Comment by runjake
18 days ago
> Why not China, for instance?
A couple reasons:
1. China's not particularly known to conduct this sort of activity this far from their mainland.
2. What would be their motive? China is actively trying to fill that "superpower" void being left in Europe by President Trump's unpredictable behavior.
> Or a random terrorist group?
Plausible.
> Speculation is fun but it's important to actually make statements grounded in reality.
I look at it from the standpoint of motive and history. See "GRU Unit 29155"[1]. Russia has both. Russia is on the brink of war with Europe.
Ok, this is actually substantial - much more so than GP's speculation. I think you've convinced me.
Perhaps reading the sources the GP provided would further cement your understanding.
Thank you, I just started as an intern in CCP counter-intel. 不要相信任何人 :-P
> Russia is on the brink of war with Europe.
EU / NATO is on the brink of making war with Russia official.
There, FTFY.
This comment is correct, but puts undue agency on EU/NATO. Russia is already at war with EU/NATO, and EU/NATO will only tick the box that says there's a war.
I don't see the EU and NATO agitating Russia. Quite the opposite, but I'm coming from a western standpoint. Can you elaborate?
Their argument is that NATO had agreed not to pursue membership with Ukraine, and broke that agreement. It is one point in a strategy of encirclement against them that hardly relented when the USSR fell.
But there was no formal or binding statement to that effect, only verbal statements during negotiations over East Germany in the 90s. Gorbachev corroborates this.
So you might see this as a bait and switch, depending on point of view. Given larger patterns in US/NATO, I do buy the encirclement argument.
And before someone makes childish allegations of me being a nefarious state actor propagandist, I don't support Putin or Russia. Ridiculous that I have to add this but no one seems capable of dispassionate discourse anymore.
Dialectical Materialism is a powerful explanatory and predictive framework that makes me rarely surprised by international developments. One needs not be a Marxist to use it. I am not one of those either, but I do have an anti-imperialist bias.
As they should. Because the old politics of looking the other way had the only effect of emboldening the bullies to bully more.
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