It feels like it’s very, very risky territory for these activities to be “occurring” in a NATO country. I’m sure everyone else is thinking the same thing, but at what point does Article 5 get invoked?
It would be interesting to see graphs of how similarly "unprovable" sabotage actions have developed in Russia over the past few years. I doubt we'd ever see accurate reporting out of Russia, but it seems like an obvious thing to do for both Ukrainian intelligence and also for the wider West. It's also be likely to be underreported on because neither the perpetrator nor the victim gains all that much from reporting these kind of things.
I see it as obvious that the Nord Stream pipeline was not blown up without US permission at the very least. (And the media's insistence that it was probably Russia which blew up their own pipeline convinced me beyond doubt that they see loyalty to the war effort as trumping any obligation to the truth). Of course there are going to be sabotage actions the other way too.
International reporting was almost all that it was a Ukrainian operation, eg:
On 6 June 2023, The Washington Post reported that an intelligence agency of an unnamed European "close ally" had notified the CIA of a Ukrainian military plan for a covert attack on the pipeline. The plan was to be carried out by a team of divers reporting to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, but the Post did not report any evidence that it had been put into action. The US reportedly learned of the plan three months before the destruction of the pipeline, and shared the intelligence with Germany and other allies.
it seems like an obvious thing to do for both Ukrainian intelligence
Yes it must be obvious for Ukraine to use people who are already in Russia to help with local sabotage. It could be as as crude as putting rocks on a rail line or as simple as floating toy balloons across a strategic installation until the local Russian defenses get tired of the false alarms, stop paying attention and don't see an incoming drone.
It's surprising that there are apparently no strong claims of this from either side, but especially from the Russian side. I don't agree that Russia has nothing to gain from arresting people for such activities. Wouldn't it deter others?
Nobody actually wants to invoke Article 5. The European countries talk a lot, but they don't actually want to do anything serious.
Macron famously said that he would "have to send troops to Odesa" and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine and Russia has captured even more territory and is now actively bombarding Kyiv.
The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.
The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.
This might've been the reality three years ago. A lot has changed in the US in the last three years.
Nobody wants to invoke article 5, I do agree. But I think they might understand that it's more likely that A5 is invoked than the US brokers a peace to with anybody. They're the department of war now.
You're saying this as if it is some kind of gotcha?
Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.
The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.
The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.
You're saying this as if it is some kind of gotcha?
Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.
The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.
This isn’t new though, and Russia has conveniently provided the west with exactly the avenue to respond. Just further increase support to Ukraine, and make it clear that further sabotage and really anything unfortunate that happens will result in even greater support.
In fact, Russia should be investing heavily in ensuring that nobody else goes asymmetric against NATO countries.
Most of the west is already helping Ukraine as much as we can within the current budgets (which have already increased a lot over a few years ago - the "peace dividend went away).
Anything more means countries go to war time funding of some sort. Would you accept if the law made buying or working on video games illegal for the duration - that is everybody currently making a video game now has to switch to working on something military related.
I just pulled the above example out of my head randomly, there are plenty of other "non-essential" jobs that could switch to making bombs, shells, tanks, airplanes... (either manufacturing or engineering).
First, these things intentionally fall short of clear "armed attacks" and are designed around plausible deniability.
Second, Europe/NATO are not looking for a fight. Russia is in a bad spot right now, but NATO is not in a great spot for a kinetic conflict with Russia either.
Lastly, I don't think NATO countries are eager to test America's willingness to defend Europe under the Trump administration because they already know the likely answer when they call for help.
On the flip side, when your allies know they can count on you you stuff like them picking stupid fights because they know you'll back them up. Israel dragging us further into Iran during the first ~third of the conflict when the US was trying to find a clean place to stop the escalation is a pretty good example of that.
Absolutely, but there were several instances where the US, regardless of how disparate the interests in it are, was more or less at the negotiating table and then Israel started blowing stuff up.
Israel dragging us further into Iran during the first ~third of the conflict when the US was trying to find a clean place to stop the escalation is a pretty good example of that.
This is like the guy who claims that he wanted to stop beating his wife but his brother just wouldn't let him stop.
Let's be clear: nobody forced the US to attack Iran in the first place. There is a reason no president before Trump did what Trump did: defense and intelligence officials have known for a very long time how such an attack was likely to play out and how disastrous it would be for the region, the US and the global economy.
Trump was warned by senior intelligence and defense officials and he chose to ignore their advice because he's a very stable genius who knows better than anyone else.
It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
What we have been seeing is this gradual escalation. It's like boiling a frog slowly. Each escalation is too small to trigger a significant response, but after a while you suddenly notice that your country is burning.
I expect more of this in the near future. I wish the world stopped treating Russia as "just another business partner".
Ukraine is currently striking facilities deep inside Russia.
Russia could hit back in the same way easily, and to some degree they do. But their problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia - until they got that in May 2024, Ukraine understandably did not risk alienating their suppliers by doing that.
There aren't very many new lines of escalation crossed here. Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now - many hawks in the west haven't been shy about describing it as such either.
GTFO, Russian propagandist. If Russia dislikes the state of affairs there's a reallyyy easy solution: don't invade other countries baselessly. "NATO's proxy war" is a really funny way to describe the Russian war of aggression.
No, they are trying to justify actions against countries that supply arms to Ukraine.
As I point out in a other thread, supplying weapons is pretty normal and attacking random infrastructure in a country that happens to be allied to Ukraine is a significant escalation.
Where do you get this stuff? Only thing they’re saying is that Russia can’t attack Ukrainian weapon or munitions factories like Ukraine does to Russia because there aren’t many of them.
> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
But their [Russia's] problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia
That reads exactly like an argument justifying Russia's actions.
Where's the lie? I said they now see it as NATOs proxy war against them, and western hawks are not shy about talking about it in those terms.
Yeah, they probably didn't expect it to turn into that when they attacked - they probably hoped it'd be all over in a week with a regime change in Kyiv. It's now they're thinking, shit, we were goaded into another Afghanistan. Which again, is not a way western hawks are shy of talking about it.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a cakewalk compared to what is going on today. 15k dead in 10 years, and the USSR was twice as big as modern ruzzia, so it is more like 7k dead for ruzzia alone. Now compare that to 4.5 years of the invasion of Ukraine - these wars are on a totally different scale. The Afghan affair was a remote low-profile endeavour; ports and oil refineries weren't burning all over the Soviet Union.
And it is in a way. Ukraine is practically fighting on behalf of East European NATO states against Russian imperialism. NATO’s eastern flank is not immediately threatened only because Russia’s curbstomp invasion turned into a war of attrition.
Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.
It's a significant step to escalate to attacking those countries.
Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now
It is an interesting argument to choose to invade a country, act with faux outrage when they find allies willing to supply them with arms and then call it a proxy war.
Russia got themselves into this mess. They have an easy way to get out of it.
This is well beyond arms supplies, NATO is running their entire ISR and targeting show and quite vocal about it. Plantar, Starlink on drones etc. and that’s ignoring financing and production. If anything, the Russian response has been quite flaccid.
Yes, there is no doubt that NATO countries (except maybe the US/Trump some days) wants Ukraine to win. They train troops, help with intelligence etc.
There is no argument that they are neutral.
But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.
North Korea is supplying actual troops to Russia, and that doesn't mean Ukraine is at war with North Korea. Belarus and Iran have both supplied arms to Russia and Ukraine isn't at war with either.
Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.
Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Is it so hard to see why Russia doesn't see things that way?
"Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
"Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
I agree that realism is a much abused word, and I think this is an example of it.
The first part of your sentence is realism: it is not surprising that Russia chooses to treat Western help as taking part in the war. That does not make it true. Advising, supplying and sharing intelligence is not the same as fighting.
The second part is not realism. Realism explains what states do. It does not say who is right, or who has the right to complain. "Don't have a leg to stand on" is a moral judgment, with the word realism put on it.
This is exactly how Russia wants the word to be used. Right after the full invasion started, the Russian foreign ministry shared a Mearsheimer article that blamed the West for the war. The goal is to make Russia's actions look like a natural reaction to the West, so that objecting to them looks naive.
Maybe you don't mean it that way, but going from "unsurprising" to "don't have a leg to stand on" does the same thing.
Yes, there is no doubt that NATO countries (except maybe the US/Trump some days) wants Ukraine to win. They train troops, help with intelligence etc.
