"His comments echoed a statement last Sunday by Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who asserted that "Sweden is not at war. But it's not at peace either," citing hybrid attacks and "proxy wars"."
WW3 on anyone's bingo card for 2025?
Just five years ago it felt impossible, today...? Idk. I despise a lot of the almost gleeful fear mongering ("budget submarines"). But the world is scary, and it is getting worse TODAY.
@annavirrpanna Yes, it's on my bingo card.
The push towards war is, unfortunately, a decade in the making now.
@annavirrpanna if I look on gpsjam.org, there is a big red patch all over Helsinki suggesting a heavy levels of GNSS interference from Russia although Traficom in Finland quote a lower (but not insignificant) level (not enough to cause chaos, but enough to cause some disruption and require mitigation tactics)
(perhaps most of the jamming is up in the air, and sporadic?)
https://tieto.traficom.fi/en/statistics/satellite-navigation-service-interference-finland
Enough for plausible deniability, but also enough to spread fear and insecurity I guess?
@annavirrpanna this is very likely according to Traficom some of it is linked to UAVs (but Ukraine is many km away the other side of Finland, are Russia attempting to send UAVs into Finland's airspace?).
Interestingly there's also a significant level of domestic ground level GNSS disruption, some from commercial drivers trying to fiddle their tachographs for whatever reasons which is not something I've encountered at this level here in UK (or mentioned elsewhere in Europe).
Well, five years ago it was already 6 years since Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine, 5 years since they blew up ammunition depot in a NATO country, 14 years since they assassinated Litvinenko and 2 years since they tried to assassinate Skripal but instead killed a homeless woman. The primary reason why they did all of the above was that when they continuously escalated everyone was looking the other side and loudly repeating “let’s not talk about it”.
Yes, to be fair Russia has been on a track to hell since Putin started to trade places as PM and president with Medvedev.
The difference is the rest of the world I guess. More and more unhinged, more and more far-right.
These things are partially connected. For example, in 2015 Merkel famously invited all asylum seekers to Germany. Now they reintroduced border checks… on the Polish border but back then they refused to even acknowledge the fact that the migration crisis was engineered by Belarus and Russia, even when Lukashenko said that explicitly. This denial not only convinced them of their impunity, but also aggravated the problems they caused, and gave rise to the far-right. When people see that the ruling party can’t deal with a problem, they will resort to one that does - or at least claims so.
Can’t say much about US, but I suppose it’s the same there.