There were four sabotage teams. One team, on the line to Marseilles, was surprised by rail maintenance workers and ran away, but left some equipment, and possibly vehicles, behind.[1]
It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system. Something similar happened in Germany 2 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...). I assume that it's a kind of warning by Russia or some other country. They don't even need weapons to attack countries that rely on public transport. If they'd systematically attack the railway system for a longer time, they could probably disable it for many months or even years.
We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
I don't think it's this simple: someone could do significant damage to the US's economy by sabotaging a small number of bridges that transit or cross I-95. Meanwhile, Ukraine appears to be operating military railways with relative success, given that it's currently engaged in the largest European land war in 80 years.
And let's not forget the premise is all wrong as well.
It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system
The attack on SNCF was not "easy". This was a methodical, large scale, coordinated attack. They knew what to take down. How to take it down with least collateral damage. And when each should be taken down. (Order likely counts here. You're trying to plug up tracks.) Point being, these attacks are not "easy". In a place with as much unrest and discontent as France has bubbling beneath the surface, the trains would go down twice weekly, every week, if it was "easy" to do so.
A similar methodical, large scale, coordinated attack on our bridges would shut the system down as well. I won't even mention some other infrastructural assets that, if targeted, easily will shut us down for months because I think they are just that soft as targets. I honestly believe it would be irresponsible to even put the idea out into the ether.
The takeaway here is that if you're dealing with large organizations, with even a modest amount of resources, and a grievance, you're likely dealing with orgs that have a lot of young people they can send to successfully carry out such attacks. Thankfully, these attacks still require a level of technical knowledge that seems to elude such groups. So it's just matter of keeping that information as secure as possible on the one hand. While working towards security and resilience of those assets on the other.
I'd say that it's "easy" with regard of the resources on the spot. No hundreds of brain-washed fanatics. No tons of explosives. No extensive concealed digging or something similar. No desperate suicide attacks or hot chases or anything else highly visible. Apparently no bucketloads of cash.
It looks more like an elaborately prepared barbecue party: careful planning, getting all the details figured out ahead of time, coordination and, well, relatively calm execution.
You are seriously understimating how easy it is to burn an electrical substation. It is actually a frequent occurrence in France (as seen on TV these days..) and everywhere else. Almost as frequent as copper thefts. Close to where I live they famously left a silicon foundry powerless for a day (with the consequent astronomical bill to restart it) by setting fire to one specific bridge.
The only novel thing here is coordination, but it doesn't seem like a huge stretch of the imagination to target the 4th most frequent high speed rail crossroads, which is exactly what they did.
I think it’s easy in the sense that it was only a single day attack of probably not more than a few people. What would happen if 50 foreign agents would do this every day over the course of months or years?
This required a lot more than 50. There was a lot of planning and execution on this.
Maybe foreign agents could do it with 50? If they were supported by satellites and other tools to which these attackers likely did not have access. But foreign agents are operating in relatively large teams even for simple missions. I don't think with this level of coordination, and this number of targets, spread over this large a geographic area, any intelligence agency is going to send one guy/gal per target. It only works like that in Bourne and 007 movies.
Um, sabotaging any city's water tunnels would make the city uninhabitable for years.
Most frightening experience I ever had as engineer in my life:
I was intern. At a place in a midwestern city where a city's water infrastructure can be monitored. Long story short, I heard "PING". Then three more "PING"s. Then another "PING". Then 2 more. Even as an idiot intern, I knew what the implications were with respect to tensioned concrete. I was thinking in my head, "8 feet diameter. 96 inches." But I couldn't remember the PSI because I probably had already soiled myself. Thankfully there was a grey beard there who coolly looked over at me and said, "Probably want to start shutting that down son."
2 things I learned. Calm is contagious. And our infrastructure is way more frail than should be the case.
But NYC has a rather high level of vulnerability with a small number of choke points (there are currently only two water tunnels for the entire NYC metro area), but yes, the water infrastructure for a lot of major cities could be disrupted disturbingly easily.
> there are currently only two water tunnels for the entire NYC metro area
How are you counting this? If you mean Hudson River crossings between NJ and Manhattan, there are five: two road tunnel groups (Holland and Lincoln) and three rail grops (Upper/Lower Hudson and North River). When Gateway is complete (2030s), there will be four rail groups.
But if you mean the entire NYC metro area, there are significantly more: Manhattan <-> Brooklyn alone has the Hugh L. Carey for road traffic, and then six active subway tunnel groups. Manhattan <-> Queens has a similar number.
Thanks, I misread that. Although technically there are three operational water tunnels for NYC :-) — tunnel #3 is operational despite being under construction.
You could bring the entirely of NYC to a standstill by simply abandoning a large bus or truck in a single artery of manhattan or one of the bridges. Literally just drive into a tunnel, then get out and walk off. The amount of chaos this would cause would take ages to get any towing services in to clear it.
While many bridges and tunnels have tow trucks and operators stationed at both ends for normal vehicles, they probably do not have heavy-duty towing available quickly. These specialized trucks can tow other semi-tractor-trailers, dump trucks (both garbage and material haul trucks), etc.
Extra points for putting the large bus or truck on it's side, requiring a crane or much more work to get it on its wheels.
And you don't have to walk off, you can unload your electric scooter and zip away to start your new life as a fugitive.
It doesn't take ages, they have dedicated teams for this as it happens pretty frequently in the lincoln tunnel that buses and trucks break down. There's a weird little specialized towtruck they have that can remove vehicles quickly and cameras are everywhere. Some details on it: https://www.nj.com/traffic/2018/08/how_do_they_unclog_the_li...
That’s a nuisance but not economically threatening. Disabling railway permanently is a serious threat. Especially in countries dependent on railways for logistics.
A stopped vehicle is a few minutes to tow clear. But add fire.... At least twice in recent times, a gasoline tank truck crash has destroyed a bridge that took weeks to replace.
If you ever want to turn your hair grey prematurely consider an attacker that infiltrates Tesla's Full Self Driving development and adds a "crash into the nearest X at maximum acceleration" hidden subroutine that can be triggered via an over-the-air signal. Millions of Teslas suddenly deciding to point at the nearest power pole or transformer and flooring the accelerator in the hopes of crashing hard enough to start a battery fire.
A mere decade ago this was pure science fiction, but over the past few years it has become a possibility.
This has been a concern for well over a decade, and self driving cars only changes it a little bit. You can google "remote car hacking 2010" or earlier to find great examples and reports of this going back pretty far. It's been awhile since this was science fiction.
Basically every modern car can have software that says "slam the gas pedal as far as possible". Combine that with cars that are heavily integrated into their infotainment system or even include built in wifi and you've got the "over the air signal" covered.
Telling the car to aim and steer at a specific type of object is something that has only recently become possible. Computer vision has come a long way in the past few years, especially computer vision built into automobiles.
I also believe that drive by wire systems are going to become even more commonplace in the future and eliminate the possibility of a driver attempting to muscle the car back into control.
The attacker just needs to make appropriate modifications to some open source library or framework that Tesla FSD software uses. Of course, these modifications would be made by people who have been contributing to the project for many years and have built up impeccable reputations for writing safe, reliable and secure code.
We have no way of knowing whether sun h an implant already exists, wait inf to be turned on at the moment of maximum damage. Luckily I have no hair to turn gray.
Having a railroad functional enough for military purposes is easy enough: get the rails hooked up. Put soldiers at switches to flip them, use radio for coordination. For high speed high frequency passenger travel it's more complicated: you need automation flipping switches at the right times, automatic block signaling to ensure that trains are where they're supposed to be and won't crash into each other, etc.
That's why they were able to get some of the trains back to operation: they can't run them as close together as before, but can still use the tracks.
This is a bit ironic given the fact that Russia makes a conscious choice to rely on railways for military logistics. Why? Because they are more resilient and easier to repair than roads - Russia has railroad engineering units in their military and can repair just about anything you could do to a railroad in a couple of hours, and in fact they do as Ukrainian partisans (rightly) go after railways.
Meanwhile if someone throws spike strips on a busy highway/tunnel/bridge between two chokepoints, you're effectively screwed. If this is done in a concerted manner it will probably take at least a day to fix.
If you have more resources (say a state actor attacking a nation that isn't on a wartime footing), you can also exploit the fact that asphalt is a petroleum fraction and therefore soluble : spill a lot of diesel or hydraulic oil, for example (and optionally set it on fire) and you will unrecoverably ruin that section of asphalt, which could take weeks to fix: this is why gas stations are paved with concrete.
So while it's not as easy to do this as it is to derail a train or screw around a signaling system, it's far more difficult to repair professional roadway sabotage than railway sabotage, and in the end the railways are probably more resilient.
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Now that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has occurred, and cheap armed quad-copters are a publicly known thing, I can say this openly:
Are you kidding me? Because we are still petro-centric, we are extremely fragile. For example, the West Coast has a handful of oil refineries. To shut down the West Coast's road traffic it would take one guy, and less than $10,000 in equipment. This could all be accomplished in 3 days, and there are no deployed defenses for this attack vector.
I have been trying to argue that the transition to EVs is a natsec issue for 10+ years. However, I am just some forum schmuck, and it has not been going well. Any help with moving this thinking up the chain would be greaty appreciated.
A possible analogy: The Internet was designed to be a multi-path, decentralized, and distributed communications system to withstand attack. That's what EVs are for transportation.
Meanwhile, FERC found that knocking out just nine strategically located substations, of 55,000 at the time they did the assessment in 2014, would plunge our country into darkness.
There is no way that I can be off-grid with oil. Meanwhile, 6 months after the apocalypse all oil products have degraded, and my solar panels and LiFePo batteries still have years left.
Also, post-attack, there is a huge difference in supply chain lag between setting up some solar panels vs a refinery.
Ha; no. In such a situation, you'll be lucky to be alive and not have succumbed to the $5 wrench attack. Those solar panels will be a bright red target; and in such a scenario, the police aren't driving to save you.
If we lose 1/3 of our refineries, we lose about ~1/3 of our gasoline. The prices shoot up to ludicrous highs, but it's still there. We might have to make an expensive deal with Saudi Arabia to fill the void, but at least that's an option.
If we lose, according to FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission)... nine... of our 55,000 substations; the entire nation could lose power in almost all areas. Maybe our situation has improved since 2014, I definitely hope so, but think about this:
33% causing ~33% damage, or 0.016% causing ~90% damage. Which one is preferable?
Here's a genius idea if you're Russia. Maybe things have improved and are 10x better. In that case, knocking out 0.16% of our substations, 90 in total, in strategic locations should do the trick. Combine that with rail sabotage so the parts to fix them don't arrive, and then you've done it. Just smuggle about 500 soldiers among the 2.2 million illegal border crossings every year, and that'd be enough to assign a team of 5 to each task.
That'd make a great movie. Race against time to stop the Russian terrorists blowing up the substations, having to figure out what ones they're going for. I'd like it to come down to the last second, and then they actually manage to blow them all, and themselves, up, and then an engineer voice over explains that in 2018 they partially upgraded the system to account for transmission shifts due to renewables and they had enough redundancy near the three most important substations that reduced local blackouts to 4 hours.
