For anyone interested, there’s another part of the Starlink besides the satellites and your dish - ground stations (gateways) [].
These are the large clusters of antennas that communicate with the satellites and connect the Starlink network to the Internet on Earth. Looks like one of these was set on fire.
Note that this list is list of places where if you are enterprise starlink customer SpaceX can provide you with physical ethernet port to plug your cable into when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet. That is kind of obscure service that even land-based PLMN operators offer but usually do not document in this way in publicly available documentation.
From the perspective of network design, the fact that this certainly is not exhaustive list of places where SpaceX has physical DC presence and physical reality it comes that some of these datacenters are selected based on the fact that the ground station is somewhere nearby (I would be surprised if there is even just one place on the list where nearby means "on the roof", because there is a lot of technical, logistical and administrative reasons why you do not want to put such a thing at a roof of a datacenter).
None of the original 5 buildings at Telehouse in London have any dishes on the roof but the new Telehouse South a few hundred yards to the South seems to have some on the roof but they don't look like they are for a SpaceX groundstation.
SpaceX groundstations look a bit different, they are a bunch of white domes about 1-2m in diameter, usually 8 or 9 of clustered together.
It's handled by Arqiva here in the UK it seems, so no SpaceX branding on anything.
SpaceX also applied for two new grounds station sites in the UK, one a few miles West of Telehouse, south of Rainham. The other site is up in Harlow, Essex.
(I don't think any of this is secret, all of the info above can be found with some googling and scrolling in maps.)
> when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet
Isn't that skipping over the more sensible middle ground of a VPN, which is what is more common for at least small or medium sized business customers of mobile networks.
Huh… I always thought direct satellite connection was one of the things that distinguished starlink from cellular tech like 4g or 5g, and that low earth orbit was what made it possible… what actually makes starlink different?
Edit: oh I think? I understand now, these basically relay the internet itself up to the satellites - so your individual starlink dish is still talking directly to a satellite but the satellite resolves your request for a website through these ground stations. I think?
All satellite based internet access works the same way… (mostly)
1) you send a signal to the satellite
2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station
3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP
The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.
Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.
With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.
Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:
Customer - satellite - ground station - internet
The signal can go from:
customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.
This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.
Their phase one was you have a dish that goes to a satellite, but then that bounces straight back down to a ground station. Phase two was to have satellite-to-satellite comms, which they're doing with lasers. I imagine either some satellites can't do this yet, so ground stations are still needed, or they are using the ground stations for something else.
the real difference is cash. they can afford literally hundred launches costing billions upfront and hundreds of millions in upkeep.
the original concept arts called for lazer beam sat2sat dynamic mesh relaying packets globally. that didn't quite happen.
what did happen was sats and terminals refreshed like tech products and not like military tanks. decades old standards are slow. all their competitors usd decades old everything.
their launch count is off by two digits. like 10x by reuse and stacked 10x by cash. that amount of cash appearing from somewhere is the difference.
I believe many of these sites do not belong to Space X but are rented by companies offering such services. So they uplink for other companies as well and deal with regulatory stuff etc.
How would you know you live close enough to one for a physical link with it otherwise? I guess they could put "General 10km area here" but would still be kind of bad for people living on the opposite end of the "general area".
It feels like it’s very, very risky territory for these activities to be “occurring” in a NATO country. I’m sure everyone else is thinking the same thing, but at what point does Article 5 get invoked?
Nobody actually wants to invoke Article 5. The European countries talk a lot, but they don't actually want to do anything serious.
Macron famously said that he would "have to send troops to Odesa" and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine and Russia has captured even more territory and is now actively bombarding Kyiv.
The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.
This isn’t new though, and Russia has conveniently provided the west with exactly the avenue to respond. Just further increase support to Ukraine, and make it clear that further sabotage and really anything unfortunate that happens will result in even greater support.
In fact, Russia should be investing heavily in ensuring that nobody else goes asymmetric against NATO countries.
Article 5 doesn't mean what most people think it means... it's literally "we might help, somehow, somewhen, if we feel like it, in whatever way we want, maybe, maybe just by publishing an official warning to not do it again 'or else'"
> This assistance may or may not involve the use of armed force, and can include any action that Allies deem necessary to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Let's cut to the chase here: the root problem is now a critical mass of the population simply won't believe the government blame for virtually any incident since false flags are now such a widely recognized concept.