There is actually much doubt about that. It rather seems they are content with Ukraine not loosing and draining Russia in the progress with little care what happens to Ukrain except that they keep up the fight.
It is very obvious to me that basically every country in the alliance wants Ukraine to win and Russia to lose, and this is clear because they actively spend lots of money on effecting that outcome.
But NATO members obviously don't want to be spending money on foreign military, so pro-Ukraine spending stays limited to "cost effective" levels.
You make this sound like some nefarious conspiracy by western war-fetishists, when the status quo is basically the obvious outcome given even a little western self-interest.
Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Yeah, no. That is not how it works, American private companies are not just allowed to provide weapons of war without executive approval. If you remember, Trump is the one who removed Biden's ban on providing them targeting and the intel to hit Russia directly. The entire "Zelensky, please stopping hitting Russian diesel production" Trump thing is just an act - the US holds the keys to their (and the UK/EU, for that matter) ISR feeds.
Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.
My country, Norway, had a long-standing policy of not selling weapons to countries at war - yes even to the attacked party - because of the common understanding that would be tantamount to joining the war, and make us the target of reprisals. This prohibition also was a good shield against accusations of war profiteering or proxy warfare.
That policy which had been standing for 60+ years, was dropped for Ukraine.
Even if you are the most pacifist leader imaginable, at some point you have to draw a line with policies like that if you dont want to fold and hand over control to expansionist neighbors.
I figure a majority in Norway would have been willing to support Finland with more than just arms deliveries had they been the victim (would you agree with that?), so sending some cash + weapons to Ukraine seems consistent policy to me.
The point was not that you should never support a country that was attacked. The point was that you should be 100% above the table if you did that. If you weren't willing to fight yourself (and take the expected consequences, such as reprisals and sabotage), then you shouldn't sell weapons either.
And I'm sure statesmen like the Stoltenbergs would have defended this policy very eloquently, better than me, back when it was official policy...
And sure, it was broadly popular to get rid of this policy for Ukraine's benefit. It wasn't a hard sell to the public majority. Saying "let's take a step back and think principled about this" was the hard sell, as usual.
That’s simply not true and a gross misreprestation of the policy, which is still in place.
And it not dropped to cater to Ukraine, as it specifically has a carve-out for legal defensive war, which the Russian war of aggression towards Ukraine is.
Check snl.no/våpeneksport_fra_Norge, which is more reliable than Wikipedia on this.
It gives a list of the changes (or "clarifications") to the policy over the years. To the degree there ever was a carve-out for legal defensive war, it was certainly added after Ukraine.
Actually there were two phases: in 2022 they defend giving weapons to Ukraine in that it was a donation, not a commercial endeavor (that suggests to me that they implicitly admitted, commercial sales would have been against the policy). Then in 2024, they allowed direct commercial sales as well. Of course their defense lawyers will say the policy is still in place, but "realism" again: you can't blame Russia for not being convinced by that.
I am pretty sure every bigger German company has active sales team waiting for the end of the sanctions to fly on the same day to Moscow and continue/start new business. Construction materials, cars&trucks, oil refinery equipment, new deeper bunkers… everything is needed in russia. The west doesn’t see an enemy. Enemy of freedom, free speech and free thinking. Freedom to be a gay or autistic person in public. Euros and dollars matter though.
How are the Russians going to pay us though? Their economy is in shambles, Europe is busy divesting itself from fossil fuels, and their foreign currency/gold reserves are dwindling fast. And Russia as a whole will need to pay serious reparations.
How are the Russians going to pay us though? Their economy is in shambles, Europe is busy divesting itself from fossil fuels, and their foreign currency/gold reserves are dwindling fast.
First: Gas is gonna stay reasonably valuable for Europe in the near future, even if electrification of personal transport progresses very quickly.
And there are tons of other valuable ressources Russia has: Nickel, copper, aluminium, steel, ...
And Russia as a whole will need to pay serious reparations.
I don't see that happening at all. Who is gonna enforce that? Ukraine would be happy enough if they just left.
The EU pays more than 1 billion EUR each month to Russia for their fossil fuels (more specifically, 1.2bn in August, 1.5bn in July). Countries leading are Hungary, Slovakia, France, Bulgaria and then Spain. And those are just direct purchases that we know about. Fossil fuels purchased from other countries might include Russian flows as well.
At the same time, much is made of various sanction packages, which are minuscule in comparison to these flows.
In other words, the EU finances the bombs that will be falling on EU countries in the future.
I'm very curious about the downvoting here, which looks suspicious. I do realize that what I wrote might not be popular with a certain country (and its online trolling teams), but it is factually correct.
Let's cut to the chase here: the root problem is now a critical mass of the population simply won't believe the government blame for virtually any incident since false flags are now such a widely recognized concept.
Russia was widely blamed for blowing up the Nord Stream pipe. You would get your comments removed from here if you said otherwise. Then it turns out they didn't do it. Oooops.
We still do not know who did it as several experts in diving have claimed that the story published by the journalists is not possible and the German police investigation seems to have stalled.
Still seems like any of Russia, Ukraine or Ukrainian citizens on their own initiative could have dove it.
If the Ukrainian military did it, I think they would have taken credit. They've taken credit for lots of major assaults, so I don't think they would hide this specific one. As for the other two options, I'm not willing to speculate.
they are probably referring to NordStream likely being done by Ukrainians, when the primary suspect was Russia for a long time as they could now claim force majeure to get out of delivery contracts in Germany.
what exactly do you think is going to happen if article 5 gets invoked? did America's current Special Military Operation not make it clear that missiles alone don't win wars, and that there's fuck all you can do when the other side yeets their missiles at you in return?
also, a friendly reminder that all willing parties are free to go fight Russia right now. https://ildu.mil.gov.ua/
In terms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberger_Doctrine if article 5 was invoked, one could set much clearer victory conditions - chase Russia back into Russia. Maybe arrest Putin war crimes or something.
It would still be extremely unpleasant, painful and expensive, of course; winning an exchange of blows still means taking a load of punches to the face. So the true winner would be China.
It will lead to a gradual escalation, probably air spaces closed over Kaliningrad, Belarus and Ukraine for Russian planes and army mobilization towards the eastern flank of NATO in the first steps.
Sufficient assistance can be given to the Ukrainians without deploying troops to the battlefield so that the Russians are pushed out completely. Losing Crimea would be Putin's death knell.
did America's current Special Military Operation not make it clear that missiles alone don't win wars, and that there's fuck all you can do when the other side yeets their missiles at you in return?
Neither Putin nor his associates are religious fanatics happy to die for their cause, they're just money-loving strongmen. If faced with real danger they'd much rather do whatever they could to avoid dying, not risk being martyred.
Putin has backed himself into a corner. He has tied too much of his credibility to Ukraine, in turn if he loses Ukraine it is highly likely to loses his life in some "accident". He is smart enough to know that and so will double down as long as possible. Since his life is in danger anyway he has no reason to hesitate about using nuclear weapons if it looks like he is losing.
did America's current Special Military Operation not make it clear that missiles alone don't win wars
not really. The operation accomplished all the goals: it removed the current leadership of Iran. Of course the results where completely predictable: meet the new leadership - same as the old one (often just the children of the old). Lets not pretend that it didn't get the intended results. It just got some other unintended results as well (which were mostly predictable)
There are limits to what war can accomplish. Depending on how you fight the war you can get different long term results.
My understanding is that increasingly “adversaries” who may or may not be Russia simply pay local gangs/thugs/idiots to do it. If you don’t appreciate the risk of being caught, I’d imagine these things are not that hard to pull off. While risk is low for the country of origin.
My understanding is that increasingly “adversaries” who may or may not be Russia simply pay local gangs/thugs/idiots to do it.
Yes, and the playbook extends to some anti-war orgs throughout Europe who play the role of useful idiots by advocating things such as a) pressure your government to stop supporting Ukraine, b) force Ukraine to capitulate and agree to Russia's demands. They do so under the guise of "no to war, yes to peaceful negotiation" but the way they neglect Ukraine's best interests and push Russia's maximalist agenda is pretty telling.
And the West can and does return the favor. Perhaps Poland should fund the destruction of some Siberian pipeline pump stations? Article 5 against Russia is not going to get consensus anyway, so making it formal just increases the risk of escalation.
