hckrnws
Starlink ground station in Poland hit by fire in suspected arson attack
(notesfrompoland.com)
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by giuliomagnifico
by giuliomagnifico
These are the large clusters of antennas that communicate with the satellites and connect the Starlink network to the Internet on Earth. Looks like one of these was set on fire.
https://starlink.com/support/article/45d1d256-171e-0f67-4895...
From the perspective of network design, the fact that this certainly is not exhaustive list of places where SpaceX has physical DC presence and physical reality it comes that some of these datacenters are selected based on the fact that the ground station is somewhere nearby (I would be surprised if there is even just one place on the list where nearby means "on the roof", because there is a lot of technical, logistical and administrative reasons why you do not want to put such a thing at a roof of a datacenter).
SpaceX groundstations look a bit different, they are a bunch of white domes about 1-2m in diameter, usually 8 or 9 of clustered together.
Here's an example in the UK: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Zy61dfdyp5xrq4w1A
It's handled by Arqiva here in the UK it seems, so no SpaceX branding on anything.
SpaceX also applied for two new grounds station sites in the UK, one a few miles West of Telehouse, south of Rainham. The other site is up in Harlow, Essex.
(I don't think any of this is secret, all of the info above can be found with some googling and scrolling in maps.)
The ground stations look like this. https://www.srf.ch/static/cms/images/1280w/o-dpr-2/2aa021.we...
I am surprised to learn from both satellite and street view imagery that this site is located just <50m off a public road (in clear line of sight) and within a residential backyard partly behind the house on the block, and protected by a 1.2-1.5m high white picket fence. To be fair, the lack of almost any visible security deterrent may perhaps scare off an attacker because... security surely wouldn't be that non-existent? My only other thought is these sites really do not matter to Starlink because Starlink will have 1000's of them and as they only process encrypted data, almost anyone can run a ground station for a small reimbursement per month if they've got semi-decent fibre connectivity and a bit of power?
Edit: oh I think? I understand now, these basically relay the internet itself up to the satellites - so your individual starlink dish is still talking directly to a satellite but the satellite resolves your request for a website through these ground stations. I think?
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One thought is to pretend to not know that it's Russia, and invoke it against an "unidentified adversary".
https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-attacks-disrupt-intern...
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/lka-brandanschlag-muenchen-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/technology/elon-musk-ukra... (2022)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-ukraine-russia-war-st... (2023)
Now he is apparently Ukraine's best friend and evil Russia attacks his Starlink!
Of course there is no possibility that a) one of Elon's many enemies did it, b) it was a Ukrainian false flag or c) Russia did it and Musk has been deep state all along like Thiel.
I must say a web/world without them and the quatari /iranian influence operations would be pleasant.
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As a person living in the west, but contrary to most of Ukraine's fans here, knowing a bit more about whats going on there, you are deluded by your propaganda.
First, this is not "Putin's war". Maybe it was to some extent at the start, though you forget Donbass and west backed repressions against people considering themselves as Russians in Ukraine.
But by now it is you - yes, you - who wage war against every Russian person in the world, who does not deny reality.
It is a fact that you put Russians at the same position with regards to you, as jews were in nazi Germany. You can claim it is "propaganda", but it is for Russians to decide, and not by their killers.
You are bloody murderers, and we will not forget.
I don't want to see my fave HNers all get banned for rare but deadly infractions (although I can see something like the above comment written by myself)
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Isn't that skipping over the more sensible middle ground of a VPN, which is what is more common for at least small or medium sized business customers of mobile networks.
