Denmark Bans Civil Drones After More Sightings
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Denmark temporarily bans civil drones amid increased sightings during a major EU meeting, sparking debate about the legitimacy of the sightings and potential ulterior motives.
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I think a case can be made for it being slightly misleading. Also there is not mention of title length that I can see.
But now that the US has become an unreliable partner and the EU is talking about the need for increased cooperation suddenly they exact same stories become big news and ministers use it as examples of our complacency, when two years ago they would have said it's nothing to worry about.
And indeed now I see it shared all over social media with more and more "people" calling for harder responses, a single EU military, even outright declarations of war against Russia.
Russian air assets never crossed NATO airspace until this September, and the last time the Zapad exercises were held, Ukraine was invaded within months.
As such, most European nations are on extreme edge right now for a possible escalation.
Yes, they had. ACLED reports[0] that it occurred 50 times since 2022, and 4 of them had already been in Poland. It just never became a huge news piece until September, that's exactly what I mean.
0: https://acleddata.com/expert-comment/acled-data-show-least-5...
"mostly crashes of Russian and Ukrainian stray drones and missiles"
The recent incident in Poland and Romania was drones that were not strays or crashes.
> The recent incident in Poland and Romania was drones that were not strays
We don't actually know this do we? The report states that the technology to push drones off their intended path has been ramped up significantly.
1. Imagine: Your are Russia, are you going to launch drones with the fuel to fly not only into Ukraine, but also all across the map of Poland? Or do you dedicate that space to bigger warheads. Or lighter drones to increase their speed. That alone answers your question.
2. The drones found crashed, has modifications like bladdertank in the warhead section to increase their fuel. You do not accidentally get a drone all the way to Gdansk without increasing its fuel load. See point 1 again ...
3. Having a drone gone stray is not uncommon, but there is a difference between 1 going stray and 20 going stay. Your argument about jamming is flawed by the simply fact that we have the path the drones took, and unless Ukraine magically got the exact same drone misdirecting tech, active on multiple paths, again, check the map. See the issue there?
4. If the drones got jammed / flight spoofed, why did they not fly in a erratic course. You expect a drone that has its course altered to to suddenly start flying in different path.
5. The drone paths again, if the drone left the jamming or misdirection area, it will try to get back to to its intended area. They did not do so.
6. If this tech worked so great, why did we not have more mass drones flying in the wrong direction the following days? Drone attacks happen every day in Ukraine, they are not one off events. If the Ukrainians got this tech to work so good, to send 20 drones into Poland, why no repeat? You do not fix a flaw that the enemy found in just one day. Did Russia ground its drones the next day, the next week until they fix the issue? Added more antenna's and more hardware to make it harder to jam/redirect? No, they continue they typical pattern.
7. ... insert conspiracy that it was all planned and they do not use that tech again to not over use it (while giving the Russians time to adjust their hardware???). Sigh ...
People posting this nonsense that NATO is looking for a war or to ramp up incidents. Here is a simple answer: Who attack first? Was it NATO? Was not Ukraine? No ... Russia invaded a country for the SECOND TIME, triggering this mess.
You claim financial motives to trump up rhetoric ... our arms industries can already not keep up with the orders. We have backlogs that will take 10+ years to fill already, even with the expanding industry.
Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy but what else is new these days. Hate to tell ya, but the internet / social media is a battlefield these days, just as much as troops on the ground. Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic, its just a modern adaptation of old tactics. The new "remember we have nukes, we can get you", or the old USSR "see our planes flying into your identification zones"...
> Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic
Where have I even claimed anything like this? Can you appreciate how it comes across to set up a strawman and begin with "please use your mind a bit?" It's incredibly condescending and makes it difficult to take anything you've said seriously. I even made explicit reference to the repeated border tests on both sides over the past 30 years, and I linked to an independent body that showed how often it happens with drones. Did you just not read anything I wrote?
> Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy ...
Are you really saying that neither Russia nor other state actors perform online misinformation campaigns? It only takes a second of research to see otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG7sVKNP-yo
Proof points:
- the drones that made it into Poland did not have warheads
- they flew over Belarus before entering Polish airspace
- they were under continuous control from the moment of launch
- they were prepped with longer range tanks than they would have had if they had been aimed at Ukraine
- quite a few of them were equipped with ways of sending back telemetry
So no, these were not strays. The best explanation is that they were an intel gathering mission with respect to the kind of response generated and the speed with which they were detected. Other possible uses for russia are to misdirect attention from wherever they might want to attack for real (say, the Baltics) and a way to reduce the flow of defensive measures to Ukraine by instilling fear in the population further West.