My understanding is that increasingly “adversaries” who may or may not be Russia simply pay local gangs/thugs/idiots to do it. If you don’t appreciate the risk of being caught, I’d imagine these things are not that hard to pull off. While risk is low for the country of origin.
> My understanding is that increasingly “adversaries” who may or may not be Russia simply pay local gangs/thugs/idiots to do it.
Yes, and the playbook extends to some anti-war orgs throughout Europe who play the role of useful idiots by advocating things such as a) pressure your government to stop supporting Ukraine, b) force Ukraine to capitulate and agree to Russia's demands. They do so under the guise of "no to war, yes to peaceful negotiation" but the way they neglect Ukraine's best interests and push Russia's maximalist agenda is pretty telling.
Aside from the question "will Art. 5 be triggered" there is the question "what happens if it is triggered?"
The article only states that an attack on one is an attack on all. Further reactions aren't spelled out. It can go from "yeah, we recognize it, have a nice day" to "let's send nukes" That ambiguity has some value as the idea was that it discourages any offensives as reactions were unpredictable.
But Russia is testing the limits. They did it in Ukraine, where there were some "green men" strolling arouns in eastern Ukraine, which then lead to occupation of Crimea which all didn't lead to much of a reaction, so they escalated further till full scale invasion.
In parallel we see those things in NATO/EU territories. One could start at murdering Georgians in Berlin's Tiergarten park, planes accidentally entering Polish air space, drones near airports or military facilities ... always testing the reaction. Mostly actions which don't warrant forceful reactions, while testing how quickly the escalation spiral is turning.
First, these things intentionally fall short of clear "armed attacks" and are designed around plausible deniability.
Second, Europe/NATO are not looking for a fight. Russia is in a bad spot right now, but NATO is not in a great spot for a kinetic conflict with Russia either.
Lastly, I don't think NATO countries are eager to test America's willingness to defend Europe under the Trump administration because they already know the likely answer when they call for help.
It would be interesting to see graphs of how similarly "unprovable" sabotage actions have developed in Russia over the past few years. I doubt we'd ever see accurate reporting out of Russia, but it seems like an obvious thing to do for both Ukrainian intelligence and also for the wider West. It's also be likely to be underreported on because neither the perpetrator nor the victim gains all that much from reporting these kind of things.
what exactly do you think is going to happen if article 5 gets invoked? did America's current Special Military Operation not make it clear that missiles alone don't win wars, and that there's fuck all you can do when the other side yeets their missiles at you in return?
also, a friendly reminder that all willing parties are free to go fight Russia right now. https://ildu.mil.gov.ua/
It will lead to a gradual escalation, probably air spaces closed over Kaliningrad, Belarus and Ukraine for Russian planes and army mobilization towards the eastern flank of NATO in the first steps.
Sufficient assistance can be given to the Ukrainians without deploying troops to the battlefield so that the Russians are pushed out completely. Losing Crimea would be Putin's death knell.
In terms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberger_Doctrine if article 5 was invoked, one could set much clearer victory conditions - chase Russia back into Russia. Maybe arrest Putin war crimes or something.
It would still be extremely unpleasant, painful and expensive, of course; winning an exchange of blows still means taking a load of punches to the face. So the true winner would be China.
>did America's current Special Military Operation not make it clear that missiles alone don't win wars, and that there's fuck all you can do when the other side yeets their missiles at you in return?
Neither Putin nor his associates are religious fanatics happy to die for their cause, they're just money-loving strongmen. If faced with real danger they'd much rather do whatever they could to avoid dying, not risk being martyred.
It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
What we have been seeing is this gradual escalation. It's like boiling a frog slowly. Each escalation is too small to trigger a significant response, but after a while you suddenly notice that your country is burning.
I expect more of this in the near future. I wish the world stopped treating Russia as "just another business partner".
I am pretty sure every bigger German company has active sales team waiting for the end of the sanctions to fly on the same day to Moscow and continue/start new business. Construction materials, cars&trucks, oil refinery equipment, new deeper bunkers… everything is needed in russia. The west doesn’t see an enemy. Enemy of freedom, free speech and free thinking. Freedom to be a gay or autistic person in public. Euros and dollars matter though.
