Well, Russians are claiming so. I’m pretty dubious about the viability of running fully loaded freight trains at normal speed across the damaged part.
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Old and busted: pipelines
New and fresh:
Bridges. See posts above.
Upcoming: communication cables.
Won’t be surprised if this turns out to be state-sponsored:
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Ukraine boasting a 4:1 ratio here. Dang.
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Russia getting ratio’d?
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Follow-up:
Go for the translation engine of your choice. (I use deepl.)
ETA an update: the Bundespolizei (federal police, basically in charge of everything related to rail in the first instance) has transferred the investigation to the respective Landeskriminalämter. From a procedural POV, this means that this is not considered a terrorist attack, and also that no other countries are expected to be involved. The Staatschutz is still in on the investigations, which means that a political background of the sabotage is not yet ruled out.
This is kind of good.
However, the discussion how to better protect so-called “critical infrastructure” got some renewed attention.
Just FTR, I am positive that a very small group of resourceful people could wreak havoc in Europe (not only Germany) by carefully planning a small number of sabotage incidents. Anyone who is able to do some spatial analyses can find some locations which would make the result of the Kerch bridge explosion look like child’s play, and take less effort to perform.
Needless to say that it is next to impossible to protect the infrastructure against this kind of attacks.
I’m not going to discuss this at length here. I don’t want to give anyone more ideas. I really fear that we will see something like this during my lifetime. And the effect on society would be terrible.
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“This version suggests that both the Nord Stream and Kerch explosions were organized by Russia following different motives. In this case, that there are competing factions in Moscow. And there is a group of hawks trying to force Putin’s hand to resort to nuclear weapons. The logic behind it is very simple. If he decides to press the nuclear button, he will reveal himself to be a supervillain and can be removed. If he fails to do so, Putin will have shown weakness, and there is once again reason to take him down,” Tüür offered.
That is an insane take!
So do these alleged hawks want to remove Putin or not? Do they want him to use nuclear weapons because they want to win or to have an excuse to remove him and sue for peace? And why would they attack one target that helps Putin (by deniably cutting off gas to Europe) and one that entirely humiliates him? This is such a confused theory!
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I saw a clip of that video, and the replies are full of people declaring that it is a “fake” or a satire mocking Russian propaganda. But since the PinkNews article has nothing on the video’s origins except the word of somebody on Twitter, they might be right.
ETA: The replies calling it a satire are here:
The replies to the original tweet call it an accurate portrait of life in America.
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The only people who’d buy that fascist nonsense are the elderly peasants who get all their information from state TV. It seems like a lot of effort to get babushka to convince parents that it would be better for them to send their boy into the meat grinder in Ukraine than to the decadent West. Poe’s Law is the law of the land when it comes to Russia.
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Though, to be fair, the right wing in the US believes similar stuff about the left.
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Yes. Faux News spreads similar “information” about urban areas to a domestic audience of elderly peasants. The difference is that it’s clear the Murdoch and his ilk are sincere and that the American propaganda effort, while verging on seeming satire, is in earnest.
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Let us assume a state agency was behind the sabotage, and since this is the Russian invasion thread, let’s say it was Russia. Since there has been no claim by Russia, it would make sense for German authorities to downplay it and let the LKA investigate. That lowers the chance of panic, the purpose of such an attack, were it a state player.
One other thing that speaks for it being a state player like Russia is the whole “nice infrastructure you got there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it” hasn’t been openly communicated. It’s the sort of threat that would be made privately, much like how mafia goons will make veiled threats only to the shop owner, not in front of his customers.
Russia does benefit the most from a drop in trust in the train network, because Germany has been working hard on reducing gas and oil consumption. How successful they are remains to be seen, but Russia does want to stoke FUD and pressure Germany into dropping sanctions. I personally think they are hamstrung, though, in that they want to threaten but aren’t really in a position to.
For the record, I can’t think of many other groups that would benefit, the only one being disgruntled Bahn workers or some professional extortion gang, but if that were the case they haven’t made any public demands, and that’s what makes me think it was Russia. They are the only one at the moment with that modus operandi.
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Kinda sucks when it wasn’t one you had a hand in, doesn’t it Vlad?
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