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.
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?
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".
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?
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?
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 "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.
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.
what exactly do you think is going to happen if article 5 gets invoked? did America's current Special Military Operation not made it clear that missiles alone don't win wars, and that there's fuck all you can do when the other side yeets missiles in return?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
And it is. Ukraine is 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This ground station provides connectivity to Ukraine, therefore it's easy to imagine that russia the aggressor is trying to disable it to take down drone air defense and impede the ability of Ukraine to hit targets in the aggressor's territory.
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...
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?
There's a lot of RF emissions right there.
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/lka-brandanschlag-muenchen-...
One thought is to pretend to not know that it's Russia, and invoke it against an "unidentified adversary".
Macron famously said that he would "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.
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.
The defender is fundamentally at a disadvantage with all or nothing clauses like article 5
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.
It is a sad state of affairs.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.
No one wants to go near that because everyone will reliably die.
[1] https://youtu.be/yg-UqIIvang
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.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04g5x1wq5vo
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage...
I must say a web/world without them and the quatari /iranian influence operations would be pleasant.