World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News [email protected]
Politics [email protected]
World Politics [email protected]
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
view the rest of the comments
Perspective from Estonia: it was funny. I know that GRU does things which are far from funny, but this case was a comic failure.
According to the sentence, some GRU branch hired a local fan of the Kremlin, who hired an ex-cop with links to organized crime, who hired one subcontractor, who hired another subcontractor, who finally paid some clueless guy to do the job: kick in the window of the interior minister's private car (a newspaper editor's car was also targeted).
In doing so, they spent 10 000 euros. To kick in two car windows. While leaking streams of data due to involving a chain of subcontractors, and getting caught. That's ridiculously inefficient. I'm surprised at how they're able to actually carry out sabotage at this level of clumsiness. Perhaps their netork in Estonia is simply very shoddy.
Meanwhile, if you gave an anarchist in Russia 10 000 euros (no instructions, anarchists don't take instructions) you could feasibly expect something important to burn down.
P.S.
Non-paywalled source: English edition of Estonian public broadcaster ERR:
https://news.err.ee/1609542394/pro-russian-activist-handed-6-5-year-prison-sentence-for-vandalizing-minister-s-car
Setting aside efficiency, I really don't get this whole "pay criminals to engage in sabotage" campaign in Europe that Russian intelligence has going.
The actual acts don't cause that much damage. It's not hamstringing countries.
If it can't be linked to Russia, then it seems unlikely that it has much deterrent power. Russia can't say "do things I don't like, and we'll do more of this".
If it can be traced to Russia, then the elaborate string of subterfuge doesn't seem to have a point.
And stuff that can be attributed to Russia is an escalation that the other country knows about. Escalating with NATO, even in limited ways, seems to me like a losing game for Russia. Russia's best hope from NATO is disinterest, not winning a "who inflicts more pain" game.
Maybe the idea is to artificially create the impression of unrest or disagreement with the government, but that seems questionable at this scale. I mean, would some of these even have made news had they not been traced back to Russian intelligence? If they could instigate widespread riots or something like that, okay, that might be different, but...
EDIT: It might be trying to find a form of asymmetric warfare, which the article mentions. I can easily believe that Estonian intelligence and law enforcement expended more then 10k EUR in resources investigating your window-kicking incident that cost Russia 10k EUR. But...Russia trying to drain resources in NATO seems impractical too. It's too-large a pool to reasonably drain, and even more so with the scale of this campaign.