Comment by somenameforme
1 day ago
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).
Here's the article in Germany about the incident: https://www.rtl.de/news/russische-spionage-rtl-reporter-unde...
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.
> I'm saying they're likely false because they make about as much sense as a country blowing up its own pipeline
That is still bizarre to me, how it was the media mainstream.
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.