Very much depends on your applications. Some critical communications you don't want to trust to the internet at all. Some communication latency is important and so you can save a few MS by locating in such a data center. Some communication takes a lot of bandwidth and both of you want a cache in the data center to avoid use of the large pipes (youtube for example has servers in various colocation points just to cache the popular videos). Many small/medium businesses don't have a good data center, they outsource that to someone else, and starlink is just as good as anyone else (check all the fine print on the contract to see if this is true for your needs)
I haven't checked recently, but the FBI/CIA (I'm not sure which, but probably both) had 4-5 completely isolated networks, no connection to any other network. Once a computer was connected to an isolated network it would be destroyed when the lifespan was up - thus ensuring that classified data could not leak off the network. When they needed to connect to other locations they bought a separate fiber connection the entire way - the fiber would be in the same bundle as internet traffic, but otherwise isolated. (There are several cases where a virus got onto such a network despite the isolation so this isn't perfect, but...)
1) you send a signal to the satellite
2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station
3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP
The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.
Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.
With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.
Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:
Customer - satellite - ground station - internet
The signal can go from:
customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.
This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.
Arguably Starlink's special sauce is quantity of satellites and massively higher bandwidths combined with high-gain, electronically steered beams on both sides (i.e. terminal and satellite).
None of these are net-new as technologies: We've had LEO based telecommunications satellites for over two decades now (Iridium and Globalstar, the former of which even has in-space forwarding as well), as well as directional beams on both sides, but rarely all in one system and never at this scale.
The phased array antenna is also a function of this. Each satellite is moving so much that you need to have an antenna following the satellite across the sky.
So, once Starlink decided to have a low earth orbiting constellation (for better latency and bandwidth), the other features (quantity and a steerable antenna) became requirements to have a functional system.
As for steered terminals, you actually only really need these once you have more than one satellite visible in the sky at the same time. Without that, they’re purely a power efficiency feature.
"because LEO" don't explain why Starlink is like million times cheaper and faster than competitors while singlehandedly being reponsible for like 75% of man-made objects in space currently and past.
the original concept arts called for lazer beam sat2sat dynamic mesh relaying packets globally. that didn't quite happen.
what did happen was sats and terminals refreshed like tech products and not like military tanks. decades old standards are slow. all their competitors usd decades old everything.
their launch count is off by two digits. like 10x by reuse and stacked 10x by cash. that amount of cash appearing from somewhere is the difference.
There's a lot of RF emissions right there.
Macron famously said that he would "have to send troops to Odesa" and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine and Russia has captured even more territory and is now actively bombarding Kyiv.
The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.
This might've been the reality three years ago. A lot has changed in the US in the last three years.
Nobody wants to invoke article 5, I do agree. But I think they might understand that it's more likely that A5 is invoked than the US brokers a peace to with anybody. They're the department of war now.
Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.
The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.
The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.
100% agree.
In fact, Russia should be investing heavily in ensuring that nobody else goes asymmetric against NATO countries.
Anything more means countries go to war time funding of some sort. Would you accept if the law made buying or working on video games illegal for the duration - that is everybody currently making a video game now has to switch to working on something military related.
I just pulled the above example out of my head randomly, there are plenty of other "non-essential" jobs that could switch to making bombs, shells, tanks, airplanes... (either manufacturing or engineering).
Yes, and the playbook extends to some anti-war orgs throughout Europe who play the role of useful idiots by advocating things such as a) pressure your government to stop supporting Ukraine, b) force Ukraine to capitulate and agree to Russia's demands. They do so under the guise of "no to war, yes to peaceful negotiation" but the way they neglect Ukraine's best interests and push Russia's maximalist agenda is pretty telling.
The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.
If you know something the world doesn't know, you'd better get cracking at updating the Wikipedia article documenting the issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
Article 5 doesn't mean what most people think it means... it's literally "we might help, somehow, somewhen, if we feel like it, in whatever way we want, maybe, maybe just by publishing an official warning to not do it again 'or else'"
> This assistance may or may not involve the use of armed force, and can include any action that Allies deem necessary to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Also, giving up the control of when to declare war or not would be something no country would willingly give up.
Lately there’s been this push with talking points like yourself, and I’m not trying imply something about you specifically, but it is interesting with the timing and the goal of undermining NATO as a defensive military alliance.
The article only states that an attack on one is an attack on all. Further reactions aren't spelled out. It can go from "yeah, we recognize it, have a nice day" to "let's send nukes" That ambiguity has some value as the idea was that it discourages any offensives as reactions were unpredictable.