Frankly, "the West" doesn't care about Russia. They were a gas station masquerading as a country, but now they aren't even a gas station. Let's just fund Ukraine to the gills and in no time they won't even be good for petty vandalism.
I'm not necessarily referring to fringe organisations.
The best example of this that I can think of is the recent Die Linke electoral victory in Berlin. They have the same policy on European security as AfD.
It's a clear example of Horseshoe Theory. Pseudo-intellectuals in Germany may argue that the position is not the same because the motivations are not the same, but if you're sitting in Ukraine, feeling the walls shake, and seeing your pets tremble in terror, you really couldn't give a shit what some leftie in Germany thinks — the result is the same as the openly pro-Kremlin German far-right.
stellen uns auch gegen die Waffenlieferungen an die Ukraine.
It’s easier than that. We’re helping Ukraine every day, and all Russia can do to retaliate against countries helping Ukraine is carry out acts of sabotage.
The whole doctrine itself is built on the idea that you as an attacker don’t get to decide where the line is. The principle of ambiguity. Russia desperate wants to know where the line is, because they know very well that when they cross it it won’t end.
This is a fundamental principle of NATO as a defensive alliance, have always been and will continue to be.
Now you have voices, coming mostly from outside, that are trying to make this out to be a bad thing and to show some kind og weakness in the alliance, when it is one of the core tenants of the alliance itself.
If Article 5 is invoked NATO responds, and if not, the countries supporting Ukraine already are, with sanctions and military aid that keep increasing over time. Russia wants to know our limits so they can push right up to them, and we shouldn't give them that.
After the 9/11 attacks, NATO did invoke Article 5 for the first and only time in its history.
And before you or someone else claims otherwise, the US did not request activating Article 5, repeatedly said it did not need NATO resources, and never took the invoking seriously. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_NATO_Article_5_contingenc...> But feel free to continue to brag about how the deployment of seven NATO aircraft for a year, and a few ships in the Mediterranean, totally saved the USA.
(No, ISAF was not an Article 5 operation, thus the participation of the likes of Mongolia.)
Aside from the question "will Art. 5 be triggered" there is the question "what happens if it is triggered?"
The article only states that an attack on one is an attack on all. Further reactions aren't spelled out. It can go from "yeah, we recognize it, have a nice day" to "let's send nukes" That ambiguity has some value as the idea was that it discourages any offensives as reactions were unpredictable.
But Russia is testing the limits. They did it in Ukraine, where there were some "green men" strolling arouns in eastern Ukraine, which then lead to occupation of Crimea which all didn't lead to much of a reaction, so they escalated further till full scale invasion.
In parallel we see those things in NATO/EU territories. One could start at murdering Georgians in Berlin's Tiergarten park, planes accidentally entering Polish air space, drones near airports or military facilities ... always testing the reaction. Mostly actions which don't warrant forceful reactions, while testing how quickly the escalation spiral is turning.
Ukraine was never in NATO. Ukraine was getting closer and closer to NATO and there was reason to suspect they might join in a few years, but that hadn't happened (and there were a few things wrong in Ukraine that NATO was quietly demanding Ukraine fix first)
Ukraine wasn't getting closer to NATO until Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.
Both its Constitution and popular polls were against joining NATO (i.e. remain a neutral country).
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.
So triggering Article 5 means reporting an armed attack to the Security Council.
Article 5 doesn't mean what most people think it means... it's literally "we might help, somehow, somewhen, if we feel like it, in whatever way we want, maybe, maybe just by publishing an official warning to not do it again 'or else'"
This assistance may or may not involve the use of armed force, and can include any action that Allies deem necessary to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
It deliberately is that way, and I’d argue that most people in NATO countries know and understand this. You are taught this in school. It is what they call the Principle of Ambiguity.
Also, giving up the control of when to declare war or not would be something no country would willingly give up.
Lately there’s been this push with talking points like yourself, and I’m not trying imply something about you specifically, but it is interesting with the timing and the goal of undermining NATO as a defensive military alliance.
Which is what Putin would want to justify a new wave of troop mobilizations and forced conscription.
And just invoking Article 5 is unlikely to wind up immediately looking like tanks rolling across the Polish border into Russia the next day, sweeping through into Moscow and deposing Putin in a week--which is fantasy for multiple reasons.
The response would be measured and probably wouldn't go much beyond no-fly zones over the borders, and NATO forces shooting down Russian drones over Russian territory to start with.
But this would get Putin the justification for conscription that he wants. It would also provoke further debate in NATO member states over the costs of getting further sucked into a war with Russia, and Putin wants to use that in his propaganda war to strengthen the right wing in NATO states.
And Ukraine may be very vulnerable right now if Russia can figure out new combined arms tactics in a drone-saturated battlefield and restore maneuver warfare to the front. Combining that with bad weather in the winter, and 100,000s of newly conscripted troops for a zerg rush into the meatgrinder, and Ukraine could wind up in a very bad situation.
This whole war is on much more of a knife-edge than the propaganda from both sides suggests. And political reality limits what NATO can do as a response to having a Starlink terminal burned down. Be cautious of giving Putin the response that he wants to elicit.
For anyone interested, there’s another part of the Starlink besides the satellites and your dish - ground stations (gateways) [].
These are the large clusters of antennas that communicate with the satellites and connect the Starlink network to the Internet on Earth. Looks like one of these was set on fire.
How would you know you live close enough to one for a physical link with it otherwise? I guess they could put "General 10km area here" but would still be kind of bad for people living on the opposite end of the "general area".
I believe many of these sites do not belong to Space X but are rented by companies offering such services. So they uplink for other companies as well and deal with regulatory stuff etc.
Huh… I always thought direct satellite connection was one of the things that distinguished starlink from cellular tech like 4g or 5g, and that low earth orbit was what made it possible… what actually makes starlink different?
Edit: oh I think? I understand now, these basically relay the internet itself up to the satellites - so your individual starlink dish is still talking directly to a satellite but the satellite resolves your request for a website through these ground stations. I think?
It doesn't have to happen at exactly these specific ground stations, though (although any outage will increase the load on in-space forwarding capacity and downlink capacity of some other satellites, though).
the real difference is cash. they can afford literally hundred launches costing billions upfront and hundreds of millions in upkeep.
the original concept arts called for lazer beam sat2sat dynamic mesh relaying packets globally. that didn't quite happen.
what did happen was sats and terminals refreshed like tech products and not like military tanks. decades old standards are slow. all their competitors usd decades old everything.
their launch count is off by two digits. like 10x by reuse and stacked 10x by cash. that amount of cash appearing from somewhere is the difference.
Their phase one was you have a dish that goes to a satellite, but then that bounces straight back down to a ground station. Phase two was to have satellite-to-satellite comms, which they're doing with lasers. I imagine either some satellites can't do this yet, so ground stations are still needed, or they are using the ground stations for something else.
All satellite based internet access works the same way… (mostly)
1) you send a signal to the satellite
2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station
3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP
The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.
Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.
With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.
Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:
Customer - satellite - ground station - internet
The signal can go from:
customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.
This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.
but there are other LEO Internet services, like Iridium and Globalstar that just don't compare, like 100x slower at 5x monthly price for 1000x less data.
"because LEO" don't explain why Starlink is like million times cheaper and faster than competitors while singlehandedly being reponsible for like 75% of man-made objects in space currently and past.
What you are calling 'internet' is the land based backbone that's connecting to the 'rest of the internet'. The term is thus relative. Now of course there is next to no servers directly on the sate to sate network save for a few companies with special contracts. But with the AI sate halo there will inevitably be other server sate.
Arguably Starlink's special sauce is quantity of satellites and massively higher bandwidths combined with high-gain, electronically steered beams on both sides (i.e. terminal and satellite).
None of these are net-new as technologies: We've had LEO based telecommunications satellites for over two decades now (Iridium and Globalstar, the former of which even has in-space forwarding as well), as well as directional beams on both sides, but rarely all in one system and never at this scale.
In my opinion, the quantity of satellites needed is a function of the height of the satellites. You only need a large constellation because they are moving so fast relative to the earth. This means that each satellite can only see a limited arc at a time. So, in order to cover a large enough area, you have to have multiple satellites following after each other.
The phased array antenna is also a function of this. Each satellite is moving so much that you need to have an antenna following the satellite across the sky.