What I didn't include in my original argument is distributed, off-grid capture of electrons. I would still argue that a national security priority should be increasing the share of EVs and distributed PV generation. If every person, and Amazon distribution center for example, could go off-grid and continue at least partial capacity.. that would be a good thing, wouldn't it?
A "microgrid," as you are describing, could be fantastic as long as businesses or individuals aren't unreasonably constrained by their microgrid's production capability (or misguided attempts to restrict capacity in the name of climate change / equity / misguided policy here). But in theory, if all power was locally sourced and physically separate, the resiliency would be incredible.
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Cars with so much electronics on board are just vulnerable as the worst cellphone out there; always connected may seem a cool buzzword, but in reality means always ready to be exploited.
The reason they're not commonly exploited is that usually who is motivated to do that would rather look for bigger targets that give back more media coverage or potential ransom money.
Well Bob, they bought them anyway, did they not? And thus made that market a success.
Edit: myself, I have seen an overwhelming majority of users that just shrug. (Plus, a number of shocked users that could not believe the situation when told - but that does not mean they will not conform when pressed by the lack of options.)
Now: there are documented proofs of people in pornographic delight handling cars through smartphones; the facts are reachable of gadgets in contemporary premium cars that would be refused by a seventies' pimp; there are definite anecdotes of large amounts people not having the slightest idea of the security and privacy faults of contemporary cars (etc.).
To discuss how «hopeless» a population is we should probably assess and throw numbers in: "uninformed | unaware | drooling | flabbergasted, etc.". Even if the number of the «cool buzzword» enthusiasts were smaller than thought by some, the elements are there for concern and societal action.
I mean market choice was totally taken away almost immediately. You basically need to buy a used car to be totally taken away from touchscreen world.
It's similar to how consumer-grade dumb TVs do not really exist. And most consumers are not about to start a low-margin, multi-million dollar capex business and start building their own cars and tvs.
> start a low-margin, multi-million dollar capex business and start building their own cars and tvs
(Sorry, I missed that part.)
That is what we need. That is not something «most consumers are not about to start»: it should be a drive to have a few serving the rest.
An easier and (on an important side, fail-safe resilience aside) better solution would be a society that would not have let the situation happen in the first place.
Yes Bob. I also continually monitor that market. Europe here: the powers-that-be are restricting the use of old cars, and the new ones are unacceptable - as law and makers mandate. The scissor of usability is closing the gap between the blades. But that is the situation.
But this would not have happened if, wallets being holders of votes, people told the powers-that-be and the car makers to **** off.
We could make our railway more resilient to such attacks, but in general why bother ? It is probably cheaper to pay the cost whenever the disruption happens.
At least in times of peace.
There are two issues here though. The first is that the Olympics is a special event and it is more likely for somebody to try to cause the disruptions, and as such more control is probably warranted.
The second is that somebody else (Russia) is not acting like they are at peace with us so we should act accordingly
The railways get hit fairly often in Russia and nearby but while they are easy to knock out they are also easy to repair and are usually back running in a day or two. Large bridges would be an exception.
Cars are vulnerable to attacks on fuel stations, attacks on bridges, dumping a load of nails on the road during rush hour, etc. I’m not sure I’d automatically assume disrupting thousands of car passengers is necessarily harder than disrupting thousands of train passengers.
>It's frightening how easy it is for an foreign actor to knock out a country's railway system.
I get phishing mail with very pertinent information only JR West would know any time I make train or rental car reservations with JR West.
Yes, I am willing to bet hard money that they've been backdoored and/or compromised at the human level. Standard fare for Japanese IT, honestly; see Kadokawa.
Damaging highways isn't exactly hard, even if they don't contain any roads or bridges. And if you take out the highways the rest of the roads don't have nearly enough capacity.
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Cars/trucks/roads are so much more dangerous than train travel that it actually seems worth the tradeoff to me even if these sorts of attacks were a regular occurrence. Putin (or whoever did this) sucks but they have not killed 1,105 Americans in a single year. That's just the number of cyclists killed by cars in 2022. Deaths of pedestrians and drivers/passengers are significantly higher.
Why do you assume that it's a "foreign" actor? I think it is utterly idiotic to hold an event of such scale in a country which has seen several consecutive years of mass protests. I mean sure, you can cordon off parts of Paris with fences and razor wire, but you can't do that with all of France.
Because it's the only logical conclusion and multiple Russians have already been arrested in France for plotting to disrupt the Olympics, including one who set himself on fire with chemicals in his hotel room. Oh and Russians have been doing this sort of thing all over Europe for the past few years.
If this were an internal political entity they would have already claimed responsibility and put out a manifesto.
> Because it's the only logical conclusion and multiple Russians have already been arrested in France for plotting to disrupt the Olympics
In Belgium they arrested seven muslim terrorists who were planning a terror attack during the Olympics, they were from Chechnya (so, technically, russian but it sounded like the usual islamic terror attacks that was planned and not some "russia vs the west" thing).
Still, why not a disgruntled ex-employee or a crafty IT-security student? Finding out how GSM-R works, where the towers are and what cables you have to cut is not exactly rocket-science
If the past has shown anything, then that both politics and infrastructure providers greatly overestimate the skill required for disrupting/hacking such systems and networks...
> Still, why not a disgruntled ex-employee or a crafty IT-security student?
“Simultaneous operations by 4 teams in different parts of the country” does not work well with “a disgruntled ex-employee or a crafty IT-security student” as a hypothesis.
You don’t need a “team” to do what was done there by the looks of it. You need like 4 dudes, with pry bars and half a can of fuel. I’m actually surprised this does not happen more often. Not only is this infra not protected, it seems entirely infeasible to protect it, and the result to effort ratio is staggering
A bit late for this thread now, but the deafening silence since the sabotage is interesting in itself. We’d expect militants to make some noise at some point, after all these sort of things are mostly about communication. And yet I don’t really see this being in the interest of any state actor (if disrupting the country is the point, there are easier and more effective ways of doing it).
I look forward to getting more detail a couple of years from now, when information will slowly filter out.
Who needs foreign actors when you have `climate protestors` who traditionally face way too little consequence for their actions and annoy their fellow citizens so persistency they do their entire movement a disservice?
> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.
Hack traffic light controls and set them to all-green (assuming the safety interlock is done in software), all-red, or just off. Dumbass drivers will do the rest for free.
Alternatively, disrupt Google Maps and Waze. Barely anyone has a dedicated offline navigation system any more - take these two out or "suggest" fake traffic jams to overload side streets [1] will also cause a lot of chaos.
> assuming the safety interlock is done in software
It's not. There's a conflict monitor unit that is completely separate from the signal controller.
It has direct inputs from all green or other permissive lights, and a diode matrix that determines which combinations are allowed.[1] If it detects a conflict, all signals go to flashing yellow.
"This monitor uses a standardized programming card for channel compatibility (permissives), minimum flash time, per channel Minimum Yellow Change Disable, CVM latch, and 24 volt monitor latch. Programming of this card is accomplished through the use of soldered wire jumpers. The programming card plugs into the monitor through a slot in the front panel."
All 4-way intersections use the same interlocking pattern, so there's a standard card that covers most cases. Only unusual intersections need a custom programming card soldered up.
>Hack traffic light controls and set them to all-green (assuming the safety interlock is done in software), all-red, or just off. Dumbass drivers will do the rest for free.
Have you never driven during a blackout? People get a little awkward figuring out four way stop priority, but it's not pure chaos.
> Have you never driven during a blackout? People get a little awkward figuring out four way stop priority, but it's not pure chaos.
Maybe I'm biased but I've seen incredibly dumb shit happening in urban areas (Munich in winter to be precise). People forget how to drive when lights go out and street markings are covered by snow.
Rural drivers in contrast have zero problems because they're used to driving without constant guidance.
> On May 7, he was in Russia and due to fly from Moscow to Istanbul, where he’d catch a connecting flight back to Paris the next day. Except he couldn't. He got so fall-down drunk at Istanbul Airport that he was barred from boarding his plane. Instead Griaznov took a taxi to the Bulgarian border, where another car delivered him to St. Vlas, a resort town on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, where Griaznov owns property.
> Griaznov stayed at his apartment for a few days before moving on to Varna, a Bulgarian city 60 miles north of St. Vlas. From there he flew on to Paris. During one of his beach-side dinners he got drunk again and let slip to the neighbors that he had a special assignment this summer in Paris to disrupt the opening ceremony of the Olympics. At first the neighbors were incredulous. That’s when Griaznov brandished his FSB ID, witnesses told The Insider. A few days later, Griaznov made his way to Varna and took a flight from there. Before flying to Paris, Griaznov made a call to his FSB boss and informed him that the operation was on track. Griaznov even said he’d recruited “one more Moldovan from Chisinau.”
I’m just not initially inclined to trust a website ending in .press or .ru as much as I would le Monde, so I posted this to demonstrate that it can be trusted.
What a failure of our western surveillance organizations that the only spies we catch are the ones that are so bad at their jobs that they get drunk and brag about it.
How do we fail so badly to counter foreign influence, sabotage, and espionage operations?
The examples of successful foreign operations in Western countries is so long and embarrassing - high level people operating for DECADES, changing MAJOR western policies, and sending back to their foreign handlers CRITICAL data and intelligence.
If this continues, we are absolutely going to get destroyed.
This brings to mind the TLA saying of "our successes are secret. our failures are known." In today's counter espionage world, it seems all you have to do to remain invisible is not use tech. Only speak in person face to face. It's not surprising at all to me that spooks can't know everything
How do you know that this is the only spy that was caught? It seems in the west's best interest from a propaganda perspective to paint the FSB in a poor light (to discourage cooperation), and they are obviously selective about what gets disclosed.
Because our intelligence agencies do fail (the Trump assassination attempt is the most recent). We can choose to construct epicyclic explanations for this or we can update our priors broadly. Only outcomes will determine which is right. I think our intelligence orgs are probably not uniquely immune to the quality failures the rest of our government orgs are experiencing.
Someone who only really decided to shoot Trump like the week of the rally, and didn't have to do anything that a normal american doesn't do in order to obtain a rifle, a bunch of ammo, an aerial view of the location, and practice time firing said gun.
A reminder that if you want to live in a country where it is normal to buy a brand new assault rifle, 200 rounds of ammo, and go shoot it all in the same weekend, you CANNOT preemptively stop a mass shooter or wannabee assassin. Nothing he did should put up red flags in a private gun ownership country.
A finite number of failures absolutely does not imply that they never caught any spy except this one. What kind of logic is that?
Looking at the regular expulsions of embassy employees all over the world it should be rather obvious that there is a lot going on about which “we” never hear anything.
(By “we”, I mean normal people having other activities than following closely geopolitics. There is a lot of information to find if you are dedicated enough. A lot of misinformation as well.)
I don't disagree that intelligence agencies fail, but I don't think that the attempted assassination of former-President Trump counts. The shooter appears to have acted completely alone, and so far it seems that he did not give obvious signs online before committing this (yes, he looked up some things about JFK's assassination, but that does not seem enough to raise real flags).