If not, it's not manufacturing consent. It's just sparkling self-defense.
Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world. See {polonium poisoning Litvinenko, defenestration (multiple), Syrian actions, Ukraine invasion, etc}
Military resources are expensive and inefficient, so it takes some degree of political capital to develop and maintain them. I'd so much rather see that capital (human and otherwise) go into research and art and human flourishing, but that's not the world we live in.
) Driving refugees into liberal western democracies is a deliberate outcome of this strategy.I hope not. That's never worked. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Wagner Group's comic-opera invasion all failed.
The Economist seems to view this as the end of a happy era for Europe, an era when the EU could focus on making the EU work well and provide a good life for its people, without worrying too much about external problems. They're not wrong.
Putin's stated goal is to re-establish a Russian empire, out to the boundaries of the 19th century Russian Empire.[1] He's been saying things like this for years now: "Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them, he did not take anything from them, he returned [them (to Russia)]. Apparently, it also fell to us to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire
> If not, it's not manufacturing consent.
Is it not? Maybe we have a different understanding of what manufacturing consent means. For me the consent could be manufactured long before the question is raised. I'm not sure why it needs to be called for immediately, why do you believe so?
> Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world.
Yes it has, consistently, but I feel a significant seachange in the landscape of various media channels, both mainstream media and social media, as well as in the rhetoric of politicians. And yes, they have been talking about increased cooperation, taking heavier action against stray drones etc.
And it all seems to have happened in the past 2 months, like a sudden spike.
In fact, I've noticed a lot of opposition to my view that I think is state organized, but probably by Russia. I've seen zero people like me online. I've seen zero repeated pro-war, zero capability-emphasizing arguments. Complete silence except for me.
I believe that war should be conducted to exploit the enemy, not go at him in some idiot maneuver.
Our actions in Ukraine should be limited to stand-off weapons and glide bombs, mirror the Russian manner of aerial attack. We should also attack gas pipelines, ammonia plants, electrical infrastructure, etc. in Russia and generally shut the place down. We should of course also seize all Russian-flagged ships.
Exploits its dependence on transport and cheap energy, exploit Russia's size by seizing weak or undefended regions to force troop movements, attacking the troops with stand-off weapons while their being transported to the front etc.
Basically, we're playing tennis, and they're playing with both corridors in addition to the singles court. We should of course let them run.
I am absolutely opposed to sending ground troops against Russian positions or any region with sufficient defence, or capacity to resist. This risks the lives of soldiers needlessly and is not what war is about.
They know well that any attacks by them will be matched by attacks by us, so any nuclear exchange is just miscalculation on their part. It will end quickly.
It's important to understand that threats are irrelevant. If somebody says 'Eat this horrible snail, or I'll you shoot you' you just say 'No, you can shoot me anyway'. Same thing here. If they nuke us, so what? They can do that today too.
It's not in our power to decide whether they nuke us, and therefore it can't be a reason to limit any action against them.
Upon this there is of course also our own capability to nuke them, and due to Russian attitudes and their view of their place in the world any nuclear exchange with them will be short. They can choose to erase us if they are willing to erase themselves. That's their power, but the Russians won't ever be willing to erase themselves. They believe that they are on par with the US and a cultural beacon that is critical to the balance of the world, something without which there's nothing that matters. They will never choose to erase themselves.
Because of this-- mutually assured destruction and the irrelevance of threats, nuclear weapons only matters when one power has them and the other does not. It doesn't make sense for the Russians to erase themselves even if I stand at outside Moscow with an army, even if I have taken Moscow. There's never a slice when it makes sense. Thus the balance between nuclear power is determined entirely by the balance of conventional forces.
In reality, even if Moscow were cheating on its treaty obligations and had (in ready-to-use form) every nuke that the Soviet Union possessed at the peak of its arsenal, plus all the intercontinental missiles and bombers the Soviets had at the peak of their arsenal, Moscow could kill only about half of the US population. Since the Russian population is more concentrated in cities than the US population, Washington could kill about 55% of Russians with the arsenal it possessed at the height of the Cold War.
There is a bit of a wild card in these estimates: if the effect called nuclear winter turns out to be as bad as some say it will be, a lot more would die (mostly outside the countries that got nuked). Nuclear winter will probably turn out to be a nothing burger, but we cannot know that for sure, so there is some chance it would cause the deaths of most of the people in the world, but if Moscow's situation becomes desperate enough and there is a clearly identified enemy who is causing the desperation, it start to become rational for Moscow to bet that the nuclear winter won't be extremely bad (which it probably won't be).