So, once Starlink decided to have a low earth orbiting constellation (for better latency and bandwidth), the other features (quantity and a steerable antenna) became requirements to have a functional system.
Altitude does impose a lower bound for the number required for global coverage but they have much, much more than geometrically needed. Iridium gets by with about 70 and is only marginally higher.
As for steered terminals, you actually only really need these once you have more than one satellite visible in the sky at the same time. Without that, they’re purely a power efficiency feature.
Note that this list is list of places where if you are enterprise starlink customer SpaceX can provide you with physical ethernet port to plug your cable into when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet. That is kind of obscure service that even land-based PLMN operators offer but usually do not document in this way in publicly available documentation.
From the perspective of network design, the fact that this certainly is not exhaustive list of places where SpaceX has physical DC presence and physical reality it comes that some of these datacenters are selected based on the fact that the ground station is somewhere nearby (I would be surprised if there is even just one place on the list where nearby means "on the roof", because there is a lot of technical, logistical and administrative reasons why you do not want to put such a thing at a roof of a datacenter).
None of the original 5 buildings at Telehouse in London have any dishes on the roof but the new Telehouse South a few hundred yards to the South seems to have some on the roof but they don't look like they are for a SpaceX groundstation.
SpaceX groundstations look a bit different, they are a bunch of white domes about 1-2m in diameter, usually 8 or 9 of clustered together.
It's handled by Arqiva here in the UK it seems, so no SpaceX branding on anything.
SpaceX also applied for two new grounds station sites in the UK, one a few miles West of Telehouse, south of Rainham. The other site is up in Harlow, Essex.
(I don't think any of this is secret, all of the info above can be found with some googling and scrolling in maps.)
I used to have private peering with a satelite provider at telehouse, one which downlinked from GEO in Amsterdam and presented traffic direct. They simply backhauled it over their own network (tagged as mpls I guess). Indeed it would arrive on that link even when downlinked on other stations around the globe.
when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet
Isn't that skipping over the more sensible middle ground of a VPN, which is what is more common for at least small or medium sized business customers of mobile networks.
Very much depends on your applications. Some critical communications you don't want to trust to the internet at all. Some communication latency is important and so you can save a few MS by locating in such a data center. Some communication takes a lot of bandwidth and both of you want a cache in the data center to avoid use of the large pipes (youtube for example has servers in various colocation points just to cache the popular videos). Many small/medium businesses don't have a good data center, they outsource that to someone else, and starlink is just as good as anyone else (check all the fine print on the contract to see if this is true for your needs)
I haven't checked recently, but the FBI/CIA (I'm not sure which, but probably both) had 4-5 completely isolated networks, no connection to any other network. Once a computer was connected to an isolated network it would be destroyed when the lifespan was up - thus ensuring that classified data could not leak off the network. When they needed to connect to other locations they bought a separate fiber connection the entire way - the fiber would be in the same bundle as internet traffic, but otherwise isolated. (There are several cases where a virus got onto such a network despite the isolation so this isn't perfect, but...)
That depends if the goal of handling your own traffic is integrity (which a VPN can give you) or availability (which requires dedicated pathing through a leased line).
Why is that more sensible? It's worse, more expensive and has more moving parts. The only reason you'd use a VPN is if you're small enough that Starlink won't give you a PNI, or you can't afford it.
The site that was attacked is almost certainly located at 51.86428N 20.92121E (WGS84).
I am surprised to learn from both satellite and street view imagery that this site is located just <50m off a public road (in clear line of sight) and within a residential backyard partly behind the house on the block, and protected by a 1.2-1.5m high white picket fence. To be fair, the lack of almost any visible security deterrent may perhaps scare off an attacker because... security surely wouldn't be that non-existent? My only other thought is these sites really do not matter to Starlink because Starlink will have 1000's of them and as they only process encrypted data, almost anyone can run a ground station for a small reimbursement per month if they've got semi-decent fibre connectivity and a bit of power?
It's interesting which acts end up on HN. Recently there was an arson attack in Munich against a defense company [1]. I wonder if anyone keeps track of more and their resolution/convictions?
Supplying Starlink to Ukraine but not Russia is near the limit of what Musk can do, other than big cash donations. He could expand the geofence of Ukrainian drone Starlinks to include Russian territory, but that risks kinetic reprisals.
Does he still have Trumps ear? A year ago he could have probably changed Trumps mind on some issues, but he seems to have fallen out of favor and I'm not sure how far. (it wouldn't be unusual for a friend to publicly appear distant but still have soft power)
Now he is apparently Ukraine's best friend and evil Russia attacks his Starlink!
Of course there is no possibility that a) one of Elon's many enemies did it, b) it was a Ukrainian false flag or c) Russia did it and Musk has been deep state all along like Thiel.
It feels like it’s very, very risky territory for these activities to be “occurring” in a NATO country. I’m sure everyone else is thinking the same thing, but at what point does Article 5 get invoked?
Unlikely given that disposable cutout agents or useful idiots are used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare or hybrid warfare is designed to avoid full military action. But the tit for tat escalation in kind can lead to real war.
Sounds very like what happened in London a couple of years back:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04g5x1wq5vo
It would be interesting to see graphs of how similarly "unprovable" sabotage actions have developed in Russia over the past few years. I doubt we'd ever see accurate reporting out of Russia, but it seems like an obvious thing to do for both Ukrainian intelligence and also for the wider West. It's also be likely to be underreported on because neither the perpetrator nor the victim gains all that much from reporting these kind of things.
I see it as obvious that the Nord Stream pipeline was not blown up without US permission at the very least. (And the media's insistence that it was probably Russia which blew up their own pipeline convinced me beyond doubt that they see loyalty to the war effort as trumping any obligation to the truth). Of course there are going to be sabotage actions the other way too.
International reporting was almost all that it was a Ukrainian operation, eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage...
Eventually the international reporting pivoted to blaming Ukraine. But that was not what I read every day on my state-run broadcaster as it happened.
It's incredible to _experience_ how propaganda machines rewrite narratives.
Yes it must be obvious for Ukraine to use people who are already in Russia to help with local sabotage. It could be as as crude as putting rocks on a rail line or as simple as floating toy balloons across a strategic installation until the local Russian defenses get tired of the false alarms, stop paying attention and don't see an incoming drone.
It's surprising that there are apparently no strong claims of this from either side, but especially from the Russian side. I don't agree that Russia has nothing to gain from arresting people for such activities. Wouldn't it deter others?
It's not hard to find reporting about people in Russia getting arrested for sabotage: https://en.zona.media/article/2026/07/21/sabotage
And we all know how adept Russia is at leveraging useful idiots.
Undermining article 5 is the goal, so NATO needs to figure out how to invoke it gradually.
One thought is to pretend to not know that it's Russia, and invoke it against an "unidentified adversary".
Nobody actually wants to invoke Article 5. The European countries talk a lot, but they don't actually want to do anything serious.
Macron famously said that he would "have to send troops to Odesa" and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine and Russia has captured even more territory and is now actively bombarding Kyiv.
The reality is that, despite their public statements and posture, every leader in the EU secretly hopes USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kinda goes away.
This might've been the reality three years ago. A lot has changed in the US in the last three years.
Nobody wants to invoke article 5, I do agree. But I think they might understand that it's more likely that A5 is invoked than the US brokers a peace to with anybody. They're the department of war now.
It's not the reality of the USA but it's still the reality of EU wishes.
You're saying this as if it is some kind of gotcha?
Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.
The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.
100% agree.
Ukraine is not yet a NATO member. Poland is.
You're saying this as if it is some kind of gotcha? Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.
The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.
This isn’t new though, and Russia has conveniently provided the west with exactly the avenue to respond. Just further increase support to Ukraine, and make it clear that further sabotage and really anything unfortunate that happens will result in even greater support.
In fact, Russia should be investing heavily in ensuring that nobody else goes asymmetric against NATO countries.
Most of the west is already helping Ukraine as much as we can within the current budgets (which have already increased a lot over a few years ago - the "peace dividend went away).
Anything more means countries go to war time funding of some sort. Would you accept if the law made buying or working on video games illegal for the duration - that is everybody currently making a video game now has to switch to working on something military related.
I just pulled the above example out of my head randomly, there are plenty of other "non-essential" jobs that could switch to making bombs, shells, tanks, airplanes... (either manufacturing or engineering).
Probably not as likely as you think.