Ukraine is currently striking facilities deep inside Russia.
Russia could hit back in the same way easily, and to some degree they do. But their problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia - until they got that in May 2024, Ukraine understandably did not risk alienating their suppliers by doing that.
There aren't very many new lines of escalation crossed here. Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now - many hawks in the west haven't been shy about describing it as such either.
I'm very curious about the downvoting here, which looks suspicious. I do realize that what I wrote might not be popular with a certain country (and its online trolling teams), but it is factually correct.
It's interesting which acts end up on HN. Recently there was an arson attack in Munich against a defense company [1]. I wonder if anyone keeps track of more and their resolution/convictions?
There is no winning or losing in 21st century hybrid war between to states. THere is no natural offramp and the capitulating blows are stayed to the point that it doesn't "escalate".
In that light, it's not many leaps and bounds to assume that of the two, Russia is certainly "suffering" more in the grand scheme when viewed from the perspective of sunk cost fallacy. Their goal was to blitz the country in one month. 4 years later, Half a million confirmed dead, no western support, endless sanctions directly affecting the working class. That working class has been in a war economy against a foe who's GDP (nominally, no outside help considered) is 12 times smaller than it.
Naturally this is not ideal, and on the other side, Ukraine has suffered massive territory and personell loss. But having the world "behind" you and not needing to support a gargantuan economy/civil base allows them to always "spring back" more. Esp with western assistance, and especially if there is still territory to defend.
of course, all of this is moot if Russia ends up controlling ukraine. But at current pace, it will take roughly 10 million dead and 20 more years (minimum) of this form of warfare for ukraine to "fall". THat seems like losing.
Unless they do a general mobilization, they've already lost. They can hit Ukraine with missiles, but they're losing territory and their rate of attrition is extreme. If they do a general mobilization they might beat Ukraine, but that will likely result in a full political collapse.
Where are the goalposts for "losing"? Is "not winning" considered the same? Because the "three day to Kiev special military operation" has turned into a 5 year war with very little progress made in terms of conquering Ukraine.
Supplying Starlink to Ukraine but not Russia is near the limit of what Musk can do, other than big cash donations. He could expand the geofence of Ukrainian drone Starlinks to include Russian territory, but that risks kinetic reprisals.
For anyone interested, there’s another part of the Starlink besides the satellites and your dish - ground stations (gateways) [].
These are the large clusters of antennas that communicate with the satellites and connect the Starlink network to the Internet on Earth. Looks like one of these was set on fire.
https://starlink.com/support/article/45d1d256-171e-0f67-4895...
Note that this list is list of places where if you are enterprise starlink customer SpaceX can provide you with physical ethernet port to plug your cable into when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet. That is kind of obscure service that even land-based PLMN operators offer but usually do not document in this way in publicly available documentation.
From the perspective of network design, the fact that this certainly is not exhaustive list of places where SpaceX has physical DC presence and physical reality it comes that some of these datacenters are selected based on the fact that the ground station is somewhere nearby (I would be surprised if there is even just one place on the list where nearby means "on the roof", because there is a lot of technical, logistical and administrative reasons why you do not want to put such a thing at a roof of a datacenter).
None of the original 5 buildings at Telehouse in London have any dishes on the roof but the new Telehouse South a few hundred yards to the South seems to have some on the roof but they don't look like they are for a SpaceX groundstation.
SpaceX groundstations look a bit different, they are a bunch of white domes about 1-2m in diameter, usually 8 or 9 of clustered together.
Here's an example in the UK: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Zy61dfdyp5xrq4w1A
It's handled by Arqiva here in the UK it seems, so no SpaceX branding on anything.
SpaceX also applied for two new grounds station sites in the UK, one a few miles West of Telehouse, south of Rainham. The other site is up in Harlow, Essex.
(I don't think any of this is secret, all of the info above can be found with some googling and scrolling in maps.)
> when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet
Isn't that skipping over the more sensible middle ground of a VPN, which is what is more common for at least small or medium sized business customers of mobile networks.
