I don't think they look similar, the synchronicity notwithstanding. The sabotage in France was a 250–300 kg rail fragment (per your link). The objects in the Netherlands look much smaller, and look like they're intended to short-circuit two rails to trigger a signal fault. In one place they found car jumper cables with clamps attached to both rails,
Not asserting this is definitely a Russian op (given the amount of simultaneous farmers' protests and all in NL today), but their modus operandi for foreign operations of this kind involves paying random thugs a few hundred to a couple thousand euros to carry out acts of sabotage using whatever items they have on hand. The items don't need to match, the people involved don't need to know each other.
Correct, this is their exact MO and has been for decades. "Random thug" recruitment notwithstanding, part of the point of such ops is to prove to themselves that they can, in fact, reach out and touch a target - i.e., exercising the entire operational chain from C&C down to the minutiae of execution. A kind of integration test for sabotage, if you will. (Not saying this specific incident is or isn't anything in particular, just commenting on the general MO.)
If one were in a charitable mood, one could think of this as a "just in case" measure of ongoing capability assurance in the event of a broader conflict. In a less charitable mood, one might imagine it as preparation for proactive action. In either case, if you don't do this kind of sub-threshold stuff at least occasionally, you often discover that when a real conflict erupts, the capabilities you thought you had are in fact literally or figuratively rusty. (See the Russian army's logistical debacle early in the Ukraine war for a recent example.)
Most top tier nation states do some version of this; each one has its own style. The Russians are somewhat unusual in that they care less than most who knows or suspects them of this kind of activity.
France provides Ukraine with targeting information that allows Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia, including industrial targets. So France is directly contributing to attacks against non-military target in Russia, yes.
Hm, if Russia were to seriously deploy that logic to justify sabotage in European countries (insofar as a kleptocratic dictatorship is ever serious or logical), it could backfire a bit:
1. If France is a sabotage-justified enemy, then so is the US, which provides some intelligence to Ukraine.
2. In the other direction, Russia has been giving targeting information and weapons to Iran to attack the US forces. So if they're the enemy of the US, then certain members of the current Republican administration may have to tone down their "aid and comfort" for Russia lest it mean future treason charges.
>The sinking of Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique, was an act of French state-terrorism carried out on 10 July 1985. The event was described by France as a "covert operation" by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence agency, the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE). During the operation, two operatives (both French citizens) sank the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, Rainbow Warrior, at the Port of Auckland on her way to a protest against a planned French nuclear test in Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship.
Right, but you absolutely need the suspicion. If it's too deniable, it rather loses efficacy. It seems in this situation it could be any number of actors, which rather dilutes any intended message.
> The ideal scenario is everyone suspects it's you but can't prove it.
Why? EU countries have shown time and time again they won't do anything. I mean for God's sake, Russia was caught sending THREE remote controlled flying bomb on a German airfield, with another one found by a passerby before it was launched.
They contained professionally made Russian explosives. There is no doubt who did it. This was not the first, or the 10th time they got caught. I mean Russia murdered someone in the UK with polonium, for God's sake.
The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd. They leave their fingerprints knowing there will be no reaction.
> The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd.
I mean they are. That is the reason they haven’t sent balistic missiles to the same airfield. They could have sent the same agents who placed those drones to the fence of the airport with a shoulder mounted missile and shot down the planes as they were departing. Or even shoot them down on the ground.
Or similarly they could send a submarine and disrupt the railway services of the Netherlands with missiles from that.
Those would be clearly attributable actions which trigger an immediate military response. That is the reason why they don’t do them.
You look at the actions they take and conclude that they don’t have any restraint or worries. But you should also be looking at the actions they could have but did not take to see that they are in fact restrained and probably quite a bit worried. If they werent they would play the game differently.
I think it's to slowly increase offenses _that won't lead to military response_. The response to each individual incident, worse than the one before, kinetic action can be delayed because "this was only a little worse than the last one".
This compounds because NATO needs to act collectively to effectively act militarily (maybe Poland could go it alone).
