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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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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