But Russia is testing the limits. They did it in Ukraine, where there were some "green men" strolling arouns in eastern Ukraine, which then lead to occupation of Crimea which all didn't lead to much of a reaction, so they escalated further till full scale invasion.
In parallel we see those things in NATO/EU territories. One could start at murdering Georgians in Berlin's Tiergarten park, planes accidentally entering Polish air space, drones near airports or military facilities ... always testing the reaction. Mostly actions which don't warrant forceful reactions, while testing how quickly the escalation spiral is turning.
> Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.
So triggering Article 5 means reporting an armed attack to the Security Council.
Germany says Russia behind Leipzig airport drone attack https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ylm3m67n2o
and
Russia ‘planning drone attacks on southern Europe’, CIA warns https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/09/24/russia-pla...
My fav being Swedish is Iran paying ""Swedish"" youth gangsters to bomb Israeli ambassies in Sweden and Norway...
https://www.reuters.com/world/swedish-security-service-says-...
We are already at war but no widespread panic... yet...
Probably not as likely as you think.
First, these things intentionally fall short of clear "armed attacks" and are designed around plausible deniability.
Second, Europe/NATO are not looking for a fight. Russia is in a bad spot right now, but NATO is not in a great spot for a kinetic conflict with Russia either.
Lastly, I don't think NATO countries are eager to test America's willingness to defend Europe under the Trump administration because they already know the likely answer when they call for help.
It is a sad state of affairs.
- you got Kushner and his ilk who basically wants to flatten Gaza to turn it into a real estate hotspot to make untold amounts of money
- you got the Evangelical nutcases who legitimately believe that this mess is a holy war and will bring back Jesus [1]
- you got your usual old-school falcons, MIC lobbyists etc. that stand to make a lot of money and/or want this war to happen for ideological reasons
- you got a ton of isolationists who want "an end to the US wars that cost taypayer money"
- you gotTrump himself who openly admires strongmen and (wannabe) dictators, and I think it's fair to classify Netanyahu as both.
And that is a loooot of different to incompatible interests to balance against each other.
[1] https://theconversation.com/evangelical-holy-war-why-some-ch...
What we have been seeing is this gradual escalation. It's like boiling a frog slowly. Each escalation is too small to trigger a significant response, but after a while you suddenly notice that your country is burning.
I expect more of this in the near future. I wish the world stopped treating Russia as "just another business partner".
Russia could hit back in the same way easily, and to some degree they do. But their problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia - until they got that in May 2024, Ukraine understandably did not risk alienating their suppliers by doing that.
There aren't very many new lines of escalation crossed here. Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now - many hawks in the west haven't been shy about describing it as such either.
It's a significant step to escalate to attacking those countries.
> Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now
It is an interesting argument to choose to invade a country, act with faux outrage when they find allies willing to supply them with arms and then call it a proxy war.
Russia got themselves into this mess. They have an easy way to get out of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare or hybrid warfare is designed to avoid full military action. But the tit for tat escalation in kind can lead to real war.
Yes it must be obvious for Ukraine to use people who are already in Russia to help with local sabotage. It could be as as crude as putting rocks on a rail line or as simple as floating toy balloons across a strategic installation until the local Russian defenses get tired of the false alarms, stop paying attention and don't see an incoming drone.
It's surprising that there are apparently no strong claims of this from either side, but especially from the Russian side. I don't agree that Russia has nothing to gain from arresting people for such activities. Wouldn't it deter others?
When Israel starts bombing Turkey with US made weapons, NATO may invoke Article 5 again but I doubt the US will do anything.
And before you or someone else claims otherwise, the US did not request activating Article 5, repeatedly said it did not need NATO resources, and never took the invoking seriously. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_NATO_Article_5_contingenc...> But feel free to continue to brag about how the deployment of seven NATO aircraft for a year, and a few ships in the Mediterranean, totally saved the USA.