Really? Unless they are complete morons they realize something. If you take EU governments, any random country, as a general rule government expenditures go like this:
35% pensions (usually also has some health care here)
35% social security and health care
15% education
15% everything else, roads, bridges, government buildings, ... (army is in here @ maybe 5%)
They're also drowning in debt, of the non-tiny, only Germany does better than the US. So they can't realistically borrow to finance this for 5 years. They're trying to cheat, and treat the EU like a separate country (meaning get investors to treat the EU as a separate state that is not on the hook for the debt of member countries but levies it's own taxes, then borrow against that, but EU countries are cheating, for example using money the EU borrowed for military purposes to fund general expenses like fixing roads)
If the EU countries mobilize the army will go to 20-25% of government expenditures easily.
That means either pensions or social security HAVE TO go down 15% (or 7.5% each). That will cause a revolt since a great many people can't survive like that. At that point there will be no choice for a lot of people but to tear the government down.
Because being too blatant will galvanize the public and create support for open war.
The goal is to ensure all reasonable people know, while keeping enough deniability that Russian-funded right-wing groups can sow doubt about attribution and response policy’s
They don’t care whether it can be proven in court or by people paying close attention. They care whether it can’t be denied even by their aligned agents in western countries.
Maybe it depends on the country, but here the public automatically assumes everything like this done by Russia and these increase support for open war. I don't think Russia wants deeper European involvement in the war, so I'm having trouble understanding why Russia would be doing this. They're already having difficulties in Ukraine, how would angering the European public and increasing the support for further involvement help Russia achieve its goals?
Exactly. If anything, the country that would benefit most from heightened Europe-Russia tensions (as a result of these sorts of infrastructure "accidents") isn't even on the continent. I'm not ruling out Russia completely, but it would sure be stupid for them to effect this strategy. Additionally, Russians weren't the ones that blew up a pipeline at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Look up how successful the US has been in getting right wing crazy people elected as the heads of state in nearly every Central and South American country by funding right-wing groups, with the exception of Mexico and Brazil (but top minds are working on this).
Russia has been trying to get locals to elect governments on their side and even revolt and destroy their own countries to do so ... since 1917. They used the red army to make this happen in most of Eastern Europe, half of Asia, Africa, South America, Middle America ... and they're still at it in quite a few places (like Africa). They fought until their state collapsed to change the government in Afghanistan.
Just because the US does something bad, does not mean others don't do 100x worse. In both meanings of the word.
You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
If you wanted you could claim you have evidence, without having any. Doesn't matter.
"This better stop or there will be sanctions, and if its not within your power to stop it, tough luck" is a valid response.
Whether that's wise is another question.
Here's a recent example where Germany so far claimed that it tied the attack to Russia, but whether that's actually true is anyone guess (since there's little publicly verifiable information released so far): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Leipzig_Airport_drone_att...
It wouldn't be terribly surprising if Russia was behind it, but on the other hand it wouldn't be the first false flag incident of this war either.
Well yes technically countries can just attack others. In practice they need to justify those attacks to their allies and populace if they want to maintain the status quo with them. That's where "they started it, we're only defending ourselves" is very helpful.
Romania has reluctantly done exactly that after the drone incident and tensions have escalated. The Romanians closed the Russian consulate in Constanta as a response and sent the consul back to Russia. The Russians sent an hijacked Ukrainian drone that blew up after 5 hours in the port of Constanta just after this. Now they're slowly escalating by periodically sending drones into Romanian airspace or attacking cargo ships bound from/to Odessa while in the Romanian EEZ.
> You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.
First order, maybe. But the clearer the attribution the more political capital there is to act. Just look at the article. We don’t know, and won’t know for a while, if this was caused by Russia or the FDF protestors or who. That is all confusion all kind of actors can use to criticise a government who puts more sanctions on Russia.
This isn’t a show of power. Sabotage works best when your target doesn’t even realize it was sabotage. Similarly it’s best if you misattribute blame because then you’re fighting the wrong party and looking for ghosts.
Russia throwing journalists out of windows or paining with Novachok - that’s a “it’s us, you can’t do anything about it, don’t fuck with us” power signal that benefits from “plausible” deniability - you can’t prove it was us.
If the main point is slowing/frustrating drone production?