First, these things intentionally fall short of clear "armed attacks" and are designed around plausible deniability.
Second, Europe/NATO are not looking for a fight. Russia is in a bad spot right now, but NATO is not in a great spot for a kinetic conflict with Russia either.
Lastly, I don't think NATO countries are eager to test America's willingness to defend Europe under the Trump administration because they already know the likely answer when they call for help.
The last one is the strongest one. Our prior allies know they just can't count on us at all, when it comes to Russia, especially.
It is a sad state of affairs.
On the flip side, when your allies know they can count on you you stuff like them picking stupid fights because they know you'll back them up. Israel dragging us further into Iran during the first ~third of the conflict when the US was trying to find a clean place to stop the escalation is a pretty good example of that.
"the US" is stretching it hard when it comes to the Iran war. In the US government under Trump, there are a lot of different interests...
- you got Kushner and his ilk who basically wants to flatten Gaza to turn it into a real estate hotspot to make untold amounts of money
- you got the Evangelical nutcases who legitimately believe that this mess is a holy war and will bring back Jesus [1]
- you got your usual old-school falcons, MIC lobbyists etc. that stand to make a lot of money and/or want this war to happen for ideological reasons
- you got a ton of isolationists who want "an end to the US wars that cost taypayer money"
- you gotTrump himself who openly admires strongmen and (wannabe) dictators, and I think it's fair to classify Netanyahu as both.
And that is a loooot of different to incompatible interests to balance against each other.
[1] https://theconversation.com/evangelical-holy-war-why-some-ch...
Absolutely, but there were several instances where the US, regardless of how disparate the interests in it are, was more or less at the negotiating table and then Israel started blowing stuff up.
Trump doesn't want negotiations and deals with Iran. He wants to conquer it and make it a puppet state.
If he actually wanted a deal in place to limit nuclear ambitions and proliferation, he wouldn't have thrown it away in the first place.
This is like the guy who claims that he wanted to stop beating his wife but his brother just wouldn't let him stop.
Let's be clear: nobody forced the US to attack Iran in the first place. There is a reason no president before Trump did what Trump did: defense and intelligence officials have known for a very long time how such an attack was likely to play out and how disastrous it would be for the region, the US and the global economy.
Trump was warned by senior intelligence and defense officials and he chose to ignore their advice because he's a very stable genius who knows better than anyone else.
Israel has been trying to make the US attack Iran for decades.
It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
What we have been seeing is this gradual escalation. It's like boiling a frog slowly. Each escalation is too small to trigger a significant response, but after a while you suddenly notice that your country is burning.
I expect more of this in the near future. I wish the world stopped treating Russia as "just another business partner".
Ukraine is currently striking facilities deep inside Russia.
Russia could hit back in the same way easily, and to some degree they do. But their problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia - until they got that in May 2024, Ukraine understandably did not risk alienating their suppliers by doing that.
There aren't very many new lines of escalation crossed here. Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now - many hawks in the west haven't been shy about describing it as such either.
GTFO, Russian propagandist. If Russia dislikes the state of affairs there's a reallyyy easy solution: don't invade other countries baselessly. "NATO's proxy war" is a really funny way to describe the Russian war of aggression.
That’s a weird reading of the GP. They only said that Russia views this as a proxy war, which is true.
No, they are trying to justify actions against countries that supply arms to Ukraine.
As I point out in a other thread, supplying weapons is pretty normal and attacking random infrastructure in a country that happens to be allied to Ukraine is a significant escalation.
Where do you get this stuff? Only thing they’re saying is that Russia can’t attack Ukrainian weapon or munitions factories like Ukraine does to Russia because there aren’t many of them.
Read the context of their comment:
That reads exactly like an argument justifying Russia's actions.
Where's the lie? I said they now see it as NATOs proxy war against them, and western hawks are not shy about talking about it in those terms.
Yeah, they probably didn't expect it to turn into that when they attacked - they probably hoped it'd be all over in a week with a regime change in Kyiv. It's now they're thinking, shit, we were goaded into another Afghanistan. Which again, is not a way western hawks are shy of talking about it.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a cakewalk compared to what is going on today. 15k dead in 10 years, and the USSR was twice as big as modern ruzzia, so it is more like 7k dead for ruzzia alone. Now compare that to 4.5 years of the invasion of Ukraine - these wars are on a totally different scale. The Afghan affair was a remote low-profile endeavour; ports and oil refineries weren't burning all over the Soviet Union.
Well for one, it's nobody's war but Russia's, since they started it unprovoked.
What about "Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now" don't you understand?
Let me highlight the important part "RUSSIA VIEWS IT AS..."
And that's exactly what they communicate towards their population AS PROPAGANDA.
Whether Putin really sees it that way doesn't matter.
And if stating this makes me a Russian Propagandist, then so be it.
And it is in a way. Ukraine is practically fighting on behalf of East European NATO states against Russian imperialism. NATO’s eastern flank is not immediately threatened only because Russia’s curbstomp invasion turned into a war of attrition.
Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.
It's a significant step to escalate to attacking those countries.
It is an interesting argument to choose to invade a country, act with faux outrage when they find allies willing to supply them with arms and then call it a proxy war.
Russia got themselves into this mess. They have an easy way to get out of it.
This is well beyond arms supplies, NATO is running their entire ISR and targeting show and quite vocal about it. Plantar, Starlink on drones etc. and that’s ignoring financing and production. If anything, the Russian response has been quite flaccid.
Yes, there is no doubt that NATO countries (except maybe the US/Trump some days) wants Ukraine to win. They train troops, help with intelligence etc.
There is no argument that they are neutral.
But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.
North Korea is supplying actual troops to Russia, and that doesn't mean Ukraine is at war with North Korea. Belarus and Iran have both supplied arms to Russia and Ukraine isn't at war with either.
Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Is it so hard to see why Russia doesn't see things that way?
"Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
You wrote:
I agree that realism is a much abused word, and I think this is an example of it.
The first part of your sentence is realism: it is not surprising that Russia chooses to treat Western help as taking part in the war. That does not make it true. Advising, supplying and sharing intelligence is not the same as fighting.
The second part is not realism. Realism explains what states do. It does not say who is right, or who has the right to complain. "Don't have a leg to stand on" is a moral judgment, with the word realism put on it.
This is exactly how Russia wants the word to be used. Right after the full invasion started, the Russian foreign ministry shared a Mearsheimer article that blamed the West for the war. The goal is to make Russia's actions look like a natural reaction to the West, so that objecting to them looks naive.
Maybe you don't mean it that way, but going from "unsurprising" to "don't have a leg to stand on" does the same thing.
There is actually much doubt about that. It rather seems they are content with Ukraine not loosing and draining Russia in the progress with little care what happens to Ukrain except that they keep up the fight.
It is very obvious to me that basically every country in the alliance wants Ukraine to win and Russia to lose, and this is clear because they actively spend lots of money on effecting that outcome.
But NATO members obviously don't want to be spending money on foreign military, so pro-Ukraine spending stays limited to "cost effective" levels.
You make this sound like some nefarious conspiracy by western war-fetishists, when the status quo is basically the obvious outcome given even a little western self-interest.
Yeah, no. That is not how it works, American private companies are not just allowed to provide weapons of war without executive approval. If you remember, Trump is the one who removed Biden's ban on providing them targeting and the intel to hit Russia directly. The entire "Zelensky, please stopping hitting Russian diesel production" Trump thing is just an act - the US holds the keys to their (and the UK/EU, for that matter) ISR feeds.
My country, Norway, had a long-standing policy of not selling weapons to countries at war - yes even to the attacked party - because of the common understanding that would be tantamount to joining the war, and make us the target of reprisals. This prohibition also was a good shield against accusations of war profiteering or proxy warfare.
That policy which had been standing for 60+ years, was dropped for Ukraine.
Even if you are the most pacifist leader imaginable, at some point you have to draw a line with policies like that if you dont want to fold and hand over control to expansionist neighbors.
I figure a majority in Norway would have been willing to support Finland with more than just arms deliveries had they been the victim (would you agree with that?), so sending some cash + weapons to Ukraine seems consistent policy to me.
The point was not that you should never support a country that was attacked. The point was that you should be 100% above the table if you did that. If you weren't willing to fight yourself (and take the expected consequences, such as reprisals and sabotage), then you shouldn't sell weapons either.