So there was no conspiracy, let alone a foreign one, for the intelligence agencies to have triggered on. This very much looks like a failure of the Secret Service agency, and it will be interesting to see what the final failure analysis looks like, and what they determine can be done better in the future.
And I think the "quality failures the rest of our government orgs are experiencing" is you projecting a bias. If you really think that things are going down hill, please find quantifiable metrics to show that.
> so far it seems that he did not give obvious signs online before committing this
It is suspicious that person who was radicalized enough to organize an attack on a president would have never said anything radical on the internet and not left a manifesto. A good guy that turned a killer overnight. Sometimes you wake up on the wrong foot ey.
I'm not surprised. Wanting to assassinate a high-profile person to "fix things" is a very common conception. While I can see how the lacking security is taken as suspicious, the existence of lone wolfs should not be.
> What a failure of our western surveillance organizations that the only spies we catch are the ones that are so bad at their jobs that they get drunk and brag about it.
That's the ones we make public. There's been quite the lot of spies quietly yeeted or exchanged for political hostages. And just as often, it's the other way 'round.
In other news the French rail systems suffered a major outage today, the opening day of the Olympics, as train infrastructure was firebombed by unknown parties.
You don’t know that to be true. You also do not know who has been caught. Western intelligence do not have “report daily figures to slowmovingtarget” in their checklists.
Venezuela is emptying their prisons and sending the released convicts to the U.S. as "migrants." Those same criminals are now doing things like impersonating delivery drivers and performing home invasions.
Too little governing.
Has nothing to do with whether the intelligence community publicizes its results, which I agree, they shouldn't. They should be stopping these kind of things, though.
They should actually prosecute those "protesters" that assaulted police on camera the other day. They released them instead.
Too little governing.
Meanwhile, we get press tours saying how awesome and kind and empathetic their policies are. Look how inclusive we are! Look how many check-boxes we've checked on the fashionable political stance list! You know that thing high muckety-muck said? They never said that. You remember that wrong. There must be something wrong with your recall. You must be racist or insane to think that. Interest rates? Those aren't a problem, what are you talking about?
Too much politics, optics, and gaslighting.
And those are just the local examples. It's happening in Britain, it's been happening in France and the rest of Europe, and when people complain, they're told to shut up and stop being so selfish.
Why wouldn't we see the operational failures of law enforcement to keep citizens and infrastructure in the West safe as an outgrowth of the other outrageous failures of leadership we keep seeing day after day?
This is obviously a Russian act of sabotage in retaliation for French support of Ukraine. All the downvotes of their mighty troll army can't make it any less obvious.
Alternatively, you can view it as a OSI layer 1 attack.
A bunch of optic fibers have been cut, but the network was badly designed without redundancy (as evidenced by the current denial of service).
Strategic points (the attacks occurred at junctions of several axis) were left insufficiently guarded.
The location of these points also shouldn't have been made available to bad actors.
French people are not surprised because there are always problems with train when lots of people need them to go on holidays. Usually at this time of the year it's getting hot, and it's one or more electrical transformer that gets burned by high heats. When copper price get high, cables are usually stolen to be sold as metal. And there are also strikes.
There is an economic balance to be found between the cost of securing and maintaining the infrastructure vs fixing the problems once they occur. Probably can be better, but others probably have it much worse.
You can't really guard thousands of kilometers of rails, or have much redundancy considering the cost of the infrastructure. The incesseant budget cuts and progressive privatization certainly do not help.
If you begin to threat model the physical security necessary, you quickly see how asymmetrical it is, regardless of the money thrown at it.
@liotier, I've been rate-limited and cannot reply to you directly, so I'm editing my response into this comment. My apologies.
I didn't intend any slight to French infrastructure or those designing and securing it, just the dynamics of the problem. It is easier to attack than to defend, particularly in physical security. I'm sure critical infrastructure is well taken care of. Do you know if TGV is considered as critical as the other sites you noted? I'm curious of your opinion about what level of expertise and intelligence collection it required to carry this out.
Network redundancy (sometimes up to quadruple for some of the French electrical infrastructure) is indeed vulnerable to asymmetrical attack, if the attacker knows what secures what.
I can throw burning fuel into a manhole or at a street cabinet, and it doesn't take much insight to find one that carries important traffic - take your pick near a military base or a nuclear power plant. But the attack will be ineffective, because the attacker needs to know what other bits of infrastructure carry the backup circuits - and take them out simultaneously. And, of course, for the important stuff such information is classified. So, an effective attack on French critical infrastructure is more difficult than it seems at first glance.
So what, we don't have to send ICBMs on their happy way to Moscow to turn the Kremlin into fine dust.
We can just go and supply Ukraine with a shit ton of Abrams, Taurus or lift the usage restrictions that currently forbid Ukraine to strike targets deep in Moscow.
All of that is certainly better than just accepting Putin's escalations.
There's no need to guess when Russian war drones crash on Romanian soil. This kind of sovereignty violations alone would be enough for anyone to start a war, our politicians however don't have the balls to do anything about it.
And besides: that's the cost of doing "plausible deniability" missions like Russia has done for over a decade now - remember the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and "they're totally not Russian soldiers" or the time they shot down a passenger plane? Fuck around, find out, it's time to have some good old-fashioned revenge for all the bullshit Russia has pulled and gotten away with until now.
> There's no need to guess when Russian war drones crash on Romanian soil. This kind of sovereignty violations alone would be enough for anyone to start a war, our politicians however don't have the balls to do anything about it.
Does that guarantee this is safe to do?
>> We can just go and supply Ukraine with a shit ton of Abrams, Taurus or lift the usage restrictions that currently forbid Ukraine to strike targets deep in Moscow.
There are no guarantees or anything when it comes to Putin not reacting to something done against him, but it is a certainty that he will escalate if not pushed back, because that has been both his personal and his country's M.O. for decades.
At the end this is a risk we have to be willing to take, otherwise it will be the Baltics next that's up for grabs. Or maybe Hungary, that one won't even need soldiers the way Orban is going.
Pray tell what other paths do you think there are? Fold and let Europe be enslaved by a certain nuke-equipped Mafia? This is very clearly what we're looking at with this new attack here, and without consistent x10 responses the thugs will keep at it and gnaw more and more. The other paths is send all the diplomats back, neuter the sleepers, repay the attacks in kind.
And I recall hearing a month ago or more that Russia would likely try something, because they aren't allowed in the Olympics as Russia, because of the invasion of Ukraine. So they want to mar the Olympics out of saving face, or spite, or revenge, or whatever. (Sorry, I cannot cite a source...)
the incredible damage that western media has done to their citizens is this outsized sense of superiority. russia isn’t la côte d’iviore. you can try a 10x response but i doubt you’ll be here to tell us how it went.
Interesting statement.
What is the nature of the superiority that you think you're seeing exactly?
Witnessing a Russian youth kicking a downed man in the head was quite revelatory: indeed no one from Côte d'Ivoire would be that much of a savage beast.
> On May 7, he was in Russia and due to fly from Moscow to Istanbul, where he’d catch a connecting flight back to Paris the next day. Except he couldn't. He got so fall-down drunk at Istanbul Airport that he was barred from boarding his plane. Instead Griaznov took a taxi to the Bulgarian border, where another car delivered him to St. Vlas, a resort town on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, where Griaznov owns property.
> Griaznov stayed at his apartment for a few days before moving on to Varna, a Bulgarian city 60 miles north of St. Vlas. From there he flew on to Paris. During one of his beach-side dinners he got drunk again and let slip to the neighbors that he had a special assignment this summer in Paris to disrupt the opening ceremony of the Olympics. At first the neighbors were incredulous. That’s when Griaznov brandished his FSB ID, witnesses told The Insider. A few days later, Griaznov made his way to Varna and took a flight from there. Before flying to Paris, Griaznov made a call to his FSB boss and informed him that the operation was on track. Griaznov even said he’d recruited “one more Moldovan from Chisinau.”
They sow chaos and then unleash the bots criticizing whoever is currently in office; then they unleash bots criticizing those bots and hope to drag in normal people.
Basically the idea is to erode trust in the western system. They don't try to hide it anymore and seems it doesn't matter - it's quite effective anyway.
This one was exceptional in every way. There are tens if not hundreds of examples in which they managed to not be so completely drunk to fail multiple times.
Sometimes the authorities find out, especially if it's a big fire of an ammo depot or a nerve agent wet job. Sometimes there is only circumstantial evidence. Sometimes you get used to it and you know it's them again.
According to their history of attacks on individuals, grand strategic logic often lags behind their desire for petty revenge. The government of France denied Russia's standing in this Olympics. This is simple reprisal.
I mean if you gave an American the option between say NK and USA they'll probably chose USA. However, if you just omit a comparison and ask them if they trust the USA they'll probably say no.
That's the cleverness of this. You aren't trying to convince them that Russia is better. You're just trying to convince them that USA is failing compared to its previous self.
The "get caught" part often doesn't happen. And even if they do get caught, as long as the main objective is achieved, it can be promoted as a show of strength so that next time the victims will play ball even before force is applied.
It's the mafia style, everyone knows who whacked whom.
Not everyone can pull off "a massive attack on a large scale to paralyse the TGV network" (literal quote from the rail operator). It's brutish, but it's a form of strength - like a mafia bully burning down your flower shop because you refused to pay.
Which is fine and expected, the goal here isn’t to impress you.
You have to look at this from the perspective of deeply broken people, full of malice and hardcore narcissism. Even if sabotage fails, they pat themselves on the back, rejoicing that they’ve increased paranoia and confusion, and start planning the next attack.
And if it provokes a response from their would be victims that results in Russian goals somewhere being ruined, they cry crocodile tears for pity and make themselves out to be martyrs, and plan the next attack.
There are many humans in this world with thoughts and motivations that are completely alien to others.
> That 'senator' is an anagram for 'treason' is no coincidence.
One is a Latin word, the other is a French word?
And when you say it's "no coincidence", that means that someone intentionally made it so. Which word do you think was designed to be the anagram? Given that 'senator' is the direct Latin word that predates 'treason' (in its modern English spelling) by thousands of years, it has to be the latter, so do you think some philologist is sitting around going "ah yes, we should spell traïson as treason so that it's a perfect anagram to use as a pun for an office that won't exist for another few hundred years"?
A paragraph of accurate historical details about government atrocities is undone by a single rhetorical remark at the botttom to drive the point home? TIL.
There's a lot of details that aren't accurate. For starters, no nuclear weapons have been placed by the US in any country of the former Warsaw Pact or USSR.
It’s an ethos thing. Don’t make ridiculous claims if you want to convince people of your argument; by nature people will assume everything else is nonsense, too.
There is no objective other than to destroy the West and democracy and then rule with as much brutality as the conquered nations will bear. If they cannot achieve that objective they want to go down in flames with the rest of the world.
If you want to know how the Russian peace looks like read up on the partitions of Poland (economic exploitation, violent anti-semitism, deportations to Siberia, confiscation of property and land, russification, etc.) or the history of countries in Eastern Europe who found themselves inside the borders of Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. Persecutions, mass deportations, mass murders, torture, economic exploitation.
