment doesn't have protection if your neighbor is accidentally stepping on your frequency range?
4. Pay for an entire cable. Also called leasing dark fiber. It's 100% your responsibility to "light" it. To make it worth it you're usually using optical networking equipment to mux together several different waves, just like the above scenario undersea, just all different waves belong to you. Commonly used by big tech companies and ISPs to connect their datacenters and points if presences in big cities. Lots of times the company you lease the cable from is also your contractor to repair cuts and maintain the amplifiers every ~50km.
You've got 3 types of use cases merged in one there.
First, The generic business internet which gives you uncontended bandwidth usage as far as an internet exchange point and an ISP which ensures its peering and transit is not oversubscribed.
Second, point to point ethernet connectivity. This morning I had an issue with a point-to-point connection I have from Beijing to the UK for example, where latency had jumped overnight from 215ms to 430ms. This is provided as point to point ethernet by I would assume something like MPLS or VXLAN over the providers network. I've had SDH and ATM backed ethernet services in the past too.
Third, I have link with an optical service from, which does map to a dedicated frequency as in your 3rd option, although it's provided to me as a standard ethernet handoff.
This is different to "pay for a dedicated frequency on a cable", as the service I have has an ethernet handoff. I couldn't put non-ethernet traffic on the frequency.
I've also got dedicated cables with a service provision at an ethernet layer (the provider gives me an ADVA which they control). The actual light goes from the ADVA in my equipment box to another ADVA in another equipment box
In none of these situations do I need to worry about frequencies, high power SFPs, etc, the handoff from the provider is always ethernet, they handle that.
My company does have some leased fibre between campuses too, I tend not to get involved in that, but I know one department runs some 800G sfps over a leased fibre between cities about 200 miles long. I don't think we have any owned fibre other than between buildings on the same campus
I'm no expert either but a complicating factor for undersea fiber-optic cables is that they need amplifiers every N kilometers. So even if the cable itself could theoretically support more bandwidth, the amplifiers might not. The amplifiers contain lasers of their own that fire at very specific wavelengths.
> undersea fiber-optic cables is that they need amplifiers every N kilometers
Huh, I had no idea it needs to be done so frequently.
> These days optical cable repeaters are photon amplifiers that operate at full gain at the bottom of the ocean for an anticipated service life of 25 years.
> Repeaters are a significant cost component of the total cable cost, and there is a compromise between a ‘close’ spacing of repeaters, every 60km or so, or stretching the inter-repeater distance to 100km and making significant savings in the number of repeaters in the system. On balance it is the case that the more you are prepared to spend on the cable system the higher the cable carrying capacity.
I've read sharks see the cables as potential (ha!) prey due to slight EMF leakage. They chew on them damaging them. Not the fiber optic ones of course.
All trans-oceanic cables carry an electric current in addition to light in fiber(s). Electricity is what powers the optical amplifiers of which there needs to be one every hundred or so kilometers.
For short-ish cables (a couple hundred kilometers), driving the amplifiers via light (interestingly this can be done from both the data-sending and receiving end!) is possible, but not for trans-oceanic distances.
Yeah, the amplifiers need 10,000 volts. The way the cable is constructed is to have the fiber pairs inside a copper tube (there's some other stuff in between too). The voltage is carried by the tube. The ocean itself serves as the ground.
In general the power to the amplifiers is series connected and the ocean does not come into the question at all. If it did you would have huge issues with corrosion even ignoring the effects on the ocean itself. So, along the cable there is a wire that carries small DC current that goes between the amplifiers, each amplifier places zener diode along this wire and gets its power from it. At each landing station there is a current source (that is capable of developing significant open-circuit voltage) that powers this (this scheme is the reason why the cables are laid not only in loops, but in "loops-of-loops").
Okay, I did a little more digging and it seems you're right eszed! Even undersea cables can increase their bandwidth, at least in some cases; seems to be dependent on some modulation factors that I don't fully understand.
If I'm reading this right, BPSK - used on the longest transpacific cables - can't really be upgraded to have higher bandwidth but QPSK and other modulation schemes used for shorter distances can be (?).
Correct. Modulation is encoding the bits in different aspects of the light wave. The better the modulation scheme, the more expensive is the division multiplexing equipment.
Not really. I know of no cases where optical amplifiers posed a barrier to upgrading. Ciena and Infinera have been able to upgrade cable capacity by several X.
Optical amplifiers simply boost the signal. A photo is absorbed and then re-emitted with more power, but the same frequency and phase.
There is no optical/electrical/optical conversion.
> The locations of pretty much every cable laid in the last half century is very precisely tracked and one of the first things that has to happen when preparing a new cable route is to undertake a high resolution side-scan sonar survey of all or part of the planned route.
When the cables aren't well buried, they can migrate. No link, but earlier today I saw a description of a repair that was significantly delayed because the cable ends were 15 km away from where they were expected to be.
That said, I think there's a lot of area on the sea, and not a lot of cables, so chances of overlapping are low; especially if a survey is done of the new route immediately before. Although if they're buried, maybe you can't see them so well. And a little overlap here and there probably isn't a big deal, because most of the time cables are brought up, it's because they were severed, so likely it doesn't disturb the other cable too much on its way up.
Overlapping is guaranteed in at least every case where a new cable has a more southern/western terminal on one but a more northern/eastern terminal on the other continent as an existing one.
No idea if specific care is taken to avoid that, or if it's even a problem, but I could imagine so for cables that are buried in the seabed – the act of burying the new one could damage the existing one.
But cables are only buried in shallow waters, is my understanding (where there's high risk of an anchor destroying them), so as long as the point of overlap or intersection is in deep seas, I'd imagine it to not be a problem.
Yeah it's a 2d geometry, of course some of the cables will cross.
The other reason that overlapping would be an issue is if they need to pull up a section to repair it and it's directly under another cable.
But the ocean is really damn big and there are only O(100s) of submarine cables. In both the burying in shallow water case, and the deep water maintenance case, I'm guessing the chances of two cables being in the same place is very very small.
Hard to tell. The cynical response is that the novelty is that it's coming from Stanford. The perhaps more correct response is that the novelty is the mechanism of triggering the apoptosis and the specificity.
Here's a paper from 2018 that discusses the prospect of using apoptosis for cancer treatment. They even talk about BCL-2.
Don't be foolish. We may one day cross the Atlantic in an aeroplane or conceive of a motorised carriage capable of traveling 50 miles per hour but some dreams are simply impossible!
The BBC produced a great series, The Secret History of Writing. There's a segment where you can watch some Chinese speakers experiencing this while being prompted to write mildly uncommon words like "cough" or "embarrassment".
For fun I tried "Formalizing" the original Ecclesiastes verse that Orwell uses in Politics and the English Language, where he translates it into modern English.
The original text is: "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
Orwell's parody is: "Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
Formalize turns out: "Upon reflection, it becomes apparent that success—whether in the form of victory in a race, strength in battle, provision for the wise, wealth for men of understanding, or favor for those with skill—is not guaranteed solely based on one's abilities. Rather, time and chance play a significant role in these matters for all individuals."
The tennis player in question is Michael T. Joyce. You can read the article on Esquire's site: https://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david... but it's DFW so it's 15k words (approx 60 pages), which is more fun to read on paper or at least some kind of e-reader.
Cable repairs are certainly annoying and for the operator of the cable, expensive. However, they are usually repaired relatively quickly. I'd be more worried if many more cables were severed at the same time. If you're only going to break one or two a year, you might as well not bother.
1: https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...
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