And I'm sure statesmen like the Stoltenbergs would have defended this policy very eloquently, better than me, back when it was official policy...
And sure, it was broadly popular to get rid of this policy for Ukraine's benefit. It wasn't a hard sell to the public majority. Saying "let's take a step back and think principled about this" was the hard sell, as usual.
Seems like they did think principled about it:
Killing people is bad
Murderers must be fought back with maximum force
We can supply force
So we should
That’s simply not true and a gross misreprestation of the policy, which is still in place.
And it not dropped to cater to Ukraine, as it specifically has a carve-out for legal defensive war, which the Russian war of aggression towards Ukraine is.
Check snl.no/våpeneksport_fra_Norge, which is more reliable than Wikipedia on this.
It gives a list of the changes (or "clarifications") to the policy over the years. To the degree there ever was a carve-out for legal defensive war, it was certainly added after Ukraine.
Actually there were two phases: in 2022 they defend giving weapons to Ukraine in that it was a donation, not a commercial endeavor (that suggests to me that they implicitly admitted, commercial sales would have been against the policy). Then in 2024, they allowed direct commercial sales as well. Of course their defense lawyers will say the policy is still in place, but "realism" again: you can't blame Russia for not being convinced by that.
I am pretty sure every bigger German company has active sales team waiting for the end of the sanctions to fly on the same day to Moscow and continue/start new business. Construction materials, cars&trucks, oil refinery equipment, new deeper bunkers… everything is needed in russia. The west doesn’t see an enemy. Enemy of freedom, free speech and free thinking. Freedom to be a gay or autistic person in public. Euros and dollars matter though.
How are the Russians going to pay us though? Their economy is in shambles, Europe is busy divesting itself from fossil fuels, and their foreign currency/gold reserves are dwindling fast. And Russia as a whole will need to pay serious reparations.
First: Gas is gonna stay reasonably valuable for Europe in the near future, even if electrification of personal transport progresses very quickly.
And there are tons of other valuable ressources Russia has: Nickel, copper, aluminium, steel, ...
I don't see that happening at all. Who is gonna enforce that? Ukraine would be happy enough if they just left.
Nowhere near fast enough. The number of senior businesspeople who'd sell out the Baltic states in exchange for cheap gas is far too high.
Probably 100% of them. Only they don't realize it won't stop with the Baltic countries either - so no cheap gas even in that case.
The EU pays more than 1 billion EUR each month to Russia for their fossil fuels (more specifically, 1.2bn in August, 1.5bn in July). Countries leading are Hungary, Slovakia, France, Bulgaria and then Spain. And those are just direct purchases that we know about. Fossil fuels purchased from other countries might include Russian flows as well.
At the same time, much is made of various sanction packages, which are minuscule in comparison to these flows.
In other words, the EU finances the bombs that will be falling on EU countries in the future.
BTW, Russia will never pay any reparations.
I'm very curious about the downvoting here, which looks suspicious. I do realize that what I wrote might not be popular with a certain country (and its online trolling teams), but it is factually correct.
Let's cut to the chase here: the root problem is now a critical mass of the population simply won't believe the government blame for virtually any incident since false flags are now such a widely recognized concept.
The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.
What?
Russia was widely blamed for blowing up the Nord Stream pipe. You would get your comments removed from here if you said otherwise. Then it turns out they didn't do it. Oooops.
We still do not know who did it as several experts in diving have claimed that the story published by the journalists is not possible and the German police investigation seems to have stalled.
Still seems like any of Russia, Ukraine or Ukrainian citizens on their own initiative could have dove it.
If the Ukrainian military did it, I think they would have taken credit. They've taken credit for lots of major assaults, so I don't think they would hide this specific one. As for the other two options, I'm not willing to speculate.
they are probably referring to NordStream likely being done by Ukrainians, when the primary suspect was Russia for a long time as they could now claim force majeure to get out of delivery contracts in Germany.
Induction has always been a poor way of thinking
If you know something the world doesn't know, you'd better get cracking at updating the Wikipedia article documenting the issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
We're nowhere near it. Article 5 is armed conflict between nuclear armed nations.
No one wants to go near that because everyone will reliably die.
There is absolutely no reason why triggering article 5 will end with nuclear annihilation, MAD doctrine remains in effect.
huh?
Trump considers the EU to be his enemy and Putin is a master of salami tactics [1] so the answer is ”Probably never”
[1] https://youtu.be/yg-UqIIvang
what exactly do you think is going to happen if article 5 gets invoked? did America's current Special Military Operation not make it clear that missiles alone don't win wars, and that there's fuck all you can do when the other side yeets their missiles at you in return?
also, a friendly reminder that all willing parties are free to go fight Russia right now. https://ildu.mil.gov.ua/
Invoking Article 5 and winning a war are entirely separate operations.
In terms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberger_Doctrine if article 5 was invoked, one could set much clearer victory conditions - chase Russia back into Russia. Maybe arrest Putin war crimes or something.
It would still be extremely unpleasant, painful and expensive, of course; winning an exchange of blows still means taking a load of punches to the face. So the true winner would be China.
NATO does not need to win a war. They just need to hurt Russia bad enough Ukraine wins.
Maybe like destruction of Russian military command structure sparing just the silo based nuclear force?
It will lead to a gradual escalation, probably air spaces closed over Kaliningrad, Belarus and Ukraine for Russian planes and army mobilization towards the eastern flank of NATO in the first steps.
Sufficient assistance can be given to the Ukrainians without deploying troops to the battlefield so that the Russians are pushed out completely. Losing Crimea would be Putin's death knell.
Neither Putin nor his associates are religious fanatics happy to die for their cause, they're just money-loving strongmen. If faced with real danger they'd much rather do whatever they could to avoid dying, not risk being martyred.
so in your educated opinion Putin will do nothing when NATO attacks Russia directly?
Putin has backed himself into a corner. He has tied too much of his credibility to Ukraine, in turn if he loses Ukraine it is highly likely to loses his life in some "accident". He is smart enough to know that and so will double down as long as possible. Since his life is in danger anyway he has no reason to hesitate about using nuclear weapons if it looks like he is losing.
not really. The operation accomplished all the goals: it removed the current leadership of Iran. Of course the results where completely predictable: meet the new leadership - same as the old one (often just the children of the old). Lets not pretend that it didn't get the intended results. It just got some other unintended results as well (which were mostly predictable)
There are limits to what war can accomplish. Depending on how you fight the war you can get different long term results.
the intended result was a regime change to eliminate an enemy of Israel. did replacing IRGC moderates with IRGC hardliners accomplish that?
My understanding is that increasingly “adversaries” who may or may not be Russia simply pay local gangs/thugs/idiots to do it. If you don’t appreciate the risk of being caught, I’d imagine these things are not that hard to pull off. While risk is low for the country of origin.
Yes, and the playbook extends to some anti-war orgs throughout Europe who play the role of useful idiots by advocating things such as a) pressure your government to stop supporting Ukraine, b) force Ukraine to capitulate and agree to Russia's demands. They do so under the guise of "no to war, yes to peaceful negotiation" but the way they neglect Ukraine's best interests and push Russia's maximalist agenda is pretty telling.
And the West can and does return the favor. Perhaps Poland should fund the destruction of some Siberian pipeline pump stations? Article 5 against Russia is not going to get consensus anyway, so making it formal just increases the risk of escalation.
Frankly, "the West" doesn't care about Russia. They were a gas station masquerading as a country, but now they aren't even a gas station. Let's just fund Ukraine to the gills and in no time they won't even be good for petty vandalism.
Try telling this to the far-left.
Russia has indeed been funding and supporting fringe/extremist organizations throughout Europe.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/10/29/from-moscow-with-chaos-h...
However, even those parties that toe Moscow regime's line don't want to be caught supporting it directly due to the expected backlash.
That goes to show how much "the west" cares about what Moscow says.
I'm not necessarily referring to fringe organisations.
The best example of this that I can think of is the recent Die Linke electoral victory in Berlin. They have the same policy on European security as AfD.
It's a clear example of Horseshoe Theory. Pseudo-intellectuals in Germany may argue that the position is not the same because the motivations are not the same, but if you're sitting in Ukraine, feeling the walls shake, and seeing your pets tremble in terror, you really couldn't give a shit what some leftie in Germany thinks — the result is the same as the openly pro-Kremlin German far-right.
https://www.dielinkebt.de/themen/a-z/detailansicht/ukraine/
It’s easier than that. We’re helping Ukraine every day, and all Russia can do to retaliate against countries helping Ukraine is carry out acts of sabotage.