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Huh… I always thought direct satellite connection was one of the things that distinguished starlink from cellular tech like 4g or 5g, and that low earth orbit was what made it possible… what actually makes starlink different?
Edit: oh I think? I understand now, these basically relay the internet itself up to the satellites - so your individual starlink dish is still talking directly to a satellite but the satellite resolves your request for a website through these ground stations. I think?
All satellite based internet access works the same way… (mostly)
1) you send a signal to the satellite
2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station
3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP
The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.
Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.
With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.
Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:
Customer - satellite - ground station - internet
The signal can go from:
customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.
This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.
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But the servers are not in space (yet), so the signal needs to come back down somewhere.
It is. But at some point traffic had to hit the ground to connect to other parts of the internet. That happens at these ground stations.
Their phase one was you have a dish that goes to a satellite, but then that bounces straight back down to a ground station. Phase two was to have satellite-to-satellite comms, which they're doing with lasers. I imagine either some satellites can't do this yet, so ground stations are still needed, or they are using the ground stations for something else.
the real difference is cash. they can afford literally hundred launches costing billions upfront and hundreds of millions in upkeep.
the original concept arts called for lazer beam sat2sat dynamic mesh relaying packets globally. that didn't quite happen.
what did happen was sats and terminals refreshed like tech products and not like military tanks. decades old standards are slow. all their competitors usd decades old everything.
their launch count is off by two digits. like 10x by reuse and stacked 10x by cash. that amount of cash appearing from somewhere is the difference.
Are they required to have precise locations listed?
I believe many of these sites do not belong to Space X but are rented by companies offering such services. So they uplink for other companies as well and deal with regulatory stuff etc.
In many jurisdictions, you need a license to operate a teleport, and the applications are public and require a precise location.
There's a lot of RF emissions right there.
these seem to be just operator hq locations, not necessarily the station street addresses. but yeah, the locations would be public information.
How would you know you live close enough to one for a physical link with it otherwise? I guess they could put "General 10km area here" but would still be kind of bad for people living on the opposite end of the "general area".
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It feels like it’s very, very risky territory for these activities to be “occurring” in a NATO country. I’m sure everyone else is thinking the same thing, but at what point does Article 5 get invoked?
Undermining article 5 is the goal, so NATO needs to figure out how to invoke it gradually.
One thought is to pretend to not know that it's Russia, and invoke it against an "unidentified adversary".
Nobody actually wants to invoke Article 5. The European countries talk a lot, but they don't actually want to do anything serious.
Macron famously said that he would "have to send troops to Odesa" and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine and Russia has captured even more territory and is now actively bombarding Kyiv.
The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.
1 reply →
This isn’t new though, and Russia has conveniently provided the west with exactly the avenue to respond. Just further increase support to Ukraine, and make it clear that further sabotage and really anything unfortunate that happens will result in even greater support.
In fact, Russia should be investing heavily in ensuring that nobody else goes asymmetric against NATO countries.
> but at what point does Article 5 get invoked
Article 5 doesn't mean what most people think it means... it's literally "we might help, somehow, somewhen, if we feel like it, in whatever way we want, maybe, maybe just by publishing an official warning to not do it again 'or else'"
> This assistance may or may not involve the use of armed force, and can include any action that Allies deem necessary to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Let's cut to the chase here: the root problem is now a critical mass of the population simply won't believe the government blame for virtually any incident since false flags are now such a widely recognized concept.
The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.
Induction has always been a poor way of thinking
What?
5 replies →
> The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.
If you know something the world doesn't know, you'd better get cracking at updating the Wikipedia article documenting the issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
My understanding is that increasingly “adversaries” who may or may not be Russia simply pay local gangs/thugs/idiots to do it. If you don’t appreciate the risk of being caught, I’d imagine these things are not that hard to pull off. While risk is low for the country of origin.
> My understanding is that increasingly “adversaries” who may or may not be Russia simply pay local gangs/thugs/idiots to do it.
Yes, and the playbook extends to some anti-war orgs throughout Europe who play the role of useful idiots by advocating things such as a) pressure your government to stop supporting Ukraine, b) force Ukraine to capitulate and agree to Russia's demands. They do so under the guise of "no to war, yes to peaceful negotiation" but the way they neglect Ukraine's best interests and push Russia's maximalist agenda is pretty telling.
