"close to Renault's factory in the town of Cléon", which is now preparing to start manufacturing drones for the French military, in collaboration with Ukrainian military-industrial groups.
I don't think they look similar, the synchronicity notwithstanding. The sabotage in France was a 250–300 kg rail fragment (per your link). The objects in the Netherlands look much smaller, and look like they're intended to short-circuit two rails to trigger a signal fault. In one place they found car jumper cables with clamps attached to both rails,
Not asserting this is definitely a Russian op (given the amount of simultaneous farmers' protests and all in NL today), but their modus operandi for foreign operations of this kind involves paying random thugs a few hundred to a couple thousand euros to carry out acts of sabotage using whatever items they have on hand. The items don't need to match, the people involved don't need to know each other.
Correct, this is their exact MO and has been for decades. "Random thug" recruitment notwithstanding, part of the point of such ops is to prove to themselves that they can, in fact, reach out and touch a target - i.e., exercising the entire operational chain from C&C down to the minutiae of execution. A kind of integration test for sabotage, if you will. (Not saying this specific incident is or isn't anything in particular, just commenting on the general MO.)
If one were in a charitable mood, one could think of this as a "just in case" measure of ongoing capability assurance in the event of a broader conflict. In a less charitable mood, one might imagine it as preparation for proactive action. In either case, if you don't do this kind of sub-threshold stuff at least occasionally, you often discover that when a real conflict erupts, the capabilities you thought you had are in fact literally or figuratively rusty. (See the Russian army's logistical debacle early in the Ukraine war for a recent example.)
Most top tier nation states do some version of this; each one has its own style. The Russians are somewhat unusual in that they care less than most who knows or suspects them of this kind of activity.
>The sinking of Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique, was an act of French state-terrorism carried out on 10 July 1985. The event was described by France as a "covert operation" by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence agency, the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE). During the operation, two operatives (both French citizens) sank the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, Rainbow Warrior, at the Port of Auckland on her way to a protest against a planned French nuclear test in Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship.
France provides Ukraine with targeting information that allows Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia, including industrial targets. So France is directly contributing to attacks against non-military target in Russia, yes.
Hm, if Russia were to seriously deploy that logic to justify sabotage in European countries (insofar as a kleptocratic dictatorship is ever serious or logical), it could backfire a bit:
1. If France is a sabotage-justified enemy, then so is the US, which provides some intelligence to Ukraine.
2. In the other direction, Russia has been giving targeting information and weapons to Iran to attack the US forces. So if they're the enemy of the US, then certain members of the current Republican administration may have to tone down their "aid and comfort" for Russia lest it mean future treason charges.
Like when we claimed that the russians had sabotaged their own pipeline rather than just stop pumping gas, after Biden declared he'd blow that thing up in case of conflict, and we are still supposed to believe it was the russians?
> The ideal scenario is everyone suspects it's you but can't prove it.
Why? EU countries have shown time and time again they won't do anything. I mean for God's sake, Russia was caught sending THREE remote controlled flying bomb on a German airfield, with another one found by a passerby before it was launched.
They contained professionally made Russian explosives. There is no doubt who did it. This was not the first, or the 10th time they got caught. I mean Russia murdered someone in the UK with polonium, for God's sake.
The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd. They leave their fingerprints knowing there will be no reaction.
> The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd.
I mean they are. That is the reason they haven’t sent balistic missiles to the same airfield. They could have sent the same agents who placed those drones to the fence of the airport with a shoulder mounted missile and shot down the planes as they were departing. Or even shoot them down on the ground.
Or similarly they could send a submarine and disrupt the railway services of the Netherlands with missiles from that.
Those would be clearly attributable actions which trigger an immediate military response. That is the reason why they don’t do them.
You look at the actions they take and conclude that they don’t have any restraint or worries. But you should also be looking at the actions they could have but did not take to see that they are in fact restrained and probably quite a bit worried. If they werent they would play the game differently.
I think it's to slowly increase offenses _that won't lead to military response_. The response to each individual incident, worse than the one before, kinetic action can be delayed because "this was only a little worse than the last one".
This compounds because NATO needs to act collectively to effectively act militarily (maybe Poland could go it alone).
It's European countries that are taking this strategy, any Russia sabotage is aimed at deterring this widening of the conflict - not to encourage it.
Originally Europe didn't want to supply tanks, then it was only short range missiles, then it was longer range missiles as long as they weren't used to attack targets inside Russia - now it's actively supporting doing military strikes deep into Russia, and openly talking about European boots on the ground in Ukraine ( not that they likely didn't have deniable special forces there from the beginning ).
Strategically it's not in Russia's interests at all to have a wider escalation right now - they have their hands full. Any Russia sabotage is a direct response to missiles and drones using Western technology blowing up warehouses and oil installations deep inside Russia - widening the war is not in their interest or their aim here - they are trying to deter that.
There is the wider question of whether Russia's long term goal is to take back the old soviet states bit by bit in a way that doesn't trigger a full response - but I'd argue there is already a clear red line there - and that's the Nato border.
Really? Unless they are complete morons they realize something. If you take EU governments, any random country, as a general rule government expenditures go like this:
35% pensions (usually also has some health care here)
35% social security and health care
15% education
15% everything else, roads, bridges, government buildings, ... (army is in here @ maybe 5%)
They're also drowning in debt, of the non-tiny, only Germany does better than the US. So they can't realistically borrow to finance this for 5 years. They're trying to cheat, and treat the EU like a separate country (meaning get investors to treat the EU as a separate state that is not on the hook for the debt of member countries but levies it's own taxes, then borrow against that, but EU countries are cheating, for example using money the EU borrowed for military purposes to fund general expenses like fixing roads)
If the EU countries mobilize the army will go to 20-25% of government expenditures easily.
