Comment by mitjam

Well, yes, Flag of Convenience is a thing.

But there is a "but", which is that in the articles of war, the flag of a ship does have quite a few implications. E.g. when two nations are at war, stopping ships flagged as belonging to the opposition gives certain rights of stopping and searching them, blockading their passage, seizing the vessels and cargo, etc.

And the relevant characteristic in that case is the flag, not the captain's nationality: > Art. 51. Enemy character. The enemy or neutral character of a vessel is determined by the flag which it is entitled to fly.

http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/1913a.htm

Yes, good points. It's not a wild stretch of the imagination that Mr P and gang are actively trying to drag China into the Ukraine conflict and I'd imagine Beijing is pretty pissed off today about being (ostensibly) implicated in this sabotage. So the usual underhand scheming from the Kremlin imho, don't fall for it. China and Russia's relationship is very complicated of course and there's many a convincingly analysis out there that predicts conflict between them in the near future (an example flashpoint being Siberia).

Yes, this is what I'm saying, but with less words.

But look around (even in these comments) and look at how many people are thinking "Chinese act of war!!!11!!"

So the Russians who are at this point highly dependant on Daddy Xi to keep their economy and military afloat are gonna false flag the West to suck China into a quagmire of a war a few months before the most unpredictable and venomously anti-china president (who has thin skin, a hair trigger, and no qualms about conducting airstrikes on high-ranking Iranian generals unilaterally on a whim) in modern US history is about to take office at the head of a country with the largest functioning stockpile of nuclear weapons and a massive military? You think Chinese intelligence is asleep at the wheel and wouldn't notice given the stakes and absurd levels of geopolitical risk the entire planet is at?

China may back Russia to try to shift perception of the west's military might/will or to drain resources or just to buy Russia by making them dependant to get those juicy Russian natural resources but they aren't going to start world war iii to help Putin with his fetishistic "yet another European dictator" fantasy.

The Chinese know how to play the game same as the Russians and the US. All these little games are just calibrated psyops, why destroy, very publicly, comms lines when tapping it would be far more beneficial to a war effort and much quieter? Maybe to make the West look weak and unable to defend their borders which affects consequences domestically like say channeling political support to isolationist politicians who want to retreat from supporting Ukraine? Cause those politicians didn't make gains in the last European elections or nothing.

Well said.

By this logic, United and American Airlines were complicit in 9/11 as well.

They're not asking for Russia to get the benefit of the doubt, they're asking (reasonably IMO) for China.

A well-earned result of decades of their hard work, although this is about china-registered vessel

Are you sure about that?

I happened to notice that at least in some cases, the change of terminology happened roughly when it became clear that offensive war was a losing proposition in terms of money and resources. I suspect that as invading the neighbours became financially irrational, the cool heads that tend to survive in management shifted their stand from mixed offense/defense to just defense.

They do have an alliance: https://www.cfr.org/article/china-russia-and-ukraine-october...

What the words are worth in a time of need remains to be seen. Neither side is exactly trustworthy :)

> China is not allied with Russia

They don't have a mutual defense treaty, sure, but they describe themselves as having a “friendship without limits”. I would agree that China has no interest in getting involved in Putin's idiot war in Ukraine though, and there's zero benefit to China in antagonizing Europe.

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I used to support Ukraine winning the war at any cost (them losing and that result being recognized implies that warmongering is acceptable). However, that war is now in its third year with no end in sight.

Our (the west's) response to warmongering has been to trickle just enough resources and monies to keep Ukraine from losing but not so much that they win. The "donated" resources of course need to be replenished, the military industrial complex is quite literally making a killing.

At this point the question of declaring a firm stand against warmongering is lost. It's three years and going, warmongering as it turns out is fine. I hate that. My tax dollars are going towards endlessly and needlessly extending human suffering for the benefit of the military industrial complex. I hate that.

So I say, enough of this bullshit. Unless we suddenly send in so much support that Ukraine decisively wins very quickly, I don't want to see a single cent more of my tax dollars going towards this. My taxes are not blood money and the military industrial complex can go fuck themselves.

I agree with what you have said here, but I don't know if the US is in a position to turn the war around in 2024 without a huge escalation. It remains to be seen if there is any possible way to do that without "boots on the ground" (formally starting WW III) or the use of nuclear weapons (again, formally starting WW III).

There were plenty of options to pressure Ukraine into preventing Russia from having a causus belli in early 2022 (too bad the Biden admin didn't do any of those), but those are gone now and Russia currently controls much of the territory they had as military objectives.

I will be absolutely flabbergasted if he manages that deal. I think Ukraine will have to give up significantly more than Crimea unfortunately:-/

This. The amount of downvoting on these comments is proof of the amount of influence propaganda can have on the population. A large number of people here appear to still be convinced that Trump and Russia are working together.

This line of reasoning keeps popping up and something about it bothers me - why go to war when you can get what you want in other, cheaper ways? It seems likely the correlation is real but so far no one has adduced any reasons to assume the causation actually goes the way they assume.

Whoever was POTUS played no role in the timing of 2014. Putin invaded Donbas in 2014 in response to a revolution in Ukraine that ousted the unpopular Russia-aligned Yanukovych. Not because Obama was POTUS or because Trump wasn't POTUS.

In his first administration he engaged directly with North Korea which has been widely regarded as a Chinese puppet state. The last thing China wants, in my opinion, is a united and free Korea.

He did impose tariffs on imports from China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93United_States_tr...

China–United States trade war

An economic conflict between China and the United States has been ongoing since January 2018, when U.S. President Donald Trump began setting tariffs and other trade barriers on China with the goal of forcing it to make changes to what the U.S. says are longstanding unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft.

Having AIS on is mandatory, but in practice a lot of ships turn it off regardless. From shadow oil fleets laundering sanctioned oil to fishermen, fake or disabled AIS systems are hardly an exception.

I don't think Russia is trying to hide their sabotage, though. Even with AIS disabled, there's no way European intelligence agencies didn't know what ships were floating above these cables at the time they went down.

This was a warning, not a secret operation.

Having AIS on is mandatory, and in many places taken quite seriously. Last night we sailed from Fuerteventura to Gran Canaria. There was a cargo ship with broken AIS in the area, and the VTS broadcasted their position over VHF every half hour (with DSC all ships alarms and everything)

Every recreational sailor knows that AIS is "mandatory." It's completely routine to see commercial ships running without it.

recent statistic : Global Fishing Watch’s study published in Science Advances on November 2, 2022, revealed that:

Over 55,000 suspected intentional disabling events of AIS signals were identified between 2017 and 2019, obscuring nearly 5 million hours of fishing vessel activity. This phenomenon accounts for up to 6% of global fishing vessel activity.