It would honestly be kind of fair game to sabotage production of drones that would be used against you, even if they're made in a country you're not at war with --- if it wasn't for Russia having a lot of responsibility for that war in the first place (to put it mildly).
Your analogy is way off base. This is how you've framed it:
> Let's say I [the Netherlands] pay [!?] someone [Ukraine] to punch you [Russia] int the face every day. Then one day when you [Russia] punch me [Ukraine] in the face do I have a right to complain?
Ukraine is defending itself, and nobody is paying Ukraine to do that. Russia is the aggressor here. It's weird that I need to point that out. We're talking about Russia sabotaging someone for selling defensive capabilities to Ukraine. So a better analogy is this:
Let's say I punch you in the face every day. Then one day you buy a baseball bat from Gart Sports to defend yourself, so I go in and punch the manager of Gart Sports. Am I in the wrong?
Yes, very obviously, when you frame the analogy correctly, you are in the wrong.
With you up until there. There's nothing defensive about drones. Retributive capabilities certainly, pre-emptive capabilities maybe, but absolutely offensive capabilities, not defensive ones. Attacking Russia back was a line that was definitively crossed in May 2024. You may argue it was justified, but not that it wasn't attacking. In terms of that stupid punching analogy (which wasn't yours to begin with, I know) this is going over to your bully's neighborhood with that baseball bat.
I mean what I said: if you're being attacked by drones, then no one can fault you for trying to sabotage the production of those drones, even if they're made in a different country than the one which is sending them against you.
But, you can and should fault Russia for getting into that position in the first place, that their neighbor is attacking them back with drones.
I guess no one can fault the West for retaliating by paying people to light stuff on fire in Russia, for deterrence. And I guess no one can blame the West for sending Ukraine more missiles to fire into Russia, to end the war.
Amazes me how the right wing American view point is so anti the “Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back” of libertarian darling Malcolm Reynolds from 25 years ago. Reagan would be spinning in his grave with how Russia has owned the discourse.
There was recently this german lady reporter who posed as actively pro-Putin for few months and it didn't take long for fsb/gru to come to her online.
It started small, just check this or that, little favor there but soon escalated to proper spycraft. Some other folks reported having death threats against family. Its for peanuts, few hundred euros mostly. They just need to find the dumbest and most desperate folks to commit acts of treason.
The chances of this being real are basically zero, or Russia would be getting double agented, and reverse intelling themselves, out the arse. Instead all we get are attempts to connect random events, of which there are endless viable suspects, to Russia.
It's fair to say that if one jumps in the middle of a fight, they should expect to get punched, but it's also fair to say that for now Russia has been avoiding throwing much in the way of punches.
How does some chump who gets paid to stick potatoes into tailpipes* become a double agent? Being a double agent requires the ability to hurt the side you're ostensibly working for. The potato guy can show Telegram chats where a guy called Alexey, or maybe an entirely non-Russian name, gave him a job.
* That actually happened. It was a false flag operation to discredit the Greens (party).
I'm not saying such claims are not being published, I'm saying they're likely false because they make about as much sense as a country blowing up its own pipeline. Espionage outside of war is an extremely sensitive issue, and were any country trivially baitable, they'd end up getting played hard. Not only would it eliminate deniability, but you also open up the door to major counter-intel operations and getting more insight into the operations, potentially on a massive scale, of an adversary.
I suspect this is why there's endless stories, in pretty much every country, of dissidents handing over information to 'enemy states' who are in fact just domestic law enforcement. These people glow to everybody, and no foreign power's going to touch them.
This has been extremely well documented. They are just paying some losers a few hundred euros to throw a molotow cocktail somewhere, that's it. As for the Germans, you know that they investigated the NS incident and are prosecuting the Ukrainian perpetrators. Now when the perpetrators are Russian, everything is fake of course.
It's odd that you would jump to "Russian op" and hedging by _not_ asserting that it is "definitely" one; but it very well could also be and arguably even is far more likely an act by someone who would benefit form scaring the public and manipulating the affected governments. I'm not going to assert at all, one way or another who it may be because it could be several actors with interests in producing outcomes of fear among the public and animating and manipulating the respective governments and the clowns in the EU to take actions without thinking.