That means either pensions or social security HAVE TO go down 15% (or 7.5% each). That will cause a revolt since a great many people can't survive like that. At that point there will be no choice for a lot of people but to tear the government down.
part of the answer is the peace time dividend. the decrease in european spending has mostly been used for lowering or abolishing taxes on the corporations and the wealthy. if this was to be reversed (because we're not in a peace time anymore), the added tax income could be used to finance the re-armament.
i agree with this. the kremlin sees this as a win-win strategy. there are two options:
1. either their actions are ignored by the victim states, which makes this very cheap and effective sabotage to weaken EU members.
2. or alternatively, if there's military retaliation, putin can finally do the mobilization he promised not to do for his war on ukraine, because he can now assert that the country is under attack by foreign nations.
the EU / the member states are now in a pickle: they know it's russia but can't say it out loud because then they'd have to take action. they also can't do nothing because then russian sabotage could wreak havoc with the population and economy. so what can they do?
1. military support of ukraine
2. further sanctions of the russian economy, which includes getting rid of dependencies on russian goods
3. re-arming and modernizing their own military (i.e. introducing modern drone warfare capability, launching their own satelite intelligence, ...)
4. start opposing/controlling russian influence by local malicious actors, i.e. russia friendly right wing political parties (which is somewhat complicated but not impossible in a democratic setting)
Because being too blatant will galvanize the public and create support for open war.
The goal is to ensure all reasonable people know, while keeping enough deniability that Russian-funded right-wing groups can sow doubt about attribution and response policy’s
They don’t care whether it can be proven in court or by people paying close attention. They care whether it can’t be denied even by their aligned agents in western countries.
Maybe it depends on the country, but here the public automatically assumes everything like this done by Russia and these increase support for open war. I don't think Russia wants deeper European involvement in the war, so I'm having trouble understanding why Russia would be doing this. They're already having difficulties in Ukraine, how would angering the European public and increasing the support for further involvement help Russia achieve its goals?
In many countries, russia’s psyop tactics do work frighteningly well, and we see this resulting in a renaissance of the far-right, who are explicitly against supporting Ukraine, and explicitly seek the rehabilitation of russia.
Exactly. If anything, the country that would benefit most from heightened Europe-Russia tensions (as a result of these sorts of infrastructure "accidents") isn't even on the continent. I'm not ruling out Russia completely, but it would sure be stupid for them to effect this strategy. Additionally, Russians weren't the ones that blew up a pipeline at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Look up how successful the US has been in getting right wing crazy people elected as the heads of state in nearly every Central and South American country by funding right-wing groups, with the exception of Mexico and Brazil (but top minds are working on this).
Russia has been trying to get locals to elect governments on their side and even revolt and destroy their own countries to do so ... since 1917. They used the red army to make this happen in most of Eastern Europe, half of Asia, Africa, South America, Middle America ... and they're still at it in quite a few places (like Africa). They fought until their state collapsed to change the government in Afghanistan.
Just because the US does something bad, does not mean others don't do 100x worse. In both meanings of the word.
Right, but you absolutely need the suspicion. If it's too deniable, it rather loses efficacy. It seems in this situation it could be any number of actors, which rather dilutes any intended message.
You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
If you wanted you could claim you have evidence, without having any. Doesn't matter.
"This better stop or there will be sanctions, and if its not within your power to stop it, tough luck" is a valid response.
Whether that's wise is another question.
Here's a recent example where Germany so far claimed that it tied the attack to Russia, but whether that's actually true is anyone guess (since there's little publicly verifiable information released so far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Leipzig_Airport_drone_att...
It wouldn't be terribly surprising if Russia was behind it, but on the other hand it wouldn't be the first false flag incident of this war either.
Well yes technically countries can just attack others. In practice they need to justify those attacks to their allies and populace if they want to maintain the status quo with them. That's where "they started it, we're only defending ourselves" is very helpful.
Romania has reluctantly done exactly that after the drone incident and tensions have escalated. The Romanians closed the Russian consulate in Constanta as a response and sent the consul back to Russia. The Russians sent an hijacked Ukrainian drone that blew up after 5 hours in the port of Constanta just after this. Now they're slowly escalating by periodically sending drones into Romanian airspace or attacking cargo ships bound from/to Odessa while in the Romanian EEZ.
> You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
First order, maybe. But the clearer the attribution the more political capital there is to act. Just look at the article. We don’t know, and won’t know for a while, if this was caused by Russia or the FDF protestors or who. That is all confusion all kind of actors can use to criticise a government who puts more sanctions on Russia.
This isn’t a show of power. Sabotage works best when your target doesn’t even realize it was sabotage. Similarly it’s best if you misattribute blame because then you’re fighting the wrong party and looking for ghosts.
Russia throwing journalists out of windows or paining with Novachok - that’s a “it’s us, you can’t do anything about it, don’t fuck with us” power signal that benefits from “plausible” deniability - you can’t prove it was us.
If the main point is slowing/frustrating drone production?
It would honestly be kind of fair game to sabotage production of drones that would be used against you, even if they're made in a country you're not at war with --- if it wasn't for Russia having a lot of responsibility for that war in the first place (to put it mildly).
Your analogy is way off base. This is how you've framed it:
> Let's say I [the Netherlands] pay [!?] someone [Ukraine] to punch you [Russia] int the face every day. Then one day when you [Russia] punch me [Ukraine] in the face do I have a right to complain?
Ukraine is defending itself, and nobody is paying Ukraine to do that. Russia is the aggressor here. It's weird that I need to point that out. We're talking about Russia sabotaging someone for selling defensive capabilities to Ukraine. So a better analogy is this:
Let's say I punch you in the face every day. Then one day you buy a baseball bat from Gart Sports to defend yourself, so I go in and punch the manager of Gart Sports. Am I in the wrong?