Moscow might calculate that Russian are better at enduring hardships than the West is, so Russia will be able to recover from the nuclear exchange before the West does, so that in a model in which the only thing that matters is Russia's strength relative to the West, a nuclear exchange can make sense -- not now, but if the situation becomes more desperate for Moscow because of the attacks you describe.
A government of a society like Russia (or the US for that matter or Britain) doesn't collapse when it is hit very hard. Everyone rallies around the government, or more precisely, most people rally around and the rest either remain silent or get imprisoned or killed.
Hitler famously believed that the Soviet Union would collapse if invaded: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down," he said. It didn't collapse, nor did China when Japan invaded and killed millions of Chinese and occupied all its coastal cities. Neither of China's two governments collapsed even though before the Japanese invasion the two governments were engaged in a civil war that was in itself the third most deadly war of the 20th Century.
The most powerful military in the world could not force regime change on Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s or on Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s. This is because when invaded, most countries will become very unified around the goal of expelling the invader -- and a big nuclear attack will elicit the same "nationalistic" feelings as an invasion.
At best they'll be going into the subway. I think losses would be >75% though.
The unrestricted warfare you're proposing escalates the situation dramatically and for Russia, nuclear warfare starts to look disturbingly approachable. The conversation wouldn't be about full exchange but a warning shot. A tit for tat escalation that makes Europe back off while the US is paralyzed with dysfunction. Any possible risk of a nuclear event is too much.
I don't see how what I propose is unrestricted. It is simply how one conducts war.
Entering Ukraine with troops puts those troops lives at risk for no reason. It is not legitimate to ask somebody to stand under artillery bombardment while the factories producing the shells are permitted to exist, or to attack well-defended positions when that is not the most efficient manner of attack.
We have no right to conduct a war so badly. Our duty to our soldiers and to our population is to conduct the war in the free and appropriate way that is the normal conduct of war.
We have a duty to undertake no operation of any kind that is not the most efficient and useful operation. This means not going against any prepared position, while betters targets exist, without considering any escalation concerns. This means focus on radical targets-- the roots of the enemy's fighting capability.
This is our duty to our soldiers in planning and conducting a war and this not something we can deviate from.
Actors like … Russia?
Now are European leaders smart enough to play geopolitics properly? That I doubt. To be honest, I doubt if the democratic processes will result in leaders that are competent enough and mature enough to deal with all this. More likely for countries to keep electing unhinged populists from either side.
We tried the appeasement through trade route already and look at what it lead to.
From Russian perspective it’s kind of the same (except the war part of course). Same language spoken, shared history etc. If you look at any empire, they colonize other nations. This specific conflict is framed as imperial by analysts based on the notion that the annexed territories are where a completely separate nation forged, which is being colonized. It’s not a historical but a propaganda narrative, that attempts to hide all the complexity of this topic.
Languages and history have nothing to do with it, it is all about consent. If you plan to kill people in order to get them to join your idea what your country should look like you've already lost, then you're just another occupier.
I've lived in Poland under the USSR, it was pretty clear what the Russian position was on how they viewed the Poles - and anybody else that wasn't 'properly' Russian for that matter. This was an occupation, not a league of nations, and in a way Russia got more out of WWII than even the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact would have given them. I've lived in Romania, I visited Latvia many times, I visited Ukraine, many times. Everywhere the sentiment is roughly the same: that they would rather die than live under Russian occupation again, they already know what that is like. And no amount of shared history or language (or forced relocation, which in many of those cases is the source of that shared history) is going to offset that.
You're if I'm not mistaken someone with Russian roots living in Berlin. Coincidentally, I know more people that are in that position. Most of them still have family back in Russia so they are very circumspect in the positions that they take. But they have zero illusion about Russia having good intentions in any of the wars they have engaged in since the USSR fell apart and it is patently clear by the indiscriminate attacks on the Ukrainian population that Russia does not care for the people that they in the same breath claim to call their brothers and sisters.
That is a easy postition for the Netherlands to take because it has very little security against invasion even now before Friesland secedes, given its location in which there is little in the way of mountains, rivers or seas between it and countries more powerful than it. (More powerful if only because of their greater size: I'm not claiming that the Dutch are bad at fighting).
But it would be foolish for Australians to allow a large chunk of Australia to secede or for the Japanese to allow part of Japan to secede because the way it is now, both countries enjoy a very favorable security situation in which any invader would need to cross an ocean or at least a wide channel even to begin an invasion. If Japan split into two, then one of the two new countries might invite in the military of a larger power with the result that the other new country is in a vastly more precarious security situation than it was before the split into 2 countries.