Article 4 (formal consultation) is far more likely, and using that as a way of doing an "article 5 light" after consultation as a warning shot.
Is it? I think the comical Euro response to the Nordstream sabotage showed what a joke the continent is.
That’s exactly the issue. If Putin provokes a measured reaction it’s a win, if NATO does nothing it’s also a win
The defender is fundamentally at a disadvantage with all or nothing clauses like article 5
Europe could respond without invoking article 5 though, so it's not really "all or nothing".
That's why USA is bombing Iran without everyone else bombing Iran. Article 5 hasn't been invoked.
What would this hypothetical response look like?
The whole doctrine itself is built on the idea that you as an attacker don’t get to decide where the line is. The principle of ambiguity. Russia desperate wants to know where the line is, because they know very well that when they cross it it won’t end.
This is a fundamental principle of NATO as a defensive alliance, have always been and will continue to be.
Now you have voices, coming mostly from outside, that are trying to make this out to be a bad thing and to show some kind og weakness in the alliance, when it is one of the core tenants of the alliance itself.
None of that answers the question. What does NATO practically do as response?
Principles, doctrines, ideas aren’t a response (or even an active decision to not respond)
If Article 5 is invoked NATO responds, and if not, the countries supporting Ukraine already are, with sanctions and military aid that keep increasing over time. Russia wants to know our limits so they can push right up to them, and we shouldn't give them that.
Every hybrid attack will increase spending towards Ukraine.
So hybrid attacks are incentivised for someone else besides Russia.
Or reduce spending because countries feel the need to station more defences on their own borders
After the 9/11 attacks, NATO did invoke Article 5 for the first and only time in its history.
When Israel starts bombing Turkey with US made weapons, NATO may invoke Article 5 again but I doubt the US will do anything.
And before you or someone else claims otherwise, the US did not request activating Article 5, repeatedly said it did not need NATO resources, and never took the invoking seriously. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_NATO_Article_5_contingenc...> But feel free to continue to brag about how the deployment of seven NATO aircraft for a year, and a few ships in the Mediterranean, totally saved the USA.
(No, ISAF was not an Article 5 operation, thus the participation of the likes of Mongolia.)
Aside from the question "will Art. 5 be triggered" there is the question "what happens if it is triggered?"
The article only states that an attack on one is an attack on all. Further reactions aren't spelled out. It can go from "yeah, we recognize it, have a nice day" to "let's send nukes" That ambiguity has some value as the idea was that it discourages any offensives as reactions were unpredictable.
But Russia is testing the limits. They did it in Ukraine, where there were some "green men" strolling arouns in eastern Ukraine, which then lead to occupation of Crimea which all didn't lead to much of a reaction, so they escalated further till full scale invasion.
In parallel we see those things in NATO/EU territories. One could start at murdering Georgians in Berlin's Tiergarten park, planes accidentally entering Polish air space, drones near airports or military facilities ... always testing the reaction. Mostly actions which don't warrant forceful reactions, while testing how quickly the escalation spiral is turning.
Ukraine was never in NATO. Ukraine was getting closer and closer to NATO and there was reason to suspect they might join in a few years, but that hadn't happened (and there were a few things wrong in Ukraine that NATO was quietly demanding Ukraine fix first)
Ukraine wasn't getting closer to NATO until Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Both its Constitution and popular polls were against joining NATO (i.e. remain a neutral country).
Still it shows the strategy of testing the reaction, which we can see in other regions, too.
The second part of the article states:
So triggering Article 5 means reporting an armed attack to the Security Council.
Article 5 doesn't mean what most people think it means... it's literally "we might help, somehow, somewhen, if we feel like it, in whatever way we want, maybe, maybe just by publishing an official warning to not do it again 'or else'"
It deliberately is that way, and I’d argue that most people in NATO countries know and understand this. You are taught this in school. It is what they call the Principle of Ambiguity.
Also, giving up the control of when to declare war or not would be something no country would willingly give up.
Lately there’s been this push with talking points like yourself, and I’m not trying imply something about you specifically, but it is interesting with the timing and the goal of undermining NATO as a defensive military alliance.
Germany already got drone bombed by Russia.
Germany says Russia behind Leipzig airport drone attack https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ylm3m67n2o
and
Russia ‘planning drone attacks on southern Europe’, CIA warns https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/09/24/russia-pla...
My fav being Swedish is Iran paying ""Swedish"" youth gangsters to bomb Israeli ambassies in Sweden and Norway...
https://www.reuters.com/world/swedish-security-service-says-...
We are already at war but no widespread panic... yet...
Which is what Putin would want to justify a new wave of troop mobilizations and forced conscription.
And just invoking Article 5 is unlikely to wind up immediately looking like tanks rolling across the Polish border into Russia the next day, sweeping through into Moscow and deposing Putin in a week--which is fantasy for multiple reasons.
The response would be measured and probably wouldn't go much beyond no-fly zones over the borders, and NATO forces shooting down Russian drones over Russian territory to start with.
But this would get Putin the justification for conscription that he wants. It would also provoke further debate in NATO member states over the costs of getting further sucked into a war with Russia, and Putin wants to use that in his propaganda war to strengthen the right wing in NATO states.
And Ukraine may be very vulnerable right now if Russia can figure out new combined arms tactics in a drone-saturated battlefield and restore maneuver warfare to the front. Combining that with bad weather in the winter, and 100,000s of newly conscripted troops for a zerg rush into the meatgrinder, and Ukraine could wind up in a very bad situation.
This whole war is on much more of a knife-edge than the propaganda from both sides suggests. And political reality limits what NATO can do as a response to having a Starlink terminal burned down. Be cautious of giving Putin the response that he wants to elicit.
The incident rate should rise drastically the more russia gets closer to loosing. https://acleddata.com/report/testing-waters-suspected-russia...
I must say a web/world without them and the quatari /iranian influence operations would be pleasant.
For anyone interested, there’s another part of the Starlink besides the satellites and your dish - ground stations (gateways) [].
These are the large clusters of antennas that communicate with the satellites and connect the Starlink network to the Internet on Earth. Looks like one of these was set on fire.
https://starlink.com/support/article/45d1d256-171e-0f67-4895...Are they required to have precise locations listed?
How would you know you live close enough to one for a physical link with it otherwise? I guess they could put "General 10km area here" but would still be kind of bad for people living on the opposite end of the "general area".
In many jurisdictions, you need a license to operate a teleport, and the applications are public and require a precise location.
There's a lot of RF emissions right there.
and yes, they are actually called teleports, that's not a typo
I believe many of these sites do not belong to Space X but are rented by companies offering such services. So they uplink for other companies as well and deal with regulatory stuff etc.
these seem to be just operator hq locations, not necessarily the station street addresses. but yeah, the locations would be public information.
Huh… I always thought direct satellite connection was one of the things that distinguished starlink from cellular tech like 4g or 5g, and that low earth orbit was what made it possible… what actually makes starlink different?
Edit: oh I think? I understand now, these basically relay the internet itself up to the satellites - so your individual starlink dish is still talking directly to a satellite but the satellite resolves your request for a website through these ground stations. I think?
It is. But at some point traffic had to hit the ground to connect to other parts of the internet. That happens at these ground stations.
It doesn't have to happen at exactly these specific ground stations, though (although any outage will increase the load on in-space forwarding capacity and downlink capacity of some other satellites, though).
But the servers are not in space (yet), so the signal needs to come back down somewhere.
the real difference is cash. they can afford literally hundred launches costing billions upfront and hundreds of millions in upkeep.
the original concept arts called for lazer beam sat2sat dynamic mesh relaying packets globally. that didn't quite happen.
what did happen was sats and terminals refreshed like tech products and not like military tanks. decades old standards are slow. all their competitors usd decades old everything.
their launch count is off by two digits. like 10x by reuse and stacked 10x by cash. that amount of cash appearing from somewhere is the difference.
Their phase one was you have a dish that goes to a satellite, but then that bounces straight back down to a ground station. Phase two was to have satellite-to-satellite comms, which they're doing with lasers. I imagine either some satellites can't do this yet, so ground stations are still needed, or they are using the ground stations for something else.
how exactly do you think the packets get from your computer to reddit.com without a ground station being involved somewhere?