Yes, very obviously, when you frame the analogy correctly, you are in the wrong.
With you up until there. There's nothing defensive about drones. Retributive capabilities certainly, pre-emptive capabilities maybe, but absolutely offensive capabilities, not defensive ones. Attacking Russia back was a line that was definitively crossed in May 2024. You may argue it was justified, but not that it wasn't attacking. In terms of that stupid punching analogy (which wasn't yours to begin with, I know) this is going over to your bully's neighborhood with that baseball bat.
and people who could do those things. Sure. That was a line which was crossed, and everyone knew that - including Ukraine, which is why they didn't do it until two years into the war after getting explicit permission from the governments supplying them with weapons.
But that leaves us back where we started doesn't it? If it's fair game to attack civilian infrastructure which was used or could be used to make the weapons you are getting hit with - then why should it make a difference if it's in the Netherlands? Or in China for that matter? I'm pretty sure that if Russian weapons were made in a state technically not in the conflict (say Belarus), that wouldn't stop Ukraine from sabotaging them.
I'm not denying that Russia was the initial aggressor. I am saying enough lines have been crossed that we really can't fault Russia if they wanted to sabotage weapons production in the west.
I mean what I said: if you're being attacked by drones, then no one can fault you for trying to sabotage the production of those drones, even if they're made in a different country than the one which is sending them against you.
But, you can and should fault Russia for getting into that position in the first place, that their neighbor is attacking them back with drones.
I guess no one can fault the West for retaliating by paying people to light stuff on fire in Russia, for deterrence. And I guess no one can blame the West for sending Ukraine more missiles to fire into Russia, to end the war.
Amazes me how the right wing American view point is so anti the “Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back” of libertarian darling Malcolm Reynolds from 25 years ago. Reagan would be spinning in his grave with how Russia has owned the discourse.
It occurred on Prinsjesdag, which is a particularly popular time of year for the Dutch to protest. If it was Russia trying to make a point, it was a wasted effort as they did it on a day where it is lost in the noise.
It's like if Russia decided to set off a few fires and explosions in the USA on July 4th. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
There was recently this german lady reporter who posed as actively pro-Putin for few months and it didn't take long for fsb/gru to come to her online.
It started small, just check this or that, little favor there but soon escalated to proper spycraft. Some other folks reported having death threats against family. Its for peanuts, few hundred euros mostly. They just need to find the dumbest and most desperate folks to commit acts of treason.
The chances of this being real are basically zero, or Russia would be getting double agented, and reverse intelling themselves, out the arse. Instead all we get are attempts to connect random events, of which there are endless viable suspects, to Russia.
It's fair to say that if one jumps in the middle of a fight, they should expect to get punched, but it's also fair to say that for now Russia has been avoiding throwing much in the way of punches.
How does some chump who gets paid to stick potatoes into tailpipes* become a double agent? Being a double agent requires the ability to hurt the side you're ostensibly working for. The potato guy can show Telegram chats where a guy called Alexey, or maybe an entirely non-Russian name, gave him a job.
* That actually happened. It was a false flag operation to discredit the Greens (party).
I'm not saying such claims are not being published, I'm saying they're likely false because they make about as much sense as a country blowing up its own pipeline. Espionage outside of war is an extremely sensitive issue, and were any country trivially baitable, they'd end up getting played hard. Not only would it eliminate deniability, but you also open up the door to major counter-intel operations and getting more insight into the operations, potentially on a massive scale, of an adversary.
I suspect this is why there's endless stories, in pretty much every country, of dissidents handing over information to 'enemy states' who are in fact just domestic law enforcement. These people glow to everybody, and no foreign power's going to touch them.
This has been extremely well documented. They are just paying some losers a few hundred euros to throw a molotow cocktail somewhere, that's it. As for the Germans, you know that they investigated the NS incident and are prosecuting the Ukrainian perpetrators. Now when the perpetrators are Russian, everything is fake of course.
Russia blowing up its own pipeline was also 'extremely well documented.' One of the many reasons that propaganda is self defeating is because when done effectively, as it has been with Ukraine, the people doing it eventually begin to be unable to tell what people really think due to self censorship and other issues. Have you really convinced everybody, or just made them smile and nod?
Germany is now finding out the answer to that question, and I expect it's mere foreshadowing for much of the rest of Europe. The exact same happened with the Soviet Union. Gorbachev grew up during the Stalin years, alongside all of the joys that entails. He smiled and nodded all the way until he was at the top in power, at which point he almost immediately set about undermining the systems that had been in place.
No, Russia being behind NS was never extremely well documented. There was lots of speculation and the German police did investigate and came to the conclusion that it had been the Ukrainians. Now the German police did investigate and came to the conclusion that it was the Russians. That's it.
By this standard, nothing is well documented. The Western propaganda machine was building up an extensive case against Russia. I suspect the reason it was dialed back was only because they overestimated the gullibility of the public - nobody believed them.
Operation Mockingbird. [1] Now let's bring that into modern times with the internet, digital communications, the complete degradation of values from government and business alike, and LLMs on top of it all now. It's why nothing makes any sense. Because it's just lies force fed on people alongside actions to encourage self censorship.
It's odd that you would jump to "Russian op" and hedging by _not_ asserting that it is "definitely" one; but it very well could also be and arguably even is far more likely an act by someone who would benefit form scaring the public and manipulating the affected governments. I'm not going to assert at all, one way or another who it may be because it could be several actors with interests in producing outcomes of fear among the public and animating and manipulating the respective governments and the clowns in the EU to take actions without thinking.