The Mongols attempted a massive invasion of Japan, but the invasion was foiled by stormy weather while the Mongols were trying to cross the wide channel. If there were two polities in Japan at the time, the Mongols could have offer to protect one polity from the other one, and if their offer had been accepted, they could have moved their forces to Japan at their leisure, and would not have needed to risk an operation in which all their forces try to cross a sea as quickly as possible ready to fight as soon as they get to the other side.
Because of their separation from other countries by large bodies of water, Australian and Japan have been invaded or occupied only once in the last 2000 years (Australia when Europeans arrived and Japan after WWII) whereas during those 2000 years, the Netherlands has been invaded many times (with the occupation or annexation of the Netherlands by Spain having proved particularly painful).
Again: the Netherlands is not giving up much in the way of security advantages by allowing parts of itself to secede, but not all countries are in a similar situation.
> From Russian perspective it’s kind of the same (except the war part of course). Same language spoken, shared history etc. [...]
This is a truly bizarre piece of mental gymnastics. You list superficial similarities and casually gloss over the only thing that is substantial as if it were some inconsequential detail. By your "logic", rape is indistinguishable from making love. The same organs involved, the same movements (except the consent part, of course).
It is fascinating in a pathological way, but it also makes me wonder to what degree there is a rational pathway out of this. If this is the best then the people inside the russian propaganda machine don't stand a chance. Fortunately I know some russians outside of russia that have their eyes wide open but they too are scared of the long arm of putin.
The EU, and Germany by way of Merkel in particular for the longest time believed in 'wandel durch handel'. It turns out that this was a massive mistake and in spite of the still lingering abberations (Orban, Fico) that seem to think that sucking up to the Russian mob is going to pay off for them in the long term the sentiment has changed quite dramatically from where it was five years ago. I don't think there is any high level EU politician that still believes that we are going to go back to 'the good old days', and that is in spite of the current course of the USA, which is best described as 'confused'. Just check out what Russia did in the last 24 hours to give you an idea of how far from any kind of compromise we are. I think escalation is more likely than de-escalation and that's not something I consider lightly. But Putin has dug himself into a very deep hole and he does not seem to have a way out other than to keep on digging, he's ignored each and every off-ramp offered so far thinking that they were offered out of weakness rather than out of an aversion to war.
If Europe is ever forced to go - reluctantly - to war against Russia it will be because it saw no other way out. Until then we will keep arming Ukraine and we will continue to build up our defenses. Russia's main plan: to decapitate Ukrainian leadership and to use Ukrainians to continue its operation in the South has failed so utterly it is incredible, and yet, here we are. Whether Russia will still exist in one form or another in a decade is now something you can legitimately wonder about. All they had to do was absolutely nothing, and they'd be in a far stronger position today. Just live and let live. But that idea seems to be very hard for Russian leadership to entertain: that you can create together rather than that you can only expand at someone else's expense.
I don't like this reality either, but it is what it is.
Right now, Russia is a country waging a war of conquest. Regardless of what they say, they are making it unambiguously clear that they do not recognize the sovereignty of their neighbors. It's not possible to be in friendly terms with such a neighbor, until there is a regime change. Or until enough time has passed that the supporters of the regime waging the war have become irrelevant.
Then there are bigger entities like NATO and the EU. From their perspective, geopolitics means having to choose between being in friendly terms with some of their eastern member states and Russia. They cannot choose both.
Russia has gotten more offensive and attacking more frequently in the hybrid war, including a murder plots against Rheinmetall CEO [1], putting explosives in packages [2], etc.
It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims (1) testing Trumps commitment to NATO; (2) their invasion of Ukraine is not going well. The front barely moves annd Ukraine is starting to mass produce their own long-range cruise missiles and they are hitting oil refineries in Russia. Most likely he wants to instill fear in Europeans to support the narrative that Europe should keep weapons/money for their own defense, hoping that Ukraine will lose support.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/threat-plot-murder-rhei...
[2] https://amp.dw.com/en/russia-linked-group-planned-parcel-bom...
No, that's true. But they could be worried about their lack of strength without the US and recognise that there's no domestic appetite to move public funds towards strengthening the militaries, so publicising the "potentially imminent dangers" posed by Russia could be a way to do that.
> It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims
What is "it" here?