(No, ISAF was not an Article 5 operation, thus the participation of the likes of Mongolia.)
The defender is fundamentally at a disadvantage with all or nothing clauses like article 5
That's why USA is bombing Iran without everyone else bombing Iran. Article 5 hasn't been invoked.
What would this hypothetical response look like?
This is a fundamental principle of NATO as a defensive alliance, have always been and will continue to be.
Now you have voices, coming mostly from outside, that are trying to make this out to be a bad thing and to show some kind og weakness in the alliance, when it is one of the core tenants of the alliance itself.
Which is what Putin would want to justify a new wave of troop mobilizations and forced conscription.
And just invoking Article 5 is unlikely to wind up immediately looking like tanks rolling across the Polish border into Russia the next day, sweeping through into Moscow and deposing Putin in a week--which is fantasy for multiple reasons.
The response would be measured and probably wouldn't go much beyond no-fly zones over the borders, and NATO forces shooting down Russian drones over Russian territory to start with.
But this would get Putin the justification for conscription that he wants. It would also provoke further debate in NATO member states over the costs of getting further sucked into a war with Russia, and Putin wants to use that in his propaganda war to strengthen the right wing in NATO states.
And Ukraine may be very vulnerable right now if Russia can figure out new combined arms tactics in a drone-saturated battlefield and restore maneuver warfare to the front. Combining that with bad weather in the winter, and 100,000s of newly conscripted troops for a zerg rush into the meatgrinder, and Ukraine could wind up in a very bad situation.
This whole war is on much more of a knife-edge than the propaganda from both sides suggests. And political reality limits what NATO can do as a response to having a Starlink terminal burned down. Be cautious of giving Putin the response that he wants to elicit.
also, a friendly reminder that all willing parties are free to go fight Russia right now. https://ildu.mil.gov.ua/
Sufficient assistance can be given to the Ukrainians without deploying troops to the battlefield so that the Russians are pushed out completely. Losing Crimea would be Putin's death knell.
not really. The operation accomplished all the goals: it removed the current leadership of Iran. Of course the results where completely predictable: meet the new leadership - same as the old one (often just the children of the old). Lets not pretend that it didn't get the intended results. It just got some other unintended results as well (which were mostly predictable)
There are limits to what war can accomplish. Depending on how you fight the war you can get different long term results.
It would still be extremely unpleasant, painful and expensive, of course; winning an exchange of blows still means taking a load of punches to the face. So the true winner would be China.
Neither Putin nor his associates are religious fanatics happy to die for their cause, they're just money-loving strongmen. If faced with real danger they'd much rather do whatever they could to avoid dying, not risk being martyred.
No one wants to go near that because everyone will reliably die.
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In that light, it's not many leaps and bounds to assume that of the two, Russia is certainly "suffering" more in the grand scheme when viewed from the perspective of sunk cost fallacy. Their goal was to blitz the country in one month. 4 years later, Half a million confirmed dead, no western support, endless sanctions directly affecting the working class. That working class has been in a war economy against a foe who's GDP (nominally, no outside help considered) is 12 times smaller than it.
Naturally this is not ideal, and on the other side, Ukraine has suffered massive territory and personell loss. But having the world "behind" you and not needing to support a gargantuan economy/civil base allows them to always "spring back" more. Esp with western assistance, and especially if there is still territory to defend.
of course, all of this is moot if Russia ends up controlling ukraine. But at current pace, it will take roughly 10 million dead and 20 more years (minimum) of this form of warfare for ukraine to "fall". THat seems like losing.
When they have to conscript in Moscow Putin will be in trouble.
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Help Ukraine with intelligence (beyond current), black hat, sabotage within Russia. Arrest and confiscate from oligarchs and their relatives abroad. Flood Russia with counterfeit and defective electronics goods.
Moving knowledge workers to munitions factories is the 1940 solution. We can do better than that.
Frankly, "the West" doesn't care about Russia. They were a gas station masquerading as a country, but now they aren't even a gas station. Let's just fund Ukraine to the gills and in no time they won't even be good for petty vandalism.