I really pity the African nations who got convinced to kick out Americans and the French. They will now get a taste of Russia and it will not be pretty.
> I really pity the African nations who got convinced to kick out Americans and the French. They will now get a taste of Russia and it will not be pretty.
At least the west knew what they were getting into when they enabled the Chinese extraction system (no objections here, seemed like a fine quid pro quo for a while). I don't expect we would see benevolence from China towards the west, I do hope they show it to the emerging countries, as they were not so long ago emerging themselves.
China tends to be even more narrowly focused than Western powers on mineral extraction in its African investment, and they also have a reputation for relying very heavily on imported Chinese labor in their projects, which means the benefits percolate less than they would with Western projects (itself a pretty meager benefit usually!).
Or it could be a reference to the Chinese tendency to invest in the form of giving countries loans that they are ill-equipped to pay back, and China playing very hardball on poorest country debt forgiveness.
China emerged by building and selling. Part of the rise of china has been the extraction of wealth, resource, and knowledge. I don't say this with any shade, any emotion or feeling, just very literally. A large component of the ability for china to move forward so quickly was the creation of funnels that allowed for exchange. The west mostly extracted the labour and china extracted a bunch of other stuff. I can't think of a better word to describe what literally happened, and again, I'm not saying it with an opinion (that would be another discussion).
Without any judgement, imo: China is good at creating extractive systems.
(I'll add, if you've not read it, "Dealing with China
An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower By Henry Paulson" is a fantastic book)
Russia’s influence in Africa / Asia is greatly diminished since the Cold War era.
China is the primary threat to Western nations, not Russia. China savvily extended its influence in Africa in particular while the US was so caught up with its useless War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, totally squandering its post Cold War opportunities in Africa.
> If they cannot achieve that objective they want to go down in flames with the rest of the world.
I think this level of unserious analysis is deeply unhelpful. You know people in Russia have their lives and goals, they are not suicidal maniacs. At least read some Russian media with google translate
People in Russia are indoctrinated and their thinking and worldview is heavily influenced by Russian propaganda. They have never enjoyed freedom of thought or legal protection from the intrusive, corrupt, and murderous state. Their lives belong to the state just like their goals. The concept of personal freedom or privacy doesn't exist in Russia.
Even those who travel abroad don't seem to change their behaviour and thinking no matter how often and how long they visit other countries. They have become the scourge of the tourist resorts that will still take their money. Europeans don't want to go there anymore. It's all vodka, loud parties, and being absolute assholes to others. They are quickly becoming the Sentinelese of Europe.
I will not read Russian media, I had enough of it in my early years when it was compulsory. Russians pillaged my country of birth and continue to be an existential threat. Russians also lied to everybody after 1989 and used the time, the trust, and the money to arm themselves and start invading and killing neighbours. There is zero truth in what Russians say. They can keep their ballet and Dostoyevsky.
> You know people in Russia have their lives and goals, they are not suicidal maniacs.
There are many, many decent people in Russia who abhor this war. But people have zero influence on what is going on. If one day Putin decides to invade the Baltics, your statement about Russians not being suicidal maniacs will still hold true, but again with no relationship with the actual events.
The "nations" in Africa courting Russian influence are largely militant groups that have claimed dominion over lands. Those particular people in charge will probably selfishly benefit a great deal.
They didn't want to get caught. They want to create chaos, which leads to disillusionment, nihilism, infighting and isolationism and a breaking up of the West's unity. Relevant, from the CBS this week:
> The FBI announced it disrupted a Russian AI-enhanced social media bot farm, which was designed to be an influence operation. Some of the fake profiles from bots purported to be Americans.
It's probably quite effective, but we don't know how effective because it's impossible to re-run the last 10 years without this and see what would have happened.
Poisonings, people falling out of windows, arsons, it all make sense if you consider that it is a state captured by a mafia clan. John McCain famously said that Russia is ‘A Gas Station Run by a Mafia That Is Masquerading as a Country’
most countries are captured by a mafia clan, this isn't a thing specific to Russia. When you have powerful intelligence services sooner or later they end up taking over.
The reality of living in Russia is the perfect example of the false equivalence of the sentiment that “a government is just a mafia”. Magnitude matters.
For example, Asian theocracies understand their mission as a state and its government as furthering whatever bizarre ideas they gleamed from the scripture. They are often clan-ish in organization, but this only reflects the history of how they came to be that way, that isn't the goal.
When it comes to the European politicians, they may be very corrupt lying scumbags, but in order to get elected they need to put on a show pretending to act in the interest of the country they want to rule.
When it comes to Russia: they are simply criminals. They don't need to pretend to want to make their country better off. Not in the sense the same corrupt lying European politician would. In prison terms, they try to prove themselves as the higher cast. As those who are allowed (and even required) to humiliate the lower cast.
It's highly unlikely that Russian intelligence service is anything special. But they aren't the ones calling the shots that's for sure. They are just a part of the country-sized prison.
I think you have to be Russian to fully grasp the motivations behind this.
I've got a lot of mileage out of the assumption that every such act is supposed to send a message both to Russia's enemies and citizens.
The message being "we are everywhere".
Should anyone try to start working with the enemy, like the helicopter pilot Maxim Kuzminov, they will be found and executed.
EDIT: Navalny's return to Russia raised eyebrows in the west. I think he was aware that he would be targeted anyway, so might as well have it happen on his own terms.
They could be embracing the North Korean model. You don't have to be competitive as long as you are untouchable. The elites get wealth and power, and the rest don't matter.
What wealth? Their wealth comes from the natural resources, which they now cannot openly sell at market prices. Give it a few years and the next meeting of the Russian oligarchs will be held on a wooden bench behind the foreign currency exchange kiosk next to the Moscow's Luzniki stadium.
Private wealth, not national wealth. Despite the poverty of his country and decades of isolation, Kim Jong Un is a billionaire who lives an extremely comfortable life.
If you are untouchable, don't care about the people, and can keep the people in check, the economy doesn't matter. You can live in wealth and comfort, while your people face famine and poverty. And the situation can be stable for many decades.
I'm a bit puzzled by this as well but I assume that the goal here is to project power and scare people into submission. Making themselves seem more powerful than they are by attacking an event that is in the public spotlight.
You should be puzzled. You should always be puzzled when people say "witnesses told us", "anonymous intelligence officials said". It's what got us into plenty of wars we didn't need to be in. Especially when the authors are known to be in collusion with said intelligence agencies.
> An extraordinary email uncovered under freedom of information laws raises serious questions about whether Bellingcat, the “open source” collective widely cited by mainstream journalists and loved by the CIA, collaborates directly with Western intelligence agencies.
Calling everything a conspiracy is the exact lack of skepticism you should not have.
If you want to paint bellingcat as a tool of the CIA, you have to prove their claims to be false. If the CIA pays bellingcat to produce only factually correct information, that is still useful.
No. People like YOU should provide proof. Until then YOUR claims are the conspiracy. Relying purely on hearsay makes YOU the conspiracy theorist. It's absurd that I even have to say this.
Did you even read the article you linked? Wyatt Reed worked as a Freelance journalist, like so many other journalists. It was always public knowledge. There was no "hacked email" here. The WaPo issued a tiny correction on this smear piece at least:
> correction
> A previous version of this article incorrectly said that leaders of the online news site Grayzone had received payments from Iranian media, according to recently unearthed documents. The documents show that only one of the site’s editors received such payments. The article has been corrected.
Terrorism is the weapon of the powerless. Russians know they cannot match NATO, so they are trying to disrupt the event they essentially banned themselves from.
Different cultures, this seems a very Russian way of projecting power. Though I personally can think of at least two other actors who are just as likely to blame. At least this wasn't a "hurt people" power projection.
Western civilization, including most of the infrastructure, assumes good intentions of those around. How many times have teenagers independently realized the chassis they could cause just by pushing a waiting pedestrian into traffic? Trains have always been noted as an easy target.
The goal is to get some fact they can use in propaganda internally to show how the country is great or succeeding against its enemies. And yeah, everybody that complains about them is an enemy.
My take is they think they are a great power entitled to rule over their neighbours including the former soviet union and thus are entitled to attack all who oppose that by whatever ways including dumb things like disrupting the olympics and funding anti vaxxer and far right folk and the like. Not that I know that much - I'm kind of confused myself.
To understand anything Russian government does, you need to understand that they aren't a government in the way Western democracies / republics / monarchies understand the function of the government. For someone with largely humanistic outlook on life, the function of the government is to try to make sure that what's being governed prospers. Prosperity may be understood as "more riches for the rich" or "redistribution of wealth" or anywhere in between. But the basic idea is to make things better, at least for some sub-group of thus governed subjects.
Russia is operated by straight-up criminals. And I don't mean white-collar corrupt politicians. They are literally people who committed often very violent crimes. For instance, Putin is implicated in a number of "hits" on law enforcement officers, investigators etc. He was not the one executing the "hits", but he was likely directly involved in the crime. A lot of his associates have done often long time behind bars. For example, his puppet assigned to rule over Ukraine (the one who was deposed in the "revolution of dignity" which set in motion the present conflict) started his career as a gang robber: he, with his friends broke into an apartment, tortured the owners while taking their belongings.
These people have a mental model of the world defined by the prison lore. They have a bizarre set of rules which define what honor is: "honor" (the prison kind of) is the central value / virtue in this system. In this model, the world is divided into "suckers" and "men". "Men" are allowed to humiliate the "suckers" in whatever way they want. In fact, if they don't, they might as well join the "suckers". In this system, anyone who shows any kind of compassion to the "suckers" is him/herself a "sucker". Europeans or anyone who wants to live in a society that values any human life thus is automatically a "sucker".
This is why Russians think and treat Europeans with contempt and disdain. They don't think it to be immoral to steal from a European, or to assault one etc.
It's also "honorable" to accept the risks associated with humiliating the "suckers". To prove how much of a "man" someone is that is. It's actually better to die while proving your place is among "men" than to surrender and live like a "sucker". So, they don't care about international consequences of their sabotage in France today. At least not in the sense how another European country might've cared, should they engage in something similar.
> For example, his puppet assigned to rule over Ukraine (the one who was deposed in the
> "revolution of dignity" which set in motion the present conflict) started his career as a
Deposed by the maidan's "revolution of dignity" president of the Ukraine Yanukovich had not been "assigned to rule over Ukraine", but elected in competitive voting, that OSCE certified as democratic and "organized in a transparent manner."
You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.
I think about this quite a lot. I presume people at that level are at least TRYING to be strategic in some manner. The two thoughts I used to try and frame it are: the cold war never really ended, it just changed, and, begrudging-capitalist subscribing societies have highly intelligent people in them just like capitalist societies. If nation states are indeed competitive, then a relatively decent strategy would be presume automation is going to rapidly allow for an alternative systems in societies, and while that shift is happening, cause as much problem as you can for the folks unable/unwilling/unknowing, while you start shifting behind the scenes. Marx literally articulated deeply, the idea that socialism, and eventually communism, would arise as a natural progression from capitalism. We may or may not want to accept that, but Marx spelled it out, and lots of people follow Marx as their philosophy.
