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.
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.
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.
- [0]: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20240729-far-left-extremi...
> 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.
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.
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.
- [0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/files/be-hear...
Suggestive of a basic attitude of disregard for factual accuracy in regard to such things.
Arson attacks are actually an extremely French phenomenon, over 1000 cars are often torched a night on New Years Eve
>but this sort of escalation cannot be left unchecked
Some of us would rather not die in a world war because a sports event was mildly disrupted
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.
How far gone do you have to be to call "Russian apologists" people who are horrified at calls for a nuclear war?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
... refutes nothing I said.
> ... refutes nothing I said.
In the same way as nothing you said refutes nothing I said.
You do because of an apparent morbid obsession with death and unconcern towards other values.
Other people, for your information, judge the strict opposite.
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.
Israel is already calling for an act of sabotage by Iran. Turns out you should have used an "if" instead of "when".
So much less likely than Russia.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-russia-ready...
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...>
> 2005
Explain how are singular events from 2005 "highly relevant"?
Thanks to the power of art, it can be Russian and French at the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Pavlensky#Lighting_(2017)
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?
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.
- 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.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/qa-nord-stream-gas-sabo...
Plenty of people claiming that Russia did it.
But that doesn't detract from what I wrote.
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.
> 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
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.
It might as well not be Russia but the suspicions aren't far fetched, given stuff like this: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2024/07/24/russian-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Soul%C3%A8vements_de_la_Te...
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.
https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/les-soulevements-de-la-ter...
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.
Because they announced it:
https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/la-flamme-olympique-d...
https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/les-soulevements-de-la-ter...
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 no similarly held opposition to trains/mass transit. Indeed, as the parent indicates, trains appear to have unanimous support from green factions.
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.
Another example: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/07/26/non-artists-take-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not suggesting Figaro is unbiased, but they are already reporting possible left wing involvement:
https://www.lefigaro.fr/faits-divers/sabotage-sur-le-reseau-...
(I'm assuming you are not talking about https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_de_Tarnac specifically which I would say is not "the exact same".)
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.
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.
... 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.
(But yeah, I'd assume this was Putin.)
Knowing France I can imagine that their Peugeot Nukes wouldn't reach their target. All previous "successful" tests had no SIGNIT in place.
https://www.intelligenceonline.com/surveillance--interceptio...
eg : https://www.france24.com/en/france/20231119-france-test-fire...
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)
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.
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.
Why would any of them do that? They can seat, wait and watch the west crumble apart with almost no intervention.
You could maybe argue China, I suppose? Though I think they're just better at keeping the chaos boiling just below the surface.
Why should I? What were the French military success in the last 100 years? Paris is just degraded right now. French bashing please!
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.
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'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)?
A couple of reports (grain of salt needed):
An FSB operative caught bragging about sabotaging the Olympics in Bulgaria: https://x.com/michaeldweiss/status/1816431778615226742
Russian arrested in Paris over sabotage plot: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1j7kg2nk0o
A bunch of FSB operatives caught in Ukraine: https://global.espreso.tv/russia-ukraine-war-fsb-agents-plan...
Previous reporting from Bellingcat on Russian operations: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2021/04/26/how...