Russia has indeed been funding and supporting fringe/extremist organizations throughout Europe.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/10/29/from-moscow-with-chaos-h...
However, even those parties that toe Moscow regime's line don't want to be caught supporting it directly due to the expected backlash.
That goes to show how much "the west" cares about what Moscow says.
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Still seems like any of Russia, Ukraine or Ukrainian citizens on their own initiative could have dove it.
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If he actually wanted a deal in place to limit nuclear ambitions and proliferation, he wouldn't have thrown it away in the first place.
This is like the guy who claims that he wanted to stop beating his wife but his brother just wouldn't let him stop.
Let's be clear: nobody forced the US to attack Iran in the first place. There is a reason no president before Trump did what Trump did: defense and intelligence officials have known for a very long time how such an attack was likely to play out and how disastrous it would be for the region, the US and the global economy.
Trump was warned by senior intelligence and defense officials and he chose to ignore their advice because he's a very stable genius who knows better than anyone else.
My country, Norway, had a long-standing policy of not selling weapons to countries at war - yes even to the attacked party - because of the common understanding that would be tantamount to joining the war, and make us the target of reprisals. This prohibition also was a good shield against accusations of war profiteering or proxy warfare.
That policy which had been standing for 60+ years, was dropped for Ukraine.
I figure a majority in Norway would have been willing to support Finland with more than just arms deliveries had they been the victim (would you agree with that?), so sending some cash + weapons to Ukraine seems consistent policy to me.
And I'm sure statesmen like the Stoltenbergs would have defended this policy very eloquently, better than me, back when it was official policy...
And sure, it was broadly popular to get rid of this policy for Ukraine's benefit. It wasn't a hard sell to the public majority. Saying "let's take a step back and think principled about this" was the hard sell, as usual.
Killing people is bad
Murderers must be fought back with maximum force
We can supply force
So we should
And it not dropped to cater to Ukraine, as it specifically has a carve-out for legal defensive war, which the Russian war of aggression towards Ukraine is.
It gives a list of the changes (or "clarifications") to the policy over the years. To the degree there ever was a carve-out for legal defensive war, it was certainly added after Ukraine.
Actually there were two phases: in 2022 they defend giving weapons to Ukraine in that it was a donation, not a commercial endeavor (that suggests to me that they implicitly admitted, commercial sales would have been against the policy). Then in 2024, they allowed direct commercial sales as well. Of course their defense lawyers will say the policy is still in place, but "realism" again: you can't blame Russia for not being convinced by that.
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There is no argument that they are neutral.
But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.
North Korea is supplying actual troops to Russia, and that doesn't mean Ukraine is at war with North Korea. Belarus and Iran have both supplied arms to Russia and Ukraine isn't at war with either.
Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
> Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Is it so hard to see why Russia doesn't see things that way?
"Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
Yeah, they probably didn't expect it to turn into that when they attacked - they probably hoped it'd be all over in a week with a regime change in Kyiv. It's now they're thinking, shit, we were goaded into another Afghanistan. Which again, is not a way western hawks are shy of talking about it.
As I point out in a other thread, supplying weapons is pretty normal and attacking random infrastructure in a country that happens to be allied to Ukraine is a significant escalation.
Let me highlight the important part "RUSSIA VIEWS IT AS..."
And that's exactly what they communicate towards their population AS PROPAGANDA.
Whether Putin really sees it that way doesn't matter.
And if stating this makes me a Russian Propagandist, then so be it.
First: Gas is gonna stay reasonably valuable for Europe in the near future, even if electrification of personal transport progresses very quickly.
And there are tons of other valuable ressources Russia has: Nickel, copper, aluminium, steel, ...
> And Russia as a whole will need to pay serious reparations.
I don't see that happening at all. Who is gonna enforce that? Ukraine would be happy enough if they just left.
At the same time, much is made of various sanction packages, which are minuscule in comparison to these flows.