1. There are actors who would benefit from arms race. The money, the military careers etc. The whole NATO nearly became irrelevant before Russia started invading. Now all those generals have jobs again and Rheinmetall shares are going up.
2. There are actors for whom threat from the East is existential factor (it’s in the core of the political platform of nationalists in Baltic states - remove it and they are suddenly less competitive compared to neutral or pro-Russian parties). Current chief of EU diplomacy Kallas belongs to this group.
However I think Russia wants to make a point too. It’s hardly planning any war with NATO (I hope their intelligence isn’t as bad as in Ukraine), but they do need to convince European voters that war is possible if peace in Ukraine won’t come anytime soon (on their terms). And European voters are certainly not in the mood for big war, so the question really is, who is more convincing: von der Leyen & Co with their idea to support Ukraine until it wins, or Russia with it’s idea that further escalation may harm EU citizens directly.
Whether there's a mood for a big war, I am not sure. But there are states that are ready for it. And yes, it is within EU interests to let the fighting happen in Ukraine rather than EU.
Also, it's a nice collection of the subtler Russian points you have here, B+ for effort.
Just as a reminder: Latvian Riflemen helped to create it by supporting Lenin in the crucial phase of revolution and suppressing anti-Bolshevik rebellion in Moscow. Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites. So this “oh, it was so terrible in Soviet Union” projection on Russia is a very specific nationalist narrative ignoring shared history of both nations, which included shared suffering from the same regimes and shared participation in oppression.
Name one Lithuanian or Estonian member of the Politburo in the half-century spanning 1940 to 1990. I'll save you time: there were none.
Your knee-jerk reaction of trying to shift blame onto historical oddities like the Latvian Riflemen reminds me of neo-nazis pointing out that the Wehrmacht had some 150 000 Jews in its ranks, "proving" that Germans weren't all that antisemitic and that the Holocaust has been exaggerated. Same impulse.
Where? Not blocked in the US. Russia Today is accessible.[1] Old-school Pravda is reachable.[2] The video stream from Russia Today is working.[3]
[1] https://www.rt.com/
[2] https://www.pravda.ru/
[3] https://www.rt.com/on-air/
0: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/350/oj/eng
1: https://merlin.obs.coe.int/article/9476
Accelerationists + rando crazy people, war hawks, and defense contractors sure want it.
Without finding real perpetrators and verifiable evidence, it still lives in the domain of speculation and politicians can and will use fictional narratives to do whatever they want.
Open war should never be started "preemptively", however NATO needs to and is preparing diligently for possible need for defense. Eastern Europe won't be safe until Putin is gone and replaced by a moderate who isn't a nationalist expansionist.
Threatening neighboring countries?
Your prior is that Denmark wants a shooting war with Russia? Or do you have a weirder antecedent in mind for "actors"?[1]
Basically this idea needs a ton of elaboration and construction. As written it's a little tin-foily.
[1] I mean, let's make the obvious point and take Russia off that list of actors: they literally can't even win a shooting war against Ukraine. Maybe you can make a brinksmanship/extortion argument, but not a "actors want a war" one from their perspective.
> Your prior is that Denmark wants a shooting war with Russia?
No, I didn't say this.
> let's make the obvious point and take Russia off that list of actors: they literally can't even win a shooting war against Ukraine.
You're assuming that the intended result of this apparent campaign is to actually start a war between the EU and Russia. But it could just as much be to create enough fear of one amongst EU voters that there is increased pressure towards bolstering military qualities within the EU, which in turn creates complications and financial burdens that could result in support for Ukraine being--even if unintentionally--weakened.
> Maybe you can make a brinksmanship/extortion argument, but not a "actors want a war" one from their perspective.
Yes, I could, if you could let me do so without calling me weird before I open my mouth.
Your original framing of your question was: "Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia?"
So, yes, that's exactly what I assumed you meant. Because it's what you said. (Absent, again, a bunch of exposition that wasn't delivered).
And you still haven't clarified what "actors" you're thinking about. I stand by the criticism of this as conspiracy logic.
I do not see it as a direct way to manufacture consent for a war, but the impact on civilian infrastructure is starting to be annoying enough that the military of multiple nations around the Baltics are looking to do something, and the effect of that something may create political waves. Same things with the attacks on undersea cables and the suggested counter measures, which also include military aspects to it.
When people have analyzed the flight logs, the sightings match with known planes: https://x.com/ThomasH_Synth/status/1972236703864586463
https://x.com/MickWest is a good source to follow since he and others are willing to actually track down the data related to UFOs.
I imagine there are lots of false positives too, but they're not all false
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