4 replies →
Aside from the question "will Art. 5 be triggered" there is the question "what happens if it is triggered?"
The article only states that an attack on one is an attack on all. Further reactions aren't spelled out. It can go from "yeah, we recognize it, have a nice day" to "let's send nukes" That ambiguity has some value as the idea was that it discourages any offensives as reactions were unpredictable.
But Russia is testing the limits. They did it in Ukraine, where there were some "green men" strolling arouns in eastern Ukraine, which then lead to occupation of Crimea which all didn't lead to much of a reaction, so they escalated further till full scale invasion.
In parallel we see those things in NATO/EU territories. One could start at murdering Georgians in Berlin's Tiergarten park, planes accidentally entering Polish air space, drones near airports or military facilities ... always testing the reaction. Mostly actions which don't warrant forceful reactions, while testing how quickly the escalation spiral is turning.
Article 4 (formal consultation) is far more likely, and using that as a way of doing an "article 5 light" after consultation as a warning shot.
> ...but at what point does Article 5 get invoked
Probably not as likely as you think.
First, these things intentionally fall short of clear "armed attacks" and are designed around plausible deniability.
Second, Europe/NATO are not looking for a fight. Russia is in a bad spot right now, but NATO is not in a great spot for a kinetic conflict with Russia either.
Lastly, I don't think NATO countries are eager to test America's willingness to defend Europe under the Trump administration because they already know the likely answer when they call for help.
The last one is the strongest one. Our prior allies know they just can't count on us at all, when it comes to Russia, especially.
It is a sad state of affairs.
3 replies →
That’s exactly the issue. If Putin provokes a measured reaction it’s a win, if NATO does nothing it’s also a win
The defender is fundamentally at a disadvantage with all or nothing clauses like article 5
Every hybrid attack will increase spending towards Ukraine.
1 reply →
Europe could respond without invoking article 5 though, so it's not really "all or nothing".
That's why USA is bombing Iran without everyone else bombing Iran. Article 5 hasn't been invoked.
Unlikely given that disposable cutout agents or useful idiots are used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare or hybrid warfare is designed to avoid full military action. But the tit for tat escalation in kind can lead to real war.
It would be interesting to see graphs of how similarly "unprovable" sabotage actions have developed in Russia over the past few years. I doubt we'd ever see accurate reporting out of Russia, but it seems like an obvious thing to do for both Ukrainian intelligence and also for the wider West. It's also be likely to be underreported on because neither the perpetrator nor the victim gains all that much from reporting these kind of things.
5 replies →
Sounds very like what happened in London a couple of years back:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04g5x1wq5vo
Trump considers the EU to be his enemy and Putin is a master of salami tactics [1] so the answer is ”Probably never”
[1] https://youtu.be/yg-UqIIvang
Is it? I think the comical Euro response to the Nordstream sabotage showed what a joke the continent is.
We're nowhere near it. Article 5 is armed conflict between nuclear armed nations.
No one wants to go near that because everyone will reliably die.
There is absolutely no reason why triggering article 5 will end with nuclear annihilation, MAD doctrine remains in effect.
1 reply →
what exactly do you think is going to happen if article 5 gets invoked? did America's current Special Military Operation not make it clear that missiles alone don't win wars, and that there's fuck all you can do when the other side yeets their missiles at you in return?
also, a friendly reminder that all willing parties are free to go fight Russia right now. https://ildu.mil.gov.ua/
It will lead to a gradual escalation, probably air spaces closed over Kaliningrad, Belarus and Ukraine for Russian planes and army mobilization towards the eastern flank of NATO in the first steps.
Sufficient assistance can be given to the Ukrainians without deploying troops to the battlefield so that the Russians are pushed out completely. Losing Crimea would be Putin's death knell.
Maybe like destruction of Russian military command structure sparing just the silo based nuclear force?
NATO does not need to win a war. They just need to hurt Russia bad enough Ukraine wins.
Invoking Article 5 and winning a war are entirely separate operations.
In terms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberger_Doctrine if article 5 was invoked, one could set much clearer victory conditions - chase Russia back into Russia. Maybe arrest Putin war crimes or something.