In other words, the EU finances the bombs that will be falling on EU countries in the future.
BTW, Russia will never pay any reparations.
Nowhere near fast enough. The number of senior businesspeople who'd sell out the Baltic states in exchange for cheap gas is far too high.
> On 6 June 2023, The Washington Post reported that an intelligence agency of an unnamed European "close ally" had notified the CIA of a Ukrainian military plan for a covert attack on the pipeline. The plan was to be carried out by a team of divers reporting to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, but the Post did not report any evidence that it had been put into action. The US reportedly learned of the plan three months before the destruction of the pipeline, and shared the intelligence with Germany and other allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage...
Principles, doctrines, ideas aren’t a response (or even an active decision to not respond)
Yes im asking what that response would be.
Say Russia lobs some ordnance at Poland. Kills a kid. Claims it was an accident and definitely totally won’t happen again.
What in your mind does a response look like? Find a Russian kid? March on Moscow? Nukes? Air strike? Angry letter?
Obviously it’s a test and there is a need to push back but how is the tricky bit. Anything you do would be an overtly action against grey zone deniable action.
the intended result was a regime change to eliminate an enemy of Israel. did replacing IRGC moderates with IRGC hardliners accomplish that?
What they accomplished seems reasonable to make a guess at objective around, and regime change by killing the leaders is a reasonable guess considering they did it.
Getting irgc hardliners more power is obviously not a goal. It is what happened of course, but not the goal.
The best example of this that I can think of is the recent Die Linke electoral victory in Berlin. They have the same policy on European security as AfD.
It's a clear example of Horseshoe Theory. Pseudo-intellectuals in Germany may argue that the position is not the same because the motivations are not the same, but if you're sitting in Ukraine, feeling the walls shake, and seeing your pets tremble in terror, you really couldn't give a shit what some leftie in Germany thinks — the result is the same as the openly pro-Kremlin German far-right.
> stellen uns auch gegen die Waffenlieferungen an die Ukraine.
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> "Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
I agree that realism is a much abused word, and I think this is an example of it.
The first part of your sentence is realism: it is not surprising that Russia chooses to treat Western help as taking part in the war. That does not make it true. Advising, supplying and sharing intelligence is not the same as fighting.
The second part is not realism. Realism explains what states do. It does not say who is right, or who has the right to complain. "Don't have a leg to stand on" is a moral judgment, with the word realism put on it.
This is exactly how Russia wants the word to be used. Right after the full invasion started, the Russian foreign ministry shared a Mearsheimer article that blamed the West for the war. The goal is to make Russia's actions look like a natural reaction to the West, so that objecting to them looks naive.
Maybe you don't mean it that way, but going from "unsurprising" to "don't have a leg to stand on" does the same thing.
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There is actually much doubt about that. It rather seems they are content with Ukraine not loosing and draining Russia in the progress with little care what happens to Ukrain except that they keep up the fight.
But NATO members obviously don't want to be spending money on foreign military, so pro-Ukraine spending stays limited to "cost effective" levels.
You make this sound like some nefarious conspiracy by western war-fetishists, when the status quo is basically the obvious outcome given even a little western self-interest.
Yeah, no. That is not how it works, American private companies are not just allowed to provide weapons of war without executive approval. If you remember, Trump is the one who removed Biden's ban on providing them targeting and the intel to hit Russia directly. The entire "Zelensky, please stopping hitting Russian diesel production" Trump thing is just an act - the US holds the keys to their (and the UK/EU, for that matter) ISR feeds.
>> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
> But their [Russia's] problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia
That reads exactly like an argument justifying Russia's actions.
But an alternative commentary with the same facts would have been something like "Russia knew there was wide Western support for Ukraine but thought they would overrun the country before Western nations would be able to provide practical support. They dramatically miscalculated and now are trying to deter Western countries by slowly increasing actions."
This was basically what @jwr said that kicked off this subthread:
> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it.
Seems like a completely reasonable analysis of Russia’s motivations. I don’t see any moral justification there.