All satellite based internet access works the same way… (mostly)
1) you send a signal to the satellite
2) the satellite relays the signal down to a ground station
3) from here your packets go out on the Internet like any other ISP
The answer then goes in reverse: back to the ground station, up to the satellite and down to your dish.
Starlink’s special sauce is the low earth orbit. Older satellite internet companies operated in geosynchronous orbit. This meant they only needed one or two satellites to cover a large area. You also only needed a small number of ground stations. The satellite needs to be able to see your dish and the ground station at the same time. But this is very high up, so latency was horrible (the distance up and down before the packet even hits the internet). Bandwidth was also limited, but much less of an issue.
With low earth orbits, you have great latency. But, because you still need to be able to see the ground station and the customer’s dish, this means that you need more ground stations. This is just geometry.
Starlink adds one more feature that is relevant here - direct satellite to satellite communication. Instead of the signal going from:
Customer - satellite - ground station - internet
The signal can go from:
customer - satellite A - satellite B - ground station - internet.
This later setup might be what you were thinking about. You still want to limit the number of hops from satellite to satellite you have (latency again), but this should make the service more resilient to the loss of a single ground station.
but there are other LEO Internet services, like Iridium and Globalstar that just don't compare, like 100x slower at 5x monthly price for 1000x less data.
"because LEO" don't explain why Starlink is like million times cheaper and faster than competitors while singlehandedly being reponsible for like 75% of man-made objects in space currently and past.
If you are stuck on a ship in a typhoon, iridium is precisely the system you want to be using.
What you are calling 'internet' is the land based backbone that's connecting to the 'rest of the internet'. The term is thus relative. Now of course there is next to no servers directly on the sate to sate network save for a few companies with special contracts. But with the AI sate halo there will inevitably be other server sate.
Arguably Starlink's special sauce is quantity of satellites and massively higher bandwidths combined with high-gain, electronically steered beams on both sides (i.e. terminal and satellite).
None of these are net-new as technologies: We've had LEO based telecommunications satellites for over two decades now (Iridium and Globalstar, the former of which even has in-space forwarding as well), as well as directional beams on both sides, but rarely all in one system and never at this scale.
Is that true though? 5g is significantly faster than starlink
yes it's true that starlink has shitloads of satellites
In my opinion, the quantity of satellites needed is a function of the height of the satellites. You only need a large constellation because they are moving so fast relative to the earth. This means that each satellite can only see a limited arc at a time. So, in order to cover a large enough area, you have to have multiple satellites following after each other.
The phased array antenna is also a function of this. Each satellite is moving so much that you need to have an antenna following the satellite across the sky.
So, once Starlink decided to have a low earth orbiting constellation (for better latency and bandwidth), the other features (quantity and a steerable antenna) became requirements to have a functional system.
Altitude does impose a lower bound for the number required for global coverage but they have much, much more than geometrically needed. Iridium gets by with about 70 and is only marginally higher.
As for steered terminals, you actually only really need these once you have more than one satellite visible in the sky at the same time. Without that, they’re purely a power efficiency feature.
Note that this list is list of places where if you are enterprise starlink customer SpaceX can provide you with physical ethernet port to plug your cable into when you want to handle your traffic yourself instead of that just going directly to the internet. That is kind of obscure service that even land-based PLMN operators offer but usually do not document in this way in publicly available documentation.
From the perspective of network design, the fact that this certainly is not exhaustive list of places where SpaceX has physical DC presence and physical reality it comes that some of these datacenters are selected based on the fact that the ground station is somewhere nearby (I would be surprised if there is even just one place on the list where nearby means "on the roof", because there is a lot of technical, logistical and administrative reasons why you do not want to put such a thing at a roof of a datacenter).
None of the original 5 buildings at Telehouse in London have any dishes on the roof but the new Telehouse South a few hundred yards to the South seems to have some on the roof but they don't look like they are for a SpaceX groundstation.
SpaceX groundstations look a bit different, they are a bunch of white domes about 1-2m in diameter, usually 8 or 9 of clustered together.
Here's an example in the UK: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Zy61dfdyp5xrq4w1A
It's handled by Arqiva here in the UK it seems, so no SpaceX branding on anything.
SpaceX also applied for two new grounds station sites in the UK, one a few miles West of Telehouse, south of Rainham. The other site is up in Harlow, Essex.
(I don't think any of this is secret, all of the info above can be found with some googling and scrolling in maps.)
I used to have private peering with a satelite provider at telehouse, one which downlinked from GEO in Amsterdam and presented traffic direct. They simply backhauled it over their own network (tagged as mpls I guess). Indeed it would arrive on that link even when downlinked on other stations around the globe.
Isn't that skipping over the more sensible middle ground of a VPN, which is what is more common for at least small or medium sized business customers of mobile networks.
Is that more sensible?
Very much depends on your applications. Some critical communications you don't want to trust to the internet at all. Some communication latency is important and so you can save a few MS by locating in such a data center. Some communication takes a lot of bandwidth and both of you want a cache in the data center to avoid use of the large pipes (youtube for example has servers in various colocation points just to cache the popular videos). Many small/medium businesses don't have a good data center, they outsource that to someone else, and starlink is just as good as anyone else (check all the fine print on the contract to see if this is true for your needs)
I haven't checked recently, but the FBI/CIA (I'm not sure which, but probably both) had 4-5 completely isolated networks, no connection to any other network. Once a computer was connected to an isolated network it would be destroyed when the lifespan was up - thus ensuring that classified data could not leak off the network. When they needed to connect to other locations they bought a separate fiber connection the entire way - the fiber would be in the same bundle as internet traffic, but otherwise isolated. (There are several cases where a virus got onto such a network despite the isolation so this isn't perfect, but...)
That depends if the goal of handling your own traffic is integrity (which a VPN can give you) or availability (which requires dedicated pathing through a leased line).
Why is that more sensible? It's worse, more expensive and has more moving parts. The only reason you'd use a VPN is if you're small enough that Starlink won't give you a PNI, or you can't afford it.
Those arent't ground stations these are datacenters where Starlink has a pressence for peering with other ISPs.
The ground stations look like this. https://www.srf.ch/static/cms/images/1280w/o-dpr-2/2aa021.we...
The site that was attacked is almost certainly located at 51.86428N 20.92121E (WGS84).
I am surprised to learn from both satellite and street view imagery that this site is located just <50m off a public road (in clear line of sight) and within a residential backyard partly behind the house on the block, and protected by a 1.2-1.5m high white picket fence. To be fair, the lack of almost any visible security deterrent may perhaps scare off an attacker because... security surely wouldn't be that non-existent? My only other thought is these sites really do not matter to Starlink because Starlink will have 1000's of them and as they only process encrypted data, almost anyone can run a ground station for a small reimbursement per month if they've got semi-decent fibre connectivity and a bit of power?
It's interesting which acts end up on HN. Recently there was an arson attack in Munich against a defense company [1]. I wonder if anyone keeps track of more and their resolution/convictions?
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/lka-brandanschlag-muenchen-...
Cui bono?
Semper est Russia.
This is happening just at the same time when Russia actively targets data centers in Kyiv 2 days in a row.
https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-attacks-disrupt-intern...
And in doing so, took down half the grey internet, e.g. Anna's Archive was offline.
Putin could be making a huge mistake here by alienating a largely benevolent Musk.
Supplying Starlink to Ukraine but not Russia is near the limit of what Musk can do, other than big cash donations. He could expand the geofence of Ukrainian drone Starlinks to include Russian territory, but that risks kinetic reprisals.
Does he still have Trumps ear? A year ago he could have probably changed Trumps mind on some issues, but he seems to have fallen out of favor and I'm not sure how far. (it wouldn't be unusual for a friend to publicly appear distant but still have soft power)
Effectively this is an attack on an American company’s infrastructure?
attacks on anything conected with elon, are only remarkable for there rarity.
Ok, so first Musk was supposed to be a Russian asset:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/technology/elon-musk-ukra... (2022)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-ukraine-russia-war-st... (2023)
Now he is apparently Ukraine's best friend and evil Russia attacks his Starlink!
Of course there is no possibility that a) one of Elon's many enemies did it, b) it was a Ukrainian false flag or c) Russia did it and Musk has been deep state all along like Thiel.
It happens. Not enough, but it happens.