It is really a rather common playbook of stoking fear and even instigating war not for direct outcomes that has been used innumerable times over history. Only it seems that the majority of people are incapable of seeing, accepting, or maybe just internalizing when they are being played, lied to, and manipulated for the benefit of others at their own expense.
One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing by some minor event like this, are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions, and they could simply just send barrages of missiles to hit actually meaningful targets if they ever become sick and tired of all the CIA/MI6 clowns thinking they can salami slice their way into conquering Russia and once the Germans and Poles have been whipped up to be the battering ram of minced meat again.
It's why we have so many catastrophic and calamitous events in our history because people never ask themselves who may be benefitting from the act that is immediately used to manipulate people through fear. In spite of having been told and explained a long time ago and many times since, you should always ask you who benefits, cui bono. Russia does not benefit from scaring the populace into supporting the murderous and war mongering governments and the maniacal ruling parasites that control them in order to profit from war as they send your children in to the meat grinder.
> One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
Or one could choose not to take this in isolation from all the acts of brazen and identified sabotage Russia does, slashing deep-sea cables in international waters with their shadow fleets, organizing psyop campaigns throughout the entire continent that can be traced back right to their government units, and so on :-)
"brazen and identified" is doing a lot of work here. IIRC the cable thing was an anchor accident, and everyone is doing psyop campaigns (Western psyops being far more advanced and sophisticated than their enemies). Nord Stream was definitely not an accident and we know who did that.
Implying that Russia somehow invented or is the undisputed leader in "psyops" is a popular hallmark of a low-information civilian, a narrative promoted by arch-propagandists like Peter Pomerantsev and Anne Applebaum.
"Propagandist" is not a palatable job title, so propagandists often masquerade under different words. For example, the US government's official foreign propaganda agency is called "US Agency for Global Media".
If Anne "it's okay to kill journalists in wartime" Applebaum is not a prominent Western propagandist, then who is?
\One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
They are known for actions that negatively affect them and everyone around. That's kinda their whole thing.
Look, for me this shit is personal. I am the person whose life the |redacted| makes worse. I get that boring explaination is not exciting to you for the reasons of neurological kind, this is a good enough model with predictive properties that help me be alive and have all my body parts in the factory installed places
The ruling class in Europe needs this war for economic reasons. They're orchestrating and selling it to the public by constant fear mongering and provoking conflict.
Even in a relatively intelligent crowd like this forum, people are gullible and easily guided to hate the Other: red ("communists", Russia, China); brown (immigrants, Muslims, Iran); or green ("far left", environmental and civil rights activists). They hate us for our freedoms!
Be afraid, people, and keep funnelling billions of your tax money into the pockets of the rich who profit from literal conspiracy, mass murder and war crimes. No wonder we have endless conflict and fascism on the rise around the world. There's so much money to be made from war and hate, defrauding the public for generations.
How can we not see it, it's the same playbook again and again. One day we will have to face the true evil, the traitors of humanity, the enemy within.
The last thing ‘the ruling class in Europe needs’ is a pan European war! Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place. They actively don’t want outright war and Russia knows this, which is why Russia continually provokes and gets away with acts of sabotage.
>Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place.
The system is already unstable due to the rampart growth of wealth inequality, especially after covid, disproportionately affecting the purchasing power and CoL of the working class, while those with assets have seen their wealth ballon. All orchestrated by EU politicians and the ECB currency inflation policies and and allocation towards banks and corporations who spent it during covid on assets and stock buybacks and left the working class footing the bill with inflation and mass layoffs years later.
The EU elites are already worried about how they can manage this bottled anger of the working class, which is why you see more and more draconical EU "chat control" and "speech control" laws trying to get passed. Pointing the peasants to vent their anger towards Russia as the scapegoat, for the fiscal irresponsibility of the EU elites that lead to the current wealth disparity, is a good way for the EU elites to avoid the angry mob.
After all, most of the wealthy European elites and nobles didn't lose their wealth after WW1 and WW2 even though millions of peasants died.
Who designs a signaling system where a ‘major disruption’ can be caused by a jumper cable applied at any point along potentially hundreds of kms? What about resiliency and fallbacks for something that critical?
Fear not! I’m sure the European Commission will promptly ban jumpstart cable ownership without a license.
Most consumers know Renault as an ordinary car manufacturer but also worth mentioning it's a major manufacturer of armored vehicles for the French armed forces.
> Just days after a similar (criminal) incident causing a train to derail in France
From what I read, the similarity ends in “both involved trains”. This chain of attacks seems to have used short metal pipes (“Footage published by Dutch public broadcaster NOS on Tuesday showed police carrying what appeared to be metal pipes - about 1.5 metres (5ft) long”) to short a connection, making safety systems signal “there’s a train there”, stopping trains further up the track.
The France incident involved a piece of rails heavy enough to cause derailment (“The rail fragment was estimated to weigh between 250 and 300 kilograms”)
My money is on this being a rogue farmers protest.
It seems unlikely they would let any political divisions or legitimate grievances go unexploited. It is their cultural core competency for centuries. That does not mean the greivances being exploited aren't valid, or that the parties themselves don't aid in the fracture so they don't have to worry about competition with parties whose ideology is too close to theirs.
Edit: This is reductive, Russia has tons of culture besides this trait, but it is the fundamental strategy that allowed a landlocked state with no natural borders to survive and expand. When you learn a strategy to survive or cope with adversity, it sticks long after it is beneficial.
The way I see it, both things are true - European politicians and major parties have stirred anger by their incompetence, AND Russia has exploited this anger for their own purposes.
EU has huge flaws, but it's still better than Russia. Germans, French and the British may not understand it, but us unfortunate enough to live next to Russia do. There is a reason why Poland, Baltic countries and now even Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Russia is ruled by evil, murderous tyrants (as is always has been), while EU elite is merely lazy, greedy and incompetent.
