Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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You are saying that now, but many posters here said the same thing to argue that Ukraine would never blow up Nord Stream 2, before the articles saying it was likely them started appearing - it was all about how it would be stupid of them to engage in a terrorist attack against the infrastructure of one of their most important backers, and people in Germany would never forgive them if that turned out to be true, all for dubious benefit. Then the articles came out, and it was predictably crickets; ask anyone here or in Germany now and they'll affirm that surely Ukraine can't be faulted for protecting its interests like that (and are you really sure it was them anyway?).
People consistently overestimate how much they would actually be willing to apply principles if it turns out those principles favour the enemy team over their own. Condemning your in-group is painful, and people will be looking for any excuse to not do so, and anyhow we have the best excuse-printing machines in the world. If hypothetically this attack was actually ordered from Ukraine, is there any evidence that Russia could realistically obtain and present that would convince you of that, assuming Western media and governments just stuck to the line that it was independent ISIS adherents? Any statement procured from the perpetrators themselves can easily be dismissed as the product of torture or bribery, and supplying money and weapons untraceably in a country like Russia is trivial. Knowing this, though, any hypothetical Ukrainians considering to orchestrate such an attack would not need to include Western displeasure in their risk calculus at all - as long as governments and media in the West stay broadly on their side, no such displeasure can possibly manifest over this.
I was commenting (maybe here) that Ukraine blowing NS is unlikely - but due to lack of ability to do this, not due to lack of motive. (add to that inability to keep secret)
were there any worth anything? And not written by that journalist which is spiralling into insanity for some time?
AFAIK nothing clear appeared and I am confused how this topic died. I would expect at least Russia to keep talking about this and release something if anything close to actual proof would appear.
In this case it is relatively tricky. And it is price they are paying for very low quality of courts.
Though for NS providing some evidence should be feasible.
There was this cluster of reports carried by the WaPo and most major German papers. The Russian reaction at the time was that this is a lizard-cutting-off-its-tail release meant to pin it on "rogue elements in Ukraine that nobody with agency can be held responsible for" and the operation was actually executed with US backing. The reaction was mokusatsued in Western media.
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Maybe, but it would have to be something that cannot be faked or coerced, like a confession from a Ukrainian planner made while he and his family are in safety, not in Russia. Other than that... well, suffice it to say that I do not trust either the Kiev government or the Moscow government when they say anything that is less obvious than "the sky is blue" or "2 + 2 = 4".
I am pretty neutral in this war, so I feel that for whatever my intuition is worth, it is at least probably not much biased by partisanship. And in the absence of strong evidence that Ukraine either did it or that someone else clearly is behind planning it, I default to my cost-benefit analysis, which says that it makes no sense for Ukraine and it does not really fit their usual modus operandi (as far as I know, they usually find Slavs instead of people of Muslim ethnicities for assassinations in Russia, probably precisely because that is much much easier to present or spin as a case of "disaffected freedom fighter wants to strike a blow against Putin's regime" than using Muslims would be, since it would be a very hard sell to present Muslim militants as being chiefly driven by the kind of liberalism that Westerners like).
Of course nations do not always behave rationally, and you make a good point about Nord Stream 2. I would never have thought that the Ukrainians would risk doing something like that. However, I still think that a jihadi-type attack on civilians, without even the shred of a plausible military target, has significantly worse optics in Western eyes than either blowing up Nord Stream 2 or killing civilians as part of an assassination that targets some Russian pro-war figure.
That said, I never thought Russia would invade in 2022 to begin with because I overestimated the degree to which Putin would be deterred from such a course by the risk of losing the gas and oil trade with Europe. And as I already mentioned, I did not think that the Ukrainians would risk something like the attack on Nord Stream 2. So my track record is bad and I seem to have a tendency to underestimate people's risk tolerance.
For now, I can at least say that all presented evidence pointing at the Ukrainians is not sufficient to convince a neutral observer like myself, and my intuition is "this doesn't seem like the Ukrainians' typical style". But who knows.
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