I try hard to avoid getting conspiratorial in my head, so I tend to leave the thought around that point, after all, it's just a thought. :)
I doubt their goal is to be universally reviled, so what's their real objective?
Believe it or not -- their initial goal was simply to gain respect.
They actually thought the Ukraine invasion would be a walkthrough, and that of course Western countries would whine and moan about of a -- but ultimately they would respect Russia for its audacity and boldness, that Russia would emerge with greatly enhanced stature over its historic rivals, and a new era of Russian gravitas and self-assuredness would begin.
So yes - it was all definitely quite strategic, in theory. But things didn't go as they planned of course, so now they're fighting like a cornered animal.
Except now the fight isn't for "respect", and it certainly isn't about Ukraine -- but rather their own physical and political survival.
It's just like how the terrorists hated us for our freedoms and were hiding weapons of mass destruction. The war machine isn't just gonna keep itself running.
Are any le Carré characters so flagrantly incompetent? Even the ones who like to drink (like Connie Sachs) manage to keep it under control and function reasonably well.
I always had the feeling that Le Carré's portrayal of Eastern European adversaries was too kind. He clearly underestimated the influence of alcohol over private and professional lives in those lands.
When your culture's drinking problem is so bad that it starts causing information leaks that disrupt clandestine overseas sabotage operations, maybe that's the clue it's time to get a better grip on the culture of alcohol consumption.
I've read that it's not quite as simple or easy as banning vodka or alcohol, as strangely enough, the highest individual source of Russian tax revenue is from excise taxes on the vodka, and revenue from the excise taxes on beer make up 75% as much as the excise taxes on vodka.
Nope, they operate more or less in plain sight and don't care. They know that they worst thing that can happen to them in the west is expulsion or a jail sentence.
It's a pattern. Russian and Belarusian agents attacked rail infrastructure across Europe on several occasions over the last year or so. Not a false flag, but yet another terrorist attack against the European rail transportation infrastructure.
Until RT or Putin confirms it was Ruzzia then you won't believe it.
For other real skeptics, there were 100% clear Ruzzian attacks in France before, there were people that drawn Swasticas, some people that put some coffins , soem Chechen guy with a grenade/bomb. We do not have video or written proof that Putin signed the orders so we need to use our brains and ignore the bots and trolls that defend terrorists.
There has been at least one dangerous fire in a factory or a warehouse per week in Europe for over a year now. Most suspects caught are Russian agents, Russians or people paid by Russia or Belarus.
I mean they probably won't read it anyways. Usually with comments like "french newspapers said hamas is russian" end up being strictly factually false.
Perhaps a french newspaper said hamas received russian funding or weapons or some other nuance that they completely glossed over. Perhaps it wasn't even a french newspaper or one not well regarded for accuracy (look at what the Onion prints in the US!). Or possibly it's even worse and the article is just posting a quote of somebody who said "hamas is russian" and so it's not even the french newspaper saying it.
This blindness is also commonly seen in the US. i.e. people saying polls had trump at a 0% chance to win the election despite literally a week before the election even CNN had articles saying it's a tight race -- https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/01/politics/presidential-poll-do...
this is the problem when having a political bias. you stop being factual. it was not the russian you were wrong and you wont even acknowledge it. before the russian it was the arabs for decades and before that it was the serbs. we know how the hive mind operates.
lefigaro is behind a paywall so not much to read there. Judging from the articles title it sounds _at best_ like the article will claim that "Russia created a photo of a Palestinian soldier" and not that "Russia is Hamas".
> here you go about left wing being behind the train attack
> France’s top cop said Monday he suspects far-left saboteurs [1] [2]
The article you're using as support doesn't support the claim you're making; the guy _suspects_ the far left but going around posted about it as settled matter is inaccurate. We got tons of people on this forum that _suspect_ Russia should I go make a post saying Russia did it and link to them as proof?
> the attackers had started fires in "conduits carrying multiple (fibre-optic) cables" that relay "safety information for drivers" or control the motors for points that change rails... Farandou of SNCF said: "There's a huge number of bundled cables. We have to repair them one by one, it's a manual operation" requiring "hundreds of workers".
Just wondering: is there a reason why there needs to be a bundle of fiber optic cables to carry safety information and control the rails? Is that not overkill? I assume wireless/cellular networking is not robust enough, but what just standard-ass copper wires, like the telephone lines? I assume the reason is that they're transmitting more than just what was named in the article, but all I know is what I read.
Sometimes fibre optic cables are used for reasons other than lots of bandwidth in architectures other than network A to network B.
Examples:
1. transferring data near/from/to high voltage lines, without risking short circuits that cause fire/death/damage (personal experience: getting info in/out of particle accelerators that hold mega volts of tension)
2. using fibre optic cables to measure vibration or deformations (using the fibre as sensor)
3. physical layer redudancy in case of failure
4. keeping safety critical systems physically seperate from other data transfers
There are probably more reasons that are possibly more on-topic. I'm definitely not a fiber applications expert.
Copper is distance limited. Copper oxidizes. If you are ever going to have any data transfer copper requires powered equipment at very close intervals. Metallic cabling and any equipment on the ends is vulnerable to nearby lightning.
Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete called the “massive attack” against the rail network an “outrageous criminal act”. He described people fleeing from the scene of fires and the discovery of incendiary devices at the sites.
SNCF said many routes would have to be cancelled “at least all weekend while repairs are conducted” as thousands of rail staff were deployed to repair the damage.
There is a massive attack and people fleeing; news orgs will be super aggressive about finding/publishing 1st-hand accounts. I read thru a ½doz articles and couldn't spot any, tho.
If this were the US and NatSec were on the table, we could expect some overstatement of harm done and risk to the public.
IDK France tho. Do French officials favor agenda or accuracy?
This is really sad. It seems like the main theory is that it's an inside job (France is doing it to itself, specifically people disgruntled by the government and by the Olympics). France has a HUGE culture of self-hate (although if you're not French and you criticize France then that's not acceptable suddenly). Any semblance of appreciation is often seen as being nationalist or "too far right".
On the other hand I don't think too much nationalism is good for a country, but at what point do people start appreciating what they have and start contributing at how France look for outsiders? I really wish we were more welcoming people as a whole, and less self-sabotaging.
Which in France is a reasonable survival strategy for its people judging by their history: a bunch of kings, 3 emperors, fairly corrupt governments with huge deficits etc.
I don't get why self-sabotage is likely in this case though: plenty of real external enemies, including one that recently "stole" France's African empire.
This is low effort. The real problem with a dictatorship is that people rise through loyalty rather than competence. The people are too afraid to call attention to the situation. You get childish actions like this as a result.
The scale is different: "thousands of travellers" vs "hundreds of thousands"
One line was blocked because of "two optic fibers" in Germany "for around three hours".
Now in France three main lines are blocked: West, North, East (+ attempt on South), the disruption will probably last for days, it's a lot more than two optic fibers.
- cui prodest/cui bono? So far the government witch it VERY hated by Parisian at least due to their zoning and confinement of people "for safety reasons", reasons who appear justified if someone commit crimes, the same plot observed with recent "terrorist attacks" of Charlie Hebdo, Nice etc all with a sole general effect: justify surveillance and repressive power. No one else have earned anything else good for them;
- you can surveil a city, many people in a dense area, full of surveillance. You can't surveil a whole country, so you can easily surveil, contain people rioting or some attacks in a city, you can't protect a long rail line across a country. No matter how much surveillance you have, even if you are so powerful to deploy cam on every place of the rails in the middle of nowhere you can just watch some masked biped attacking your infra, say hi! to the cam and disappear before even a drone jet can came;
- you can't protect the society against the society, or people agree to be civil and cooperative or there is no "third party force" who can keep the order and prevent a civil war. You can protect the most against very few, nothing more, actually this means that essentially ALL government can't do nothing positive because they have essentially no popular legitimization enough to be consider "the people government system". If they try to tighten the lace a civil war will happen. If they do not any kind of anti-social activity will happen anyway, because the society is actually fractured.
I read the article waiting for the least hint of proof that Russia was involved and left with empty hands. Except a politician talking and their national security agency saying these are included in an investigation related to Russian terrorism, but still nothing else than talk.
Why would Russia even do such small time damage to countries geographically pretty far? Protip: no "Putin wants to conquer the world so he's planning in advance" conspiracy theory.
And so burning a few random facilities (or relatively low strategic importance I guess, since they were seemingly not under surveillance) is going to change what?
It'd make more sense for it to be an operation Northwoods if anything, but that would be even more far-fetched.
It would make more sense but that would be even more far fetched…?
Sorry, but the high speed rail is Frances pride, and this was not some random attack. Russia absolutely could pull this off, and they have the motive. What other organisations does?
Maybe screw the opening ceremony of the Olympics to keep saying that "western countries are falling apart" ? It has been a classic rethoric of Russia media for a while.
There has been 800,000 people affected by this outage and the opening ceremony is at 7pm tonight, so probably connected.
If there's something you can easily say on HN without the slightest piece of evidence and without fear of being called out is implicating Russia in any situation like this.
This thread reads like a propaganda fair sponsored by Western governments.
Would be incredibly stupid of Russians to do something like this.
Over at France24.com this is what is posted ATM:
"Two security sources said the modus operandi meant initial suspicions fell on leftist militants or environmental activists, but they said there was not yet any evidence."
We don't talk about nation acting rationally when their egos and pride are involved. They are effectively banned from 2024 olympics, so they do terrorist attack to sabotage it. Childish? Yes. What long term good effect for them is there? 0 nil nothing. Is this very typical of russian mentality for anybody who actually knows the country and its leadership? Absolutely, 0 doubt, yes.
Plus arrest of that drunken FSB agent in Romania who was bragging about exactly this terrorism few days ago. Also, very typical.
Yes, and as mentioned in the Italian media, they were caused by lightning strikes damaging instrumentation on the rails, or by planned maintenance work. There is no suspicion of sabotage.
Are just scraping the bottom of the barrel to find anything of use to incitate for a military escalation?
It is the power of mass movements. The same people who posed as ultra liberals and leftists are now talking like Archie Bunker from the comedy series (forgot the name of the series, the character is an ultra conservative, commie hating person).
What's important about an interpretation is that it is close to the truth, not that it is convenient or pleasant to look forward to. The opposite is just burying your head in the sand.
It's Russia who escalated, though. If they chose a path of co-operation and friendly trade instead of trying to enslave their neighbours, then they would be allowed to compete in the olympics.
Of course the real problem is that it's ordinary Russians who bear the suffering caused by their own government, while the ruling elite enjoys luxurious lifestyle no matter what sanctions Europe and US do. The solution would be making life difficult for the oligarchy, but that would probably require measures West isn't willing to employ, because they would be illegal under international law (which Russia doesn't care about).
Even if they choose a friendly path no one will believe them. They would need to change their political class and write into their constitution clauses that punish any attack on their neighbours or even calling for such an attack as high treason. That would be a good start, but I have a feeling they are going to try to keep everything as is.