I'll choose pro-EU parties over pro-Russian parties as long as EU is not bombing children's hospitals and massacring civilians. I can only hope citizens of other countries do the same, or otherwise there's a pretty good possibility my country will face what Ukraine has suffered.
It's unfortunate that so many alternatives to mainstream parties in big EU countries are also more or less pro-Russian. One should be able to vote against the flaws of European Union without voting for closer ties with Putin.
Yes, and Stalin was Georgian, Kaganowitch was Ukrainian (and orchestrated the Ukrainian Holodomor), Breshnev was Ukrainian and so on.
The alternative parties are not pro-Russia. They want to trade with a totalitarian regime just like we trade with Saudi Arabia. And they'll break their election promises anyway just like Meloni and Trump broke theirs.
All that's being said is, "Russia is known to exploit political conflicts to harm their enemies".
WHY those conflicts exist is irrelevant.
No one is saying it absolutely, unquestionably was Russian interference. Just that it could be. EDIT: OK, at least one person is saying that. But most people are likely thinking, "Well, could be, might not be... dunno."
Why those conflicts exist is actually very relevant when those responsible for them keep using "wawawa russians" as a diversion to avoid doing anything about the issues. If both my local politicians and foreign countries are working against my interests I am going to first vote for better local politicians because at least there I am supposed to have agency.
> macron has 16% approval rating, while 81% see him "unfavorably"... how shitty of a politician do you have to be to not step down when 81% of the country hates you?
When elections come due, following the natural order. Otherwise maybe some bad actor could influence polls - which are easier to manipulate than official elections - to make you resign.
They certainly seem to be implying it. And not only that, disinformation narratives often to to emphasize domestic political troubles that fan the flames of skepticism against mainstream institutions, and their reply to a topic about Russia was to go straight to that particular well.
When the mainstream institutions are obviously divorced from reality ( Nordstream - "Russians did it themselves", or every mainstream news segment in spring 2022 starting with "unprovoked full scale invasion of Ukraine" where even a casual glance at numbers involved (~ 180000) pales in comparison with what US used in Iraq I or II), you don't need disinformation narratives to elicit skepticism against mainstream institutions. A bit of common sense is entirely sufficient.
One could even argue the mainstream institutions were involved in disinformation narratives (e.g., in the case of 40 beheaded babies or widespread systematic rape on Oct 7th: did not bother to check the facts before spreading it wide).
> Do you claim that Russia doesn't invest in disinformation campaigns against the West?
Maybe it do invest. But that has about zero effect. If Russian disinformation campaigns were working, they would work in Russia as well, but that's not happening.
This is a completely all over the place gish gallop. Both can be true: there's real reporting on acts of sabotage that aren't made up, and there are domestic tensions happening independently of that. The skill is keeping both things in your mind at the same time.
Old German politicians had many opportunities to say something about the genocide. They decided to support Israel instead and (maybe) this choice played some part in their demise. They miscalculated how angry was the people and basically fired themselves. Should know better after seeing the Democrats fall in the same trap.
When you are surrounded only by people that says "I don't care" every single time, you may forget that those aren't the people that you have to convince that "you care".
The similarity is also timing and geopolitical context. It doesn't have to be an identical method to merit the comparison as the means for sabotage can be variable.
Of course more similarity would be a stronger signal, but we shouldn't miss the forest (rail sabotage) for the trees (shorted circuit).
As far as sabotage goes doing it in a way that is disruptive but causes no permanent damage is a bit odd. As a protest, however, it makes perfect sense.
Economical damage caused by temporary chaos is still damage.
Forcing delays on European trains in special days when a huge number of travelers are expected is the oldest trick in the book. It has been exploited for years and years.
Those aren't the first trains that had problems in Europe recently. Spain has been plagued with thousands of Train delays, cable stolen before a holiday, sabotages and rocks in the railway are also very popular. Russians are obsessed with trains, and the Kremlin even tried to buy the main Spanish train maker disguised as Hungarians, before to be blocked by the Spanish government.
About rogue farmers protest in France... well, exactly the same problem. They are always agitated by far right agents in special moments, and when people scratch a little, this people always are seen taking selfies and money from people associated with Putin. Farmers still didn't understood that are being used every single time, often again their own interests. See the Yellow Jackets movement for example.
I'm surprised people jump to Russia instead of the radical left. Left-wing environmentalist terrorists attached shunts to rail lines to short out the safety signals back in 2020 in the US [0]. Vulkangruppe has been conducting sabotage in Germany, and a 48-year-old named Daniel V was arrested on suspicion of sabotaging Germany's electrical grid because he hated fossil fuels [1]. The French had left-wing environmentalist terrorists sabotaging the rail network in 2024 [2]. The left has been conducting infrastructure attacks all over Europe this decade, but it's probably more politically expedient to blame Russia.
- Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups always claim the action pretty quickly and openly in NL.
- If you look at the locations of sabotage, it’s all close to the ‘farmer heartland’. Most left-wing and environmental groups would do it in the randstad.
Most likely it’s farmers. They announced very heavy protests today and also burnt hay near highways to create smoke clouds. Possibly nudged by Russian operatives because the like to sow dissent.
Also, extinction rebellion goes after motorways blocking private cars, not trains which are a sustainable mode of transport they support.
No, I'm pretty sure this would have been a farmer splinter group. The last time they protested with tractors on the motorways it caused a deadly accident, they won't be getting away with that anymore. So they'll be looking for new ways to protest.
Also, today was Prinsjesdag, similar to the state of the Union in the US. It was a day to expect local protests. Nobody in the Netherlands thinks Russia is behind this.
