Comment by brookst
1 day ago
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?
Indeed, maybe it depends on the country.
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.
The Russians have learned from the best.
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.
> Middle America
I thought I loved Red Dawn, I rewatched it recently, it's really stupid.