It is you who is trying to weaponize everything else, including the Olympics movement. It was your choice to make Olympics political and full of military messages, and then you act surprised when they start blowing up in your hands.
You did not have to weaponize everything yet you did.
You didn't have to invade Ukraine, yet you did. Besides, it's not like Russia keeps sports and politics separate. They don't, they never have. Why do you think state-sponsored doping has historically been big in Russia and Soviet Union? Obviously, because sports is an important vector of propaganda for the state.
Just a reminder: the historical spirit of Olympics required to stop all wars for the games. The reason for not admitting someone to participate in the games is that they don't act in the Olympic spirit.
2020 was actually sufficient for hostile actions to be taken and the hot war just didn't start yet.
I don't see this historical spirit being applied in the century XXI against anybody besides Russia. And it's not like there is no wars.
You are trying to frame escalations into some legalistic framework, but it only works domestically. Internationally, it is "you punch us, we punch you, we stab you, you stab us". No empty words are necessary and may cause additional violence in response.
Since Sochi Olympics, Russian athletes were consistently banned for doping and for their country's starting wars. Russia didn't change anything in this regard. I don't see why these Olympics should be any different.
I am arguing that doping never had anything to do with the issue and it was a political lash at Russia from the start. A successful attempt to use the built influence to smear the olympic shirt.
If your due process sucked, tough shit, don't fall for it next time, deal with the fallout on case to case basis. What you certainly should not do is to accuse a whole country of breaking your wee little rules, and try to punish that whole country. It is an lasting insult and a serious international escalation. It is not even remotely in proportion with the weight of IOC in the grand scheme of things.
What's this? Is thrftwy an account intending to convince people they really need to invest heavily into their armies and stop whatever Russia is doing?
If the esteemed commenters of the FT are thinking similarly to this person, Russia.
It’s unfounded. Maybe not impossible, but it seems FAR more likely that it was eco-terrorism or another similar grievance. I haven’t heard one parsimonious theory for why Russia might do this.
Interesting links, thanks for sharing them. I am not so convinced of these necessarily being state level aggression, but I think in these cases, they are perhaps more leaning that direction than anything else.
If anything, the fires lit by the saboteurs in France seem more amateurish and heavy-handed.
Pray tell, what is your "parsimonious theory" as to why it would be eco-terrorism, as opposed to a very predictable Kremlin reprisal against France's stand on the invasion of Ukraine?
Well, it was probably left wing terrorism. Perhaps not ecoterrorism. At least that’s what the French government thinks. My thought process is this: what does disrupting the trains achieve for Russia? At best, nothing and, at worst, closer involvement from France in Ukraine. Why bother with a coordinated attack then? Doesn’t stand to reason.
This is a smart attack - security attention definitely wasn't there (and it's not like it's possible to guard thousands of kilometres of rail), and the disruption is massive (both for the Olympics, and regular people going in holiday by train).
It's also pretty clearly Russia's style. Islamic terrorists would have targeted people, not random infrastructure, and Russian operatives have already been caught trying such things, or after having done such things all over Europe.
I'd be very interested to see how France responds. Nuking Moscow would of course be too much, but this sort of escalation cannot be left unchecked because as we've well seen, Putin is a fucking idiot who needs to get his head kicked in or he'll just keep pushing. More Mirages for Ukraine? This list getting longer? https://www.defense.gouv.fr/en/news/french-military-equipmen...
A ban on anyone receiving Russian money from French politics (bye bye Le Pen and other Quislings)?
>Arson attacks are actually an extremely French phenomenon, over 1000 cars are often torched a night on New Years Eve
Highly relevant:
TIL that during the 2005 French riots, up to 1408 cars were burned per night across the country. The government declared that the riots had ended when, after three weeks of chaos, only 98 cars were burned per night ("return to a normal situation everywhere in France"). <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4i50p8/til_th...>
Though burning random cars might be French, we are talking here about arson with precise strategic targets (although I'm not staying this is more Russia's style)
> Arson attacks are actually an extremely French phenomenon, over 1000 cars are often torched a night on New Years Eve
As far as I can tell it happened twice, 19 years ago and 4 years ago. I wouldn't call it a "common" occurrence.
Now, 1000 cars or 700 cars doesn't mean much, one would have to compare it to the amount of cars in France. For example, more than 150 000 cars burn each year in the US (probably not just arson, but it's not my point) which is 500 per day on average. But there are more cars in the US than in France.
I doubt these planned and coordinated attacks on infrastructure are carried out by the same individuals that opportunistically burn cars during New Years Eve.
There are no calls for nuclear war. And it's wild to call warmongers people who want action to stop appeasement of the warmonger on the global stage, Russia.
There is plenty circumstantial evidence Russia was behind this, and they're the only ones that make sense. I've listed tons of it in sibling comments, but just the fact that multiple Russians were arrested in the past few weeks plotting against the olympics, including a guy who set himself on fire with chemicals in his hotel rooms, it's obvious Russia wants to cause disruptions.
We'll see when the results of the investigation come out, but when they do say Russia, what do you think an appropriate answer would be?
Disagree. There are several warmongers on the global stage, Russia is just one of them. Appeasement is a word pointlessly thrown around by people who don't uderstand history.
> There is plenty circumstantial evidence Russia was behind this
I have no intention of starting world war III on the basis of circumstantial evidence. If we operated like this then half of Europe should be hostile to Ukraine over circumstantial evidence that they destroyed north stream 2.
> but when they do say Russia, what do you think an appropriate answer would be?
There's only one answer that doesn't end in an escalation and stops all hostile acts from all parts at once. Find a compromise for peace. Stop the posturing and find a damn compromise.
I have a feeling this war is mostly going on because both sides have gone too far with their statements and it would be a political suicide to backtrack on what was said.
> Appeasement is a word pointlessly thrown around by people who don't uderstand history.
I would say appeasement is the approach taken by people who don't understand history.
Putin has been appeased for decades (Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine 2014 and 2022). How did that work out? It didn't, he just kept escalating.
> Find a compromise for peace. Stop the posturing and find a damn compromise.
How do you find a compromise with a robber and rapist? If someone comes to your home, rapes you, and says your home has always been theirs and you're fake, what sort of compromise would you find with them?
And for the record yes, Russian troops are looting, raping, and enacting a genocide (if nothing else they've proudly said they've kidnapped hundreds of thousands of kids for reeducation which is in the literal definition of genocide).
> If someone comes to your home, rapes you, and says your home
Oh no, not yet another completely pointless "raped in your home" analogy. A nation is not a home and its citizens are not family, otherwise we'd manage countries much differently.
> Russian troops are looting, raping, and enacting a genocide
There's no genocide ongoing in Ukraine. No international authority has declared or recognized what's going on as genocide.
Looting and raping is what happens in any war. The Americans know it very well.
The question is: if you consider what's going on in Ukraine a genocide, with 10k civilians killed over 2 years and a half of war, how do we define what's going on in Israel/Palestine, with 40k civilians killed over 10 months of war?
What about the ~200k civilian killed during USA's unjustified invasion of Iraq? How come we ended up appeasing the warmongers in that situation?
So you see, if it's not worth causing a WWIII for Palestine, or for Iraq, then it's objectively not worth it for Ukraine.
These are the rules, and it wasn't Russia who set them.
And before you accuse me of "whataboutism": I'm not raising different issues to derail the conversation, I'm bringing in some much needed context to explain my reasoning.
> There's no genocide ongoing in Ukraine. No international authority has declared or recognized what's going on as genocide.
Putin is literally an international fugitive wanted by the ICC for genocide.
> Looting and raping is what happens in any war. The Americans know it very well.
Scale makes a fundamental difference. Nothing comparable to 1-2 million raped German, Polish and other civilians in Prussia during the final months of the WWII took place on the western front. In Ukraine too, Russians continue to use sexual violence against civilians and prisoners of war in a systemic and institutionalized manner and on a massive scale. Trying to wave it away with "happens in any war" is disingenuous.
> Putin is literally an international fugitive wanted by the ICC for genocide.
No, the charges are "unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation", and we're talking about "at least hundreds of children". This has nothing to do with genocide and you shouldn't really throw the word around lightly.
> Scale makes a fundamental difference. Nothing comparable to 1-2 million raped German, Polish and other civilians in Prussia during the final months of the WWII
Now, that is some good old whataboutism. The URSS doesn't even exist anymore.
> No, the charges are "unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation", and we're talking about "at least hundreds of children". This has nothing to do with genocide and you shouldn't really throw the word around lightly.
Abduction of children is a form of genocide and stipulated as such in international treaties. As with many other crimes, the full extent remains unknown due to lack of access to occupied territories, but the number of victims is in at least tens of thousands, possibly in hundreds of thousands.
> Now, that is some good old whataboutism. The URSS doesn't even exist anymore.
> lol ok genocide of hundreds of children who are actually still alive. I wish genocide was always like this.
Children abducted from Native Americans and forced into abusive charter schools also lived, but that doesn't make it any less of a genocide. If this prompts retarded "lol ok" reaction from you, then perhaps you should learn what geno and cide mean.
Russians kidnap children from Ukraine, forge new birth certificates that change their name, birthday and location of birth to erase all traces of Ukrainian background, and then put them up for adoption. This is textbook example of destruction of ethnicity through the abduction of children - or genocide.
> In the same way as nothing you said refutes nothing I said.
It did refute. Rape and other forms of sexual abuse on the scale unleashed by Russia is at levels unseen in many other armed conflicts. The behavior of Russians in the final months of the WWII, compared to the behavior of western allies, is a prime example of the sharp difference. The same legacy lived on in the Afghan war, Chechen wars, and now in the Ukrainian war.
Happens on a massive scale everywhere they go:
Allegations of rape by Russian mercenaries, who have a large presence in CAR’s restive north-west region, have escalated in recent months. Women and girls are avoiding going to the fields and markets, and food shortages are being reported as a result. /-/ In Bouar, the country’s fifth-largest town with a population of about 40,000, the growing attacks in the farmlands are having an impact on food production as women stay away from the fields. As a result, some food prices have increased by 50% in the last eight months.
Iran has no beef with France, on the contrary, France was one of the and countries the most actively trying to get a deal with them. And there are 40 Iranian athletes at the Olympics.
What exactly is Dang supposed to do here ? Ban people who don’t desire further escalation towards a nuclear war whom you label as “Russian apologists”..?
It's worth to keep in mind that there also are activists in France that warned to this kind of thing as far back as when the Olympics were announced to be in France. This could be their actions. It's called "Zbeul Olympique", which roughly translates to "Olympic Mess".
Very unlikely. None of the disjointed group who called for disruption of the games as enough organization and man power to perform an attack at such a scale in one night.
> I'd be very interested to see how France responds. Nuking Moscow would of course be too much
No evidence to be shown of Russia's involvement in this,
but let's mention a nuclear escalation. This is absolutely delirious. I hope the people who actually take decision are just a tiny bit more level-headed than you are.
> No evidence to be shown of Russia's involvement in this
Only it fits their modus operandi perfectly, they were caught in similar acts all around Europe, Russian operatives were arrested in France as recently as last week (and a few weeks prior there was a guy who burned himself with chemicals trying to build a bomb in his hotel room), and a russian operative was arrested in Bulgaria yesterday bragging about Russian plans to disrupt the Olympics.