> Vulkangruppe has been conducting sabotage in Germany
It's important to note that AFAIK nothing in this direction has been proven. After the attack, some people claiming to be part of Vulkangruppe claimed they did the attack, but it's all just claims.
Also important to note: the Vulkangruppe's letter mentions JD Vance, but spells the name "Vans" - almost like the authors usually write/read about him in Cyrillic texts.
Surely there is a lot of Russian-motivated sabotage going on in Europe, but there's another group that might be motivated:
exactly today, a major farmer demonstration was already planned. They way they usually go ahead in the Netherlands is drive with their tractors over the highways towards The Hague, where our government is based. Obviously this leads to massive traffic jams.
A simultaneous disruption of the Dutch railways would add some extra effect to the expected traffic chaos.
Quite easy to go from a misdemeanor to terrorism charge if you sabotage the train network. IMHO likely those ** farmers causing insane amounts of damage while getting a slap on the wrist every time, that has to end. At least the climate activists only block one highway which you can work around. Unless it turns out it's them. Then they need be treated the same but it's not their MO.
Last week we had four train-truck collisions at Polish level crossings resulting in derailment and passenger death, and afaik 2 or 3 involved foreign truck drivers.
Yes. And in combination it completely rules out the suggestion that the Netherlands attack is some kind of local activist protest. (The France attack resulted in several grave injuries and could have just as easily resulted in dozens of deaths.)
No I agree with that, but if it's "activists" I would expect them to claim credit otherwise it's all pointless. The same doesn't follow for Russian fuckery, IMO.
> the Wildberries logistics centers in Russia were also civilian targets
They've now hidden the label, but Wildberries carry almost a 1/4 million items tagged "Everything for the SMO" ("special military operation"), so hardly a civilian target. Ukraine has been highly disciplined in going after military targets, other than energy, which of course also feeds the Russian war machine.
There is a big difference between starting fires in a warehouse which gives most people a chance to escape, and being like the Russians who were murdering and raping civilians in Dobas etc, firing missiles non-stop into civilian areas of Kyiv.
Really Western Europe has been ignoring Russia's war for far too long; the MH17 shootdown was in 2014 and the situation has only deteriorated since then.
While the consensus is that it's likely a Russia controlled/allied battery shot it down - I'm not sure anybody thinks it was anything other than an accident, not an intentional act of sabotage.
If it was a Russian weapon (which is the most likely explanation) then it was the result of them meddling where they shouldn't be - either by supplying separatists with military equipment or by being there themselves, i.e. a part of their ongoing expansionist campaign in Ukraine.
You cannot ignore war - Ukraine found that out the hard way. Just because you want to be peaceful doesn't mean everybody else does and you cannot stop them from attacking by being peaceful.
My grandfather was a Communist Party member, as was my dad, unfortunately I ended up living in this neo-liberal hell. Which is to say that I had sincerely wished to be a "tovarăș", but those days are by now long behind me.
russia declared war on whole west (including this open forum) in 2014, if you cared about the topic a bit you would know that. They are not even hiding it, quite contrary. Attacks keep happening basically daily in entire Europe now, thats a text book declaration of war from russia.
They repeatedly declared razing whole western Europe and western world with nuclear weapons, annihilating hundreds of millions. They repeatedly stated their goal is to at least restore former USSR with eastern bloc acting as a shield/nuclear battlefield at all costs, same as it was during cold war.
Then they started their military push, and if Ukraine didn't fight back with everything they had they may have stopped only at Austria/German eastern border (probably West Germany one).
But you should know all this mister troll, don't you. I don't mind, repeating (sad) facts about russia can be a hobby and internet should be full of it.
russia never formally declares war. you can check the history and correct me on this if you can. nevertheless russia has repeatedly threatened to nuke europe.
> dont remember seeing Lavrov delivering a declaration of war
Mr "Lithuania Will Disappear From the World Map" has not been so shy on this aspect
"Dmitry Medvedev on Feb. 18 threatened to use nuclear weapons against the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Ukraine if Moscow loses all occupied Ukrainian territories".
In Academia, this is not how to cite references. Date, link, etc. The quality of the reference is also important, not “such and such blogger”, might as well go to local bar and ask the regular drunk for references.
Because in the real world (tm) a diplomat announcing this has consequences. Press can parrot any fantasy they want, gullible may just as well watch Marvel entertainment, same relation to reality.
Of course, the only reason wild berries got hit is because Putin started the war. The only reason why why Russians (and Russian speaking Ukrainians) are dying in large numbers is Putin.
The pro-russian historic fanfiction asserts that "Putin was forced to war or NATO would have expanded to ukraine or something"
There is no conceivable scenario where Russians would have worse safety than what Putin's decision caused. Heck, the long range drones attacking Russia today would simple not exist.
People say trump is Putin's stooge, but honestly Putin looks like a western plant. Nobody else since Stalin has killed as many Russians than Putin.
> also sells to the military... where have you been hiding?
And the Western-built railway system has been used for war/military reasons since its very inception (almost), it's how Prussia got the best over the Habsburgs at Sadowa in the 1860s. One could also say that Tsarist Russia not yet having a rail connection to Crimea just before that caused them to be defeated against the Western incursion at Sevastopol.
One side is primarily targeting civilians and infrastructure, also committing acts of war crimes, other is targeting exclusively infrastructure used by the military.
Yeah, yeah, I know you'd love to paint your comrades as the poor military attacked from the all sides, but we all know had they not invade Crimea and then start all-out war against civilian targets, they'd live peacefully today.
I hope western countries will respond in kind with the mass sabotage acts: disrupting the transportation (roads and railroads are used by the military, per your own classification), pipelines and perhaps more.