It would still be extremely unpleasant, painful and expensive, of course; winning an exchange of blows still means taking a load of punches to the face. So the true winner would be China.
>did America's current Special Military Operation not make it clear that missiles alone don't win wars, and that there's fuck all you can do when the other side yeets their missiles at you in return?
Neither Putin nor his associates are religious fanatics happy to die for their cause, they're just money-loving strongmen. If faced with real danger they'd much rather do whatever they could to avoid dying, not risk being martyred.
1 reply →
It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
What we have been seeing is this gradual escalation. It's like boiling a frog slowly. Each escalation is too small to trigger a significant response, but after a while you suddenly notice that your country is burning.
I expect more of this in the near future. I wish the world stopped treating Russia as "just another business partner".
I am pretty sure every bigger German company has active sales team waiting for the end of the sanctions to fly on the same day to Moscow and continue/start new business. Construction materials, cars&trucks, oil refinery equipment, new deeper bunkers… everything is needed in russia. The west doesn’t see an enemy. Enemy of freedom, free speech and free thinking. Freedom to be a gay or autistic person in public. Euros and dollars matter though.
4 replies →
Ukraine is currently striking facilities deep inside Russia.
Russia could hit back in the same way easily, and to some degree they do. But their problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia - until they got that in May 2024, Ukraine understandably did not risk alienating their suppliers by doing that.
There aren't very many new lines of escalation crossed here. Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now - many hawks in the west haven't been shy about describing it as such either.
19 replies →
I'm very curious about the downvoting here, which looks suspicious. I do realize that what I wrote might not be popular with a certain country (and its online trolling teams), but it is factually correct.
After the 9/11 attacks, NATO did invoke Article 5 for the first and only time in its history.
When Israel starts bombing Turkey with US made weapons, NATO may invoke Article 5 again but I doubt the US will do anything.
Effectively this is an attack on an American company’s infrastructure?
It's interesting which acts end up on HN. Recently there was an arson attack in Munich against a defense company [1]. I wonder if anyone keeps track of more and their resolution/convictions?
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/lka-brandanschlag-muenchen-...
This is happening just at the same time when Russia actively targets data centers in Kyiv 2 days in a row.
https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-attacks-disrupt-intern...
The incident rate should rise drastically the more russia gets closer to loosing. https://acleddata.com/report/testing-waters-suspected-russia...
I must say a web/world without them and the quatari /iranian influence operations would be pleasant.
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There is no winning or losing in 21st century hybrid war between to states. THere is no natural offramp and the capitulating blows are stayed to the point that it doesn't "escalate".
In that light, it's not many leaps and bounds to assume that of the two, Russia is certainly "suffering" more in the grand scheme when viewed from the perspective of sunk cost fallacy. Their goal was to blitz the country in one month. 4 years later, Half a million confirmed dead, no western support, endless sanctions directly affecting the working class. That working class has been in a war economy against a foe who's GDP (nominally, no outside help considered) is 12 times smaller than it.
Naturally this is not ideal, and on the other side, Ukraine has suffered massive territory and personell loss. But having the world "behind" you and not needing to support a gargantuan economy/civil base allows them to always "spring back" more. Esp with western assistance, and especially if there is still territory to defend.
of course, all of this is moot if Russia ends up controlling ukraine. But at current pace, it will take roughly 10 million dead and 20 more years (minimum) of this form of warfare for ukraine to "fall". THat seems like losing.
Unless they do a general mobilization, they've already lost. They can hit Ukraine with missiles, but they're losing territory and their rate of attrition is extreme. If they do a general mobilization they might beat Ukraine, but that will likely result in a full political collapse.
Where are the goalposts for "losing"? Is "not winning" considered the same? Because the "three day to Kiev special military operation" has turned into a 5 year war with very little progress made in terms of conquering Ukraine.
Running out of men and material.
When they have to conscript in Moscow Putin will be in trouble.
Cui bono?
Semper est Russia.
Putin could be making a huge mistake here by alienating a largely benevolent Musk.
Supplying Starlink to Ukraine but not Russia is near the limit of what Musk can do, other than big cash donations. He could expand the geofence of Ukrainian drone Starlinks to include Russian territory, but that risks kinetic reprisals.
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That's bit rich even for sarcasm.