It's hard to imagine anyone else being involved. Of course there will be a thorough investigation.
There you go[0]. French activists are behind this, not Russian agents. Maybe next time, before you incite for a WWIII, cool your head and think?
Luckily the french government isn't as out of control as the average HNer/redditor, or we'd all be hiding underground by now.
Mind, these are anarchists we're talking about, and I assure you anarchists absolutely despise Russia and even the USSR. So think twice before going about some wild theory about these activists being paid by Russia.
As an aside note, I find the "ULTRA-left" nomenclature to be ridiculous.
"likely", says the pretty right-leaning Minister of Interior, without providing any proof.
> think
It still makes the most sense for Russia to be behind this. It might not be them, or it might just be them sponsoring an internal group, too early to know. But they make by far the most sense.
> It still makes the most sense for Russia to be behind this
You, other HNers and the whole of Reddit prove the opposite.
If this sabotage was performed by Russia it would be the perfect justification to reinvigorate military support to Ukraine, in spite of a growing tiredness of the European public with the war.
So really who has the most to benefit here would be the faction that wants the war to continue until Ukraine can obtain a victory.
> So really who has the most to benefit here would be the faction that wants the war to continue until Ukraine can obtain a victory.
You mean the normal people, right?
> You, other HNers and the whole of Reddit prove the opposite. If this sabotage was performed by Russia it would be the perfect justification to reinvigorate military support to Ukraine, in spite of a growing tiredness of the European public with the war.
Just like all other Russian sabotages, including a murder plot against a CEO, burning warehouses and factories all across Europe?
"55% of EU citizens agree with providing weapons to Ukraine, even
though data indicate a downward trend in support for this measure over time"[0]
If you draw the line with being normal at supporting Ukraine or not, then I'm afraid 45% of Europeans aren't normal anymore, and the number is growing. Must be pretty expensive for Russia to pay 200 milions of spies/trolls.
The point is, your reference to this group (those who don't simply wish to cave into Putin's suite of territorial demands as a price tag for ending the conflict) as a "faction" when in fact they've been not just a majority, but a solid majority of the European population for 2+ years now -- was rather shifty and dodgy.
Suggestive of a basic attitude of disregard for factual accuracy in regard to such things.
Threads like this are ... really scary. Way more scary than the actual acts. I sometimes wonder if I am out of touch with the zeitgaist or these people are just brigading trolls.
> I'd be very interested to see how France responds.
I'd be interested to see if French businesses that chose to ignore the atrocities committed by Russia finally withdraw from that market.
France has a number of large businesses that are still cosy with Russia: Auchan, Leroy Merlin, Decathlon, L'Oreal, Sanofi, Lacoste, BIC… the list is very long (see https://leave-russia.org/).
I thought these companies would be concerned with customer boycotts, but it doesn't seem that people care that much, I guess until rockets and drones start falling on their heads…
It could be Russia, but it could also be any political movement in France, such as far-left movements, opposing the Olympics or the government in general.
Edit: to clarify, I'm French, and this exact same modus operandi has been used by far-left movements in the past to disrupt high-speed lines; if you have solid arguments against my theory, I suggest you address them before blindly downvoting.
I'm struggling to try and find information on "exact same modus operandi has been used by far-left movements in the past to disrupt high-speed lines" can you provide some links?
> Edit: to clarify, I'm French, and this exact same modus operandi has been used by far-left movements in the past to disrupt high-speed lines; if you have solid arguments against my theory, I suggest you address them before blindly downvoting.
The only remotely similar case is Tarnac, and it is ludicrous to even compare it with what is happening today. Tarnac was one line interrupted with a very different (and less destructive) method. Today was a coordinated attack at a much wider scale in a short amount of time. You would be hard press to find any far-left organization in France with the capacity to even approach such an operation.
Its also SNCF, which less than a year ago basically threatened to go on strike during these olympic games unless they got an exception to the retirement age reform (exception which they got). CGT-Cheminots (which is the main union) is the most despicable railworkers union in the world.
Think what you want about cheminots, but one thing they all love and will never attack is railway infrastructure.
SNCF may be a shitty company (mainly because it have been voluntary sabotaged by governments) but the people making those thousands of trains run everyday all over the country are almost the most passionate workers you could imagine.
Yes they do have revendications, yes, they are good at striking, but they’ll never destroy the hardware and infrastructure they love and defend.
Mainly because they respect it (railway is working because thousands people are working together to make it work) and also because of safety reasons : SNCF is one of the safest train network in the world because the cheminot culture puts safety on top of any other preoccupations.
They’ll never harm infrastructure and never, never ever in a coordinated way.
Also, when you criticize cheminots and SNCF, which I agree are far from perfect corporation and company and deserves criticism, don’t forget to look at the rest of the world and you’ll discover that most countries in the world would love to have our train network. It’s easy to brag about having imperfect things but it’s also easy to forget that at least we have them.
>people making those thousands of trains run everyday all over the country are almost the most passionate workers you could imagine.
I would probably also be really passionate about all the treasures I amassed by successfully threatening to strike at opportune moments. France is lucky EDF workers at nuclear plants or other critical infrastructure aren't so "passionate".
>They’ll never harm infrastructure and never, never ever in a coordinated way.
I mean, given the sort of attacks that happened, you can already be pretty certain that whoever did them had very good inside information about how the network works.
No. Pjerem obviously knows cheminots - they worship rail infrastructure. Labour conflicts involving cheminots are often brutal, but harming the rail infrastructure is a taboo never transgressed.
In general, in labour conflicts across any industry, destroying the very instruments that provide legitimate power as a worker is so stupid that it is just not done.
I would love to think like you, but one of the legacies of Martinez(and now Binet) is that CGT is now so openly political in terms of higher ups that such things can be outsourced to some left wing militias.
Not suggesting Figaro is unbiased, but they are already reporting possible left wing involvement:
... Yes, that might be a _little_ extreme for [check notes] disrupting the trains. I mean, maybe if it was Switzerland, but I don't think France takes train punctuality quite _that_ seriously.
do you honestly believe France is going to engage in direct military action against Russia? even for HN-distortion-field hallucinations, this is ridiculous
It's a completely mistaken personal viewpoint. The M51 (fully manufactured in France) is highly reliable and well tested. Over the past 18 years, there has only been one failure out of the twelve missiles tested. The most recent successful test took place on November 18, 2023. The missile has a classified range estimated to be around 10,000 km, which is pretty opposed to your statement.
LOL. Or maybe UK was just more transparent in this matters? I hope we never come to a point to depend on France to save World/Europe.. they cannot even take care of their own internal problems.
> they cannot even take care of their own internal problems.
that's a silly take, who can? France, UK, US, pretty much all european countries... it's all a shitshow, every major country has huge internal problem they can't take care of (incl Russia, for that matter)
Even the Western intelligence agencies do not believe that Russia has blown up Nordstream.
The closest narrative they produced were "independent Ukrainians using a sailboat", after which they closed the investigation.
So, whose style is Nordstream? Under Reagan, another Russian-German pipeline was sabotaged.
It is of course possible that Russia did this particular one, but it is not Russia's style. Why now and not in 2022? Why don't they cut Internet cables? Why would they do it when they know there will just be a backlash?
Throwaway account to defend Russia, do not worry about Russia until facts are officially denied
> It is of course possible that Russia did this particular one, but it is not Russia's style. Why now and not in 2022? Why don't they cut Internet cables? Why would they do it when they know there will just be a backlash?
Because Russia likes to pretend it's not them (you know that)
And they have been going around internet cables in an inappropriate way
Well, blowing up Nordstream was clearly against Russian interests, so yeah, nobody believe that the Russian government did.
This one? Anything that messes up with the credibility of NATO governments (and France is one of the pillars of NATO) could help Russia. Which of course doesn't prove that it is Russia, either.
That is not the case. The initial Western reaction in the weeks after the event was:
- Russia did it as a false flag operation to sow distrust between NATO members.
- Russia did it because the long term contracts for Nordstream 1 required them to supply cheap gas, whereas they'd get market prices for the remaining pipeline of Nordstream 2.
It is remarkable that all Western agencies have backed off from both claims.
It's not "clearly" against Russian interests given that Russia was already withholding supply with a myriad of various transparent excuses at the time, and using their German-based but Russian-owned companies to prevent Germany from stockpiling natural gas (they owned the storage), which ultimately resulted in Germany nationalizing those companies.
> It is of course possible that Russia did this particular one, but it is not Russia's style. Why now and not in 2022?
Because now there's a major event happening in France, where disruptions will be shown globally and affect people from many places congregating for a singular event. It shames France on the global stage, Putin likes shaming leaders who he thinks are weak.
> Why don't they cut Internet cables? Why would they do it when they know there will just be a backlash?
Internet cables have much more redundancy than a rail network, you can't route trains around the world to get to their destination just some hundreds of milliseconds delayed, it's disruptive but workarounds are embedded in the design of the system, not so much with rail during peak summer season in a very touristic country while hosting a major sporting event.
Do you think Russia really cares about the backlash? They keep pushing the boundaries to test responses, what kind of backlash do you think France would give to a nuclear power while they can't show with 100% certainty was Russian? That's the MO of Russia, I don't understand why you are trying to defend it.
Terrorists surely want as much, rapid, coverage of their acts as possible (even if not wanting anyone to know they're terrorist acts). If internet were out that probably makes the acts less impactful.
So quick to create or fully believe in speculations and obviously biaised media (well, I don't believe one moment that there's purely neutral media or that I would be able to recognize it with certainty, but the BBC, lol).
I'd like to remind you that the World Wars started because of alliance networks like these, with countries like mine clearly taking sides for not-so-obvious reasons. And not because of caricatures of cartoon baddies that dwarf what the Catholics and Ottomans made of Vlad Tepes.
Even the political group "Les verts" is quite radical in their language. And those groups like "Les Soulèvements de la Terre" want a violent green revolution.
Why would it be more probable ? How would they be able to organise a coordinated attack spread out so much, and how would they have procured the necessary explosives?
And most of all, why would they attack high speed rail infrastructure which is one of the greenest ways of transportation?
No, it wouldn't make any sense for an "eco-terrorist" group to do it in this way. Same as it doesn't make sense for an Islamic terrorist group.
This has Russia written all over it, from the methods to the Russians already arrested to the fool bragging about it yesterday in Bulgaria.
Not at all what they announced according to the linked article. It's quite literally the opposite really, do you read French or did you Google translate? 'action de masse' roughly mean assembling somewhere to disrupt anything with a mass of people, to many to get arrested. If they wanted to stop a train, they would have invaded a train station (or multiple ones).
The first article is about disturbing the olympic torch relay, and the second one is about various protests, e.g. against a freeway and a logistics center. Nothing about trains.
ecologists from our German neighbor closed the lowest-carbon energy available (nuclear) to open coal facilities. I wouldn't bet on the brains of the average european ecologist.
on a more serious note, even if train is low-carbon, this could be seen as an anti-olympics protest which ecologists claim is an ecological disaster.