> I hope western countries will respond in kind with the mass sabotage acts
I live in Bucharest, the closest NATO capital to the clusterfuck in Southern Ukraine, when you'll get conscripted/when you'll volunteer and when you'll arrive here at Bucharest Northern Railway station just ping me, I'll be very happy to help a HN-er who thinks he's fighting for the right cause. Cause you are a NATO citizen, aren't you? Meaning you're not using those threats just because.
Given the opinions you I read in this thread, we'd be more likely to meet across the front lines.
Respectfully.
"Threats" as a comment to "let respond with sabotage to multiple sabotage acts conducted by the country engaging in war crimes" shows the side you're on very well.
Found the German. As the Italians put it: "non c'e due senza tre", it seems like you guys are dead-bent on doing it for a third time. Morgenthau was 100% correct on his plan, too bad things didn't go his way.
Btw, two of my grand-grand-dads got land allotments after WW1 on account of putting their lives on the line for my country against you, Germans, so I'm talking from shared family experience.
Sad thing Stalin had to confiscate your family land allotments into a kolkhoz. Despite being allied with Germany for first few years of ww2. Imagine all these Eastern European partisans of ww2 thinking they're fighting for freedom, only to replace german occupation with a russian occupation in result.
Russia's biggest asset is general apathy in the rich West. People with names written in funny script that sound like Bond characters shooting at each other a thousand kilometers away is hard to get Peter and Paddy and Pierre and Pontus and Pablo living comfortable lives with comfortable jobs to give a shit about. There's a reason Western governments make sure the media prints stories about intercepting Russian jets.
Bringing the war to them and getting the public to want their government to commit blood and treasure to doing something about it is a ferociously poor strategic decision from the Kremlin. "That Putin killed a 17 year old French girl on her way to school on the train" is unlikely to cause the public in the West to back down.
I don't think that funding far right parties, neo nazi groups, threatening with nuclear holocaust, sending drones into neighbors, occupying neighbors territories, etc is aimed at the "goal of bringing apathy to Western Europeans."
But somehow you're trying to spin it into it's Western governments are the ones wanting to bring war?
You know, the guys that had a huge part of their economy on top of Russian gas? The guys that closed their eyes when part of Georgia was occupied? Or ignored Crimea occupation?
Those people are the ones who watched Russia kill 200 people in the flight MH17 without consequences.
Hay here it is: The idiot of the day award. Go move to russia. Hopefully we will send back their millions of "proud" migrants that are swarming Europe still.
Leaving aside the irony in seeing the "peaceful" EU (who bet it all on Uncle Sam) now going on full warmongering and wanting to spend 3% of its GDP on warfare, the serious issue here is the lack of will of politicians to punish the authors of such acts, which ruin society for everybody.
44 person injured and a young woman between life and death. Yet when the perpetrators are caught, we'll have journalists and judges relaying the official tune of the EU: "criminals are victims too".
They'll get a slap on the wrist and be able to ruin society again in no time.
When shall the left accept that people putting 300 kilograms of rails to try to kill people has only one solution: shackles and a heavy ball?
Where do you draw the line between "we're all beautiful butterflies" and "some psychos need to be scruffed by the neck and bowed into lifetime submission"?
Worth noting that the "escape hatch" clauses in the EUPL that allow converting it into other licenses mean it's only ever as strong as the weakest license it names for such an operation, AKA EPL/MPL/LGPL.
Any actor that wants to mess around with providing a closed extension on a network service can exercise that option with an EUPL codebase, so if you care about that, you're better off explicitly naming the AGPL or whatnot.
EUPL is built for government agencies first, and most of the focus is ensuring that nobody has to worry about mix-and-matching it with other copyleft licenses, plus legal language that covers and harmonizes variations in notions of copyright/patents/intellectual property across EU countries, not so much waging war against hyperscalers. (But it's still great to have around!)
You are describing the compatibility clause as if it's settled that the EUPL simply allows you to convert to a compatible license. The compatibility clause is an unfortunate ambiguity, but it's not the intention of the license authors to lose strong copyleft and SaaS loophole protections this way. See for example here [1] [2] [3].
* BigTech can take your EUPL library and write a small wrapper in MPL
* such a wrapper can therefore be used in any project, even a closed one that is a network service.
* however all of that still qualifies as distributing EUPL, and the EUPL core would still need to be made available under EUPL (whether modified or not).
Saying that since I have an MPL wrapper then all the code is MPL is not allowed.
So you can't just copy all the code and change the license to MPL.
This is basically AGPL without virality and anti-tivo, correct?
On the face of it, no it doesn't say that. It just says the combined work can be MPL. Then someone can take that MPL work, and distribute it without source code because the MPL allows that. It explicitly says any conflict between the EUPL and the MPL shall be resolved in favor of the MPL.
A “conflict” is intended to mean the case that following some EUPL obligation (such as publishing the derived source code) wouldn’t be allowed under the alternative license.
> But as none of the compatible licenses come into conflict with the EUPL *by prohibiting the essential points* of publication of the source code and coverage of remote distribution (closing the SaaS loophole), these obligations, that are the core of the "reciprocal" condition, persist for the derivatives concerned.
aka: the compatible licenses do not put additional restrictions, so no, it is not MPL.
also, from the license:
> this Distribution or Communication can be done under the
terms of this Compatible Licence..
So you are allowed distribution, not relicensing.
To simplify It seems to me that:
* GPL will automatically make something GPL.
* EUPL will automatically make something selectively dual-licensing. parts EUPL, parts whatever.
Also do note that EUPL is the first license to explicitly state that any issues fall under EU(Belgium) law, so EU has the last say on its license.