It is really a rather common playbook of stoking fear and even instigating war not for direct outcomes that has been used innumerable times over history. Only it seems that the majority of people are incapable of seeing, accepting, or maybe just internalizing when they are being played, lied to, and manipulated for the benefit of others at their own expense.
One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing by some minor event like this, are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions, and they could simply just send barrages of missiles to hit actually meaningful targets if they ever become sick and tired of all the CIA/MI6 clowns thinking they can salami slice their way into conquering Russia and once the Germans and Poles have been whipped up to be the battering ram of minced meat again.
It's why we have so many catastrophic and calamitous events in our history because people never ask themselves who may be benefitting from the act that is immediately used to manipulate people through fear. In spite of having been told and explained a long time ago and many times since, you should always ask you who benefits, cui bono. Russia does not benefit from scaring the populace into supporting the murderous and war mongering governments and the maniacal ruling parasites that control them in order to profit from war as they send your children in to the meat grinder.
> One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
Or one could choose not to take this in isolation from all the acts of brazen and identified sabotage Russia does, slashing deep-sea cables in international waters with their shadow fleets, organizing psyop campaigns throughout the entire continent that can be traced back right to their government units, and so on :-)
"brazen and identified" is doing a lot of work here. IIRC the cable thing was an anchor accident, and everyone is doing psyop campaigns (Western psyops being far more advanced and sophisticated than their enemies). Nord Stream was definitely not an accident and we know who did that.
Implying that Russia somehow invented or is the undisputed leader in "psyops" is a popular hallmark of a low-information civilian, a narrative promoted by arch-propagandists like Peter Pomerantsev and Anne Applebaum.
\One thing that logic would dictate though is that Russia would be extremely low on the list of suspects since they gain nothing and are negatively affected in every manner possible by being in any way behind such actions.
They are known for actions that negatively affect them and everyone around. That's kinda their whole thing.
Look, for me this shit is personal. I am the person whose life the |redacted| makes worse. I get that boring explaination is not exciting to you for the reasons of neurological kind, this is a good enough model with predictive properties that help me be alive and have all my body parts in the factory installed places
The ruling class in Europe needs this war for economic reasons. They're orchestrating and selling it to the public by constant fear mongering and provoking conflict.
Even in a relatively intelligent crowd like this forum, people are gullible and easily guided to hate the Other: red ("communists", Russia, China); brown (immigrants, Muslims, Iran); or green ("far left", environmental and civil rights activists). They hate us for our freedoms!
Be afraid, people, and keep funnelling billions of your tax money into the pockets of the rich who profit from literal conspiracy, mass murder and war crimes. No wonder we have endless conflict and fascism on the rise around the world. There's so much money to be made from war and hate, defrauding the public for generations.
How can we not see it, it's the same playbook again and again. One day we will have to face the true evil, the traitors of humanity, the enemy within.
The last thing ‘the ruling class in Europe needs’ is a pan European war! Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place. They actively don’t want outright war and Russia knows this, which is why Russia continually provokes and gets away with acts of sabotage.
>Stability and the system that stability enables is what has put them into positions of power and prosperity in the first place.
The system is already unstable due to the rampart growth of wealth inequality, especially after covid, disproportionately affecting the purchasing power and CoL of the working class, while those with assets have seen their wealth ballon. All orchestrated by EU politicians and the ECB currency inflation policies and and allocation towards banks and corporations who spent it during covid on assets and stock buybacks and left the working class footing the bill with inflation and mass layoffs years later.
The EU elites are already worried about how they can manage this bottled anger of the working class, which is why you see more and more draconical EU "chat control" and "speech control" laws trying to get passed. Pointing the peasants to vent their anger towards Russia as the scapegoat, for the fiscal irresponsibility of the EU elites that lead to the current wealth disparity, is a good way for the EU elites to avoid the angry mob.
After all, most of the wealthy European elites and nobles didn't lose their wealth after WW1 and WW2 even though millions of peasants died.
https://nos.nl/video/2631081-startkabels-van-spoor-bij-meppe... ("Startkabels van spoor bij Meppel weggehaald")