There are long-established objections to nuclear from supposed green groups, making that understandable.
There are no similarly held opposition to trains/mass transit. Indeed, as the parent indicates, trains appear to have unanimous support from green factions.
Indeed, and our ecologists promote train a lot. But given the timing, I can imagine the rationale of this being an attack on the olympics and not on train, simply because train is attackable and plane not.
You are describing those as 2 distinct groups, but in reality those 2 are, even if indirectly, very well connected. Le pen is sponsored (almost) directly by russia, just listen to what she keeps saying, she ain't stupid. So are other extreme right or left wing parties (or just very corrupt popular individuals) across whole Europe. There is no greater ideology, just raw destabilization so they take whoever fits the bill, I wouldn't be even surprised with isis in some way.
Russia has 1 very clear long term goal, from way before they invaded Ukraine in 2014 - making Europe as weak as possible, while extracting as much money as possible. With this optic, their approach is methodical and steady, and its up to us to decide how to react. Germany's Scholz (and Merkel before, god she really did tons of damage across whole EU security wise) took the bait quite some time ago.
A nuclear submarine on 24/7 patrol with 16 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each with 6-10 independent nuclear warheads, says otherwise.
So does the capabilities to deploy forces and fully sustain them independently anywhere in the world, something which at most 4-5 other countries can do.
You think anybody would choose national seppukku ? Great buddy, you launched your nukes with your big ass subz... now what do you think is going to happen? You think superpowers got no nukes close to France ? You'll be vaporized into nuclear waste gas before most of your nukes fly half the way. More realistically, you'd try to think how can France hurt superpowers economically: guess what, it can't.
Most democracies tolerate a degree of social chaos since self expression and freedom of action are part of the culture.
Dictatorships on the other hand are terrified of their own people, and so crush and expression of freedom that they don't directly approve (see for instance the lady that was arrested in Moscow for standing in public with a blank piece of paper).
However in times of threat from an external force, then people group together and there's more cohesion. Would a democracy like France press the button to protect themselves or an ally under such circumstances? Yes, I think they would.
However these societies are not run by a single small cell of egotistical leaders like feudal courts of old as current autocracies are. The question is more, would these deranged autocracies have the dumb courage to risk annihilation by directly attacking the democracies they hate? Doubt it.
... Wait, which are these _non_-chaotic nuclear armed countries? Like, US: Jan 6th and all that. Russia: At least one major military coup in the last year. Britain: Brexit, new prime minister every three weeks, all infrastructure more or less at point of collapse. France: well, 'nuff said.
You could maybe argue China, I suppose? Though I think they're just better at keeping the chaos boiling just below the surface.
Social chaos? Revolt is part of France's DNA, since 1789. What country can claim to have no social problems? Moreover, military action and social issues are separate matters and I don't see the link with "pressing the button". Stop french bashing please.
You can imagine whatever you want. The fact is that France is concretely prepared, "when shit hits the fan, it won't be able to answer accordingly" is a random dude-on-the-internet opinion
Thank you random dude-on-the-internet for your opinion. There is however enough information about SIGINT x French Missiles in the internet. Go and find them.
It makes no sense. The whole point of nuclear weapons is deterrence (so "theory"). The moment you actually have to use them ("practice") everybody involved loses. And the uninvolved too.
As a nuclear armed power that has shown far more propensity for military intervention outside their borders (see Africa) than all other nato members I wouldn’t bet against the French here.
» “These games are for the athletes who have been dreaming of them for years and fighting for the holy grail of standing on the podium – and someone’s sabotaging that for them,” she said.
» More than 45,000 police officers, 10,000 soldiers and 2,000 private security agents are being deployed
Here it is written, games are for athletes, not for people who live in Paris. City of a few million people grinds to a halt, for several weeks.
Paris does not even get any money for this "privilige", they have to pay for their own abuse!
It really depends on where in the city you live - I live in the north of Paris and so far this has not affected me in any way. In fact, I already went to a couple of Olympic matches (a bunch of sports have started already), and I'm enjoying it immensely.
The city center had restricted access for about a week and is completely inaccessible for 2-3 days, which sucks for the people that live and work there, but it's a far cry from the `several weeks` you mentioned. I think folks are blowing the impact of the opening ceremony way out of proportion.
If done right project like the Olympics can be a chance to push forward all those needed projects that you never get approved because NIMBYdism:
A new subway line? Normally no, but you know: Olympics.
Mega events can be used by cities to justify needed large infrastructure projects. Funding guidelines usually are weakened; the people working on the projects tend to think their work actually does matters and last but not least: there is a hard deadline, so no excuse for needing just 2 more years.
Some cities in Germany greatly benefited from the football WM.
Indeed. We got a bunch of stuff in Atlanta from them and actually came out revenue positive. And it could be argued that the Olympics is what helped propel Atlanta to the place it is today as the Capital of the South and a second tier city. Some cities have come out much worse for the wear but it's often down to the competency and corruption of the local politics and local committee for the games.
It's really for the local politicians who have likely paid billions of euros worth of other people's money for the glory of holding an Olympics. The modern Olympic movement went off track when it decided to move the event to a new city every 4 years with new stadiums instead of maintaining a permanent Olympic location like the ancient Greeks did.
No, it's mostly a move from Macron who which he could host the Olympics on his second term, for glory. Hidalgo mostly though about the long-term positive implication for the city of Paris, something nice to put on her CV and the money that came along the responsibility.
French population and Parisians didn't have a word about it.
The Paris bid was submitted in 2015, and remained the only one in 2017 (a few cities pulled out in 2016-2017, the last one in February 2017), getting officially ratified in September 2017.
Macron was elected in May 2017, two years after the Parisian bid was submitted, and months after it remained the only one.
I was just listening to a podcast, where they said that they are shipping homeless and refugees to smaller towns around France, so I guess Paris gets a little something out of it. The real losers here are the French people, especially the ones in more rural areas, with smaller budgets(we're talking towns of 5000 people).
While technically correct, it's also misleading, because there's a new bidding process that aims to eliminate contests. There's now a "Continuous Dialogue" with everybody interested, and IOC then uses opaque criteria to select "Preferred Hosts" for "Targeted Dialogue".
While there were initially 5 bids for the 2024 olympics, 3 of those were withdrawn before the session to look at them even started.
Given the spate of withdrawals, and that half the bids had also been withdrawn for the 2022 Winter Olympics, the IOC decided to just allocate 2024 and 2028 directly to the two bidders left to not take risks over 2028.
Paris was the only city too for 2024, the only other city was Los Angeles who will host the 2028 Olympics. They won the contest together and the two cities decided together which one will host the first of the summer games. Los Angeles didn't really care about the year so Paris stick with 2024.
Obviously it's not about the 0.1% that are athletes, but about the 0.01% that are making big money out of it. And the one caring for those are the one governing us.
I'm surprised they don't get held in Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and that part of the world. They have the cash and inclination to buy the world cup, F1 races, golf competitions etc - why not buy the olympics too?
If you have the infrastructure already, they bring in money. Salt Lake City and Atlanta I believe were both able to make them profitable or at least mostly breakeven.
In Paris? Doubtful.
It's not like Paris need the olympics to be full of tourists.
I read of very good editorial a few weeks ago regarding these games and how unliked they are in France. The journalist remarked that hosting the games is mostly a PR move from a city and, that if there is one thing Parisian could be counted on for, it's not caring about their own image in the rest of the world, leading to some kind of paradoxical situation here.
Paris is already a huge tourism destination - so it's not going to benefit from increased name recognition, or "putting the city on the map" like a less well known city might. Those hotel rooms were going to get booked at the height of summer, olympics or not.
And cities the size of Paris often don't really benefit from expanding tourism - tourism jobs generally lower average salaries. And they're not just poorly paid, they're also often seasonal work.
The main benefit is when there was a bunch of infrastructure you wanted to upgrade anyway, and having a strict deadline helps stop schedule over-runs.
Whataboutism is a word for your audacity of accusing others of what you do yourself (you know you do, they know you do) based on your confidence of being able to exclude opponents from the discussion.
> Take the damn kiddy gloves off and let Ukraine use your weapons as they see fit.
Ukraine already conducts attacks on Russian forward operating bases in Crimea and Donbas. And, by the way, these aren’t carried out just by Ukraine. US drones and satellites are used to perform reconnaissance. French and UK military personnel are likely programming the Storm shadow missiles. Talking about SS, when was the last time those were used?
It’s not like the west has an unlimited stockpiles. The European NATO members are low on everything right now. What should US do? Supply Ukraine with Minutemen missiles?
Ukraine is demonstrating an inhuman amount of self-restraint at the moment.
Everybody would love to see the aggressor get what's coming to them (quite deservedly), but I think they're wisely choosing to remain on the right side of history to refrain from becoming just as bad as the Russians, and so maintain their essential humanity, which the brutal Russians have clearly lost, or never had.
It’s the same brand of hybrid warfare Putin employs when he sends thousands of migrants to Polands border. Keep pushing inch by inch and boil the frog.
I haven’t lost my cool mate don’t worry. We just need to eliminate the most odious piece of excrement that snivelling cleptostate has produced in the last 50 years, and everyone can get back to enjoying peace and prosperity, including the Russian people.
This was widespread attacks at key points that are by their nature physical. You need a lot of people to do this though, and while trains are affected there is no affect on cars and coaches, or planes, or the metro or rer etc.
Crowdstrike, yes, that showed how fragile the IT ecosystem is, and I’d like to see the CTO and CISOs being held to account for the single points of failure. It will never happen though.
Russia will never learn as long as they get to break every international law possible, but their opponents play by the rules. They respect only force, which so far West has been unwilling to use. Obviously direct military confrontation with Russia is undesirable, but the West could employ the very same tactics they use in the EU, or those tactics they use against political opponents in their own country.
It's unfair only opponents of Putin accidentally fall out of their apartment windows.
There are more efficient and effective ways to undermine the Kremlin regime than risking blackops assets on torching a couple of train lines, which would be repaired within a day anyway.
Should really just start with kicking out increasing amount of diplomats and auctioning off frozen assets to pay for the recovery post some kind of legitimate trial.
I never liked that sabotage was never considered a precursor for war but unfortunately we've been in the situation of allowing sabotage for a long time so now its considered not an act of war.
To call the picture you're attempting to paint in this thread simplistic in the extreme would be generous. This is a proxy war and I suspect you know that.
After a lifetime of being subjected to the Kremlin's whims, first in Europe, and then in the USA, here are my 2 cents:
The mentality that we must adopt should be that of an animal trainer.
Every single bad behavior by the Kremlin needs to be met with a noticeable negative response. When things like this, or the bombing of the children's hospital in Kyiv, receive no specific training response... then the animal will not learn that it was bad behavior. It will continue to push the boundaries, and there will be more defecation in our living rooms.
I am sorry to put this in such blunt terms, but this is where we are today.
Hmm. America can't even do anything about 100k deaths from Chinese fentanyl. Thanks to bigcorps China and Russia are more powerful and there is anything anybody could do.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240726-sabotage-on-f...