I read a few dozen comments to see if I could get an answer to this in the thread, but it does appear to be a case where we're highlighting one of the risks of picking up a new license: folks don't agree on how to interpret it.
I'm very curious why the author didn't simply use AGPL, but I haven't done a deep dive on the text of the EUPL, so maybe that's the next step.
EDIT: Went to go research this. First thing I learned is the license has been around since 2007. It was updated in 2017. So maybe scratch my comment about it being a new license!
We found it pretty easy to build a little k8s controller for our own purposes to do this -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48478994 . You probably don't need to implement this as a plugin or hook, pgdog supports dynamic reload of its configuration without dropping existing connections.
Although I'm the type to shy away from adding extra layers in my architectures when I can help it, pgdog has been an absolute breeze to use :)
Considering "I Can Has Cheezburger" and that kind of lolspeak is nearly 20 years old now, I'm not surprised to see some people unfamiliar with it nowadays :-)
We successfully did this with pgdog at $JOB using our own "controller" -- the same service that handles deploying new instances of our application (instancing an argoCD Application that fires Crossplane DB creation, making new Deployments of bricks, etc) will also, at the end of that process, scan the cluster for Database CRDs, use those to generate a new pgdog.toml + users.toml, update the Secrets in the cluster, enable maintenance mode on all pgdog pods, do a live config reload on each of them, then disable maintenance mode (this is to make the change atomic between all the pgdog instances). Downtime there is about 2-3 seconds and all it does is make new SQL requests from existing clients wait, it doesn't break the connection or anything.
The obvious AI headings, pointless genned image of people (I'm starting to think islam had a point with discouraging depictions of human figures), and especially the blurry, artifacted, distractingly skeuomorphic diagram, with random wire traces going everywhere... this is a technical blog, not an investor sales pitch! Every time I see one of these, I have to double-check for a second if I'm not on some phishing SEO site!
If even Google, previously a gold standard of technical writing, is falling prey to this kind of laziness, then I have nothing to worry about -- knowing how to write without a language model in the driver's seat is gonna be a top tier skill in the future...
A damn shame too, as I've been following the progress of JXL in the standardization pipeline for a few years now and was quite interested in the historical breakdown, but all that's gonna stick with me from this is the disrespect I felt as a reader.
I spent 10+ years in building JPEG XL and I'm proud of the result. It wasn't always easy times. It is not so bad people can see what I look like and take a peek what the process was to get there.
This article is not about the entropy codes and predictors, memory bandwidth and decision trees, but about the long horizon planning in corporate-driven OSS efforts and being connected to both community and cross-industry.
That doesn't sound like a denial to me. Your years working on JPEGXL are extremely admirable, and you deserve to be recognized for it, but the gratuitous use of genAI in this post is also insulting to humans. The world isn't improved by a fabricated photo of a fake setting with an actor looks like you but isn't standing in front of a white board that says basically nothing.
I made that AI rendering and consider it demonstrates the conceptual discussions we had likely better than what an actual whiteboard drawing would look like. An actual whiteboard drawing from our day to day work would be very confusing without a lot of context and discussion. I have to admit that whiteboard drawings were somewhat rare in our real JPEG XL development, but it has been an intensively collaborative effort.
> consider it demonstrates the conceptual discussions
Photos do not, cannot, demonstrate discussions except in the most superficial and pointless way.
There are two reasons to show a photo of anything: 1) To share the experience of having been in a particular place in a particular moment of time, 2) to share what something looks like. Your image does not share an experience of having been in a particular place in a particular moment of time, because the place and time depicted are fake. Nor does it share anything about the discussion itself, because the content depicted is fake.
Is the fact that google has white boards an important part of your story? The only thing you've shown is a demonstration of what standing in front of a white board looks like. Not even a real white board. Not even real you.
If you want people to know what you look like, show an actual photo of yourself, not AI slop.
> An actual whiteboard drawing from our day to day work would be very confusing
Parent comment says I should not be known and my picture should not be on the blog post. I just want to disagree with that. In my opinion JPEG XL is a notable success and it is also ok to celebrate us, its makers.
Your technical achievements will help make the web a better platform (here hoping that browsers in general adopt JPEG XL sooner rather than latter). I've not seen anyone in the thread asking for you to not be credited for your work, or that you should not be known in general. Also, attaching your picture and some biographical info in that article is cool and expected, no problem there.
But.. that image isn't your picture, is it? It's a gen AI simulacrum. It's 2026, the uncanny valley causes visceral, immediate rejection in some subset of people. People that recoil in disgust at the sight of that.. thing pretending to be real? Since 2022, it's like our world became an eternal black mirror episode
(a more serious problem would be the prose itself being AI generated, but honestly reading it I am not sure)
Gen AI (both images and text) does not help your technical writing stand out. It doesn't help to illustrate better the points made in the article. If anything it debases your work and your own image
> I should not be known and my picture should not be on the blog post
That is the opposite of what parent comment says. It took offence on a generated photo of you. It would have been better to not have anything than a generated image.
That is not what the parent comment says at all. The parent comment says that an actual photo of yourself doing literally anything at all would have been better and less insulting to your readers than AI slop.
... with a high-resolution scan of the work itself available for download, to boot. I really appreciate whenever museums go out of their way to share those publically! Much better than many paintings only officially available as some 400px thumbnail.
Yes! I visited Rijksmuseum a few years ago with a close friend and I liked the painting "The Gulf of Naples with the Island of Ischia in the Distance" very much. I downloaded the high quality scan from the painting's museum web page[1] and got it printed onto a canvas to hang in our apartment. We really enjoy its presence with my wife!
"close to Renault's factory in the town of Cléon", which is now preparing to start manufacturing drones for the French military, in collaboration with Ukrainian military-industrial groups.
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