Basically making everything more shitty, and having people walk on eggshells - so that they'll vote for isolationist parties that are either neutral, or will outright appease Russia.
The idea is that no-one in Europe actually wants to go to war with Russia, and small remainders like these is enough to increase that fear.
Except that everything that is shitty in the EU right now has been the consequence of the last ~20 years of EU leadership and individual EU member policies.
Russia didn't increase the EURO supply during covid devaluing our wages and purchasing power. Russia didn't connect our fridges on the internet without a VPN with credentials admin:admin that any script kiddie could pwn. Russia didn't open our borders to unvetted criminals. Russia didn't offshore our industry leading us to fall behind on everything manufacturing related from cars to leading edge semiconductor fabs. Russia didn't create our NIMBYistic housing policies that made our current housing shortage. etc, etc, etc.
Blaming Russia (and China and Trump) for every single shortcoming of the EU right now seems the default scapegoat for the incompetence of everyone in the EU from politicians to business leaders. Have those people ever taken any accountability for their mistakes?
at risk of being autistic: no, not everything
plenty of shitty things is happening for reasons utterly unrelated to that
Some (or even all) EU policies being dumb does not make impossible to have problems caused by something else.
For example Russia was directly involved in making migrant crisis worse.
Yes, obviously Russia will weaponize every single weakness of the EU (just how Ukraine, EU, US, NATO and China will weaponzie every weakness of Russia right now), but ultimately it's still a self inflicted weakness, that the EU could close at the snap of the finger if it actually cared about stopping it, and Russia would not be able to weaponize any longer.
The part I referred to is in fact almost entirely solved, especially compared to the peak.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus%E2%80%93Poland_border_... is one of them more symbolic part, though that is only one piece of puzzle.
It was built by Poland in very non-EU fashion (see below, "shall not apply to the investment. In particular, the following are not required"), but EU at least has not sabotaged it and in fact silently ignored some topics.
https://www.sejm.gov.pl/Sejm9.nsf/PrzebiegProc.xsp?nr=1657 Art. 6. 1. - English translation below:
> Separate regulations—including the Construction Law, the Water Law, environmental protection laws, regulations on the disclosure of environmental information, the Geodesy and Cartography Law, regulations on spatial planning and land development, regulations on the protection of agricultural and forest land, railway transport regulations, and regulations concerning special procedures for the preparation and implementation of public road investments—shall not apply to the investment. In particular, the following are not required:
>1) a building permit or a formal notification;
>2) a decision determining the location of an investment of public purpose;
>3) the preparation of a construction design;
>4) the obtaining of any other decisions, permits, opinions, or clearances, or the submission of any notifications.
Again, EUs problems, are EU self inflicted and they could stop them if they chose to.
at least part of that is consequence of not only that
1. "isolationist parties" are inherently aligned with Russia and that it's good for Russia, in a zero-sum way, for countries that are not Russia to implement those policies.
2. Attacks like these are definitely done by Russia and we don't need to wait for evidence to connect them.
But there are problems with that:
1. "Isolationist parties" are nationalist, so if they knew that Russia was causing a problem for their own country, why wouldn't they oppose Russia? More generally, the claim that "small remainders like these is enough to increase that fear" is basically arguing that when a country engages in terrorism that somehow makes everyone else less inclined to take a stand against them. If that were true, I'd expect to see far more terrorism going on in the world than actually occurs.
2. The main "isolationist" policy is restricting legal immigration and/or enforcing immigration law. But if it's good for Russia that other countries do these things, it should also be good for Russia for them to do the opposite (because again, the idea that the way other countries govern themselves should impact on Russia, requires zero-sum thinking). If the powers that be in Russia believe this, we should expect them to pursue expanded legal immigration for themselves aggressively. But in fact their rate of legal immigration (percentage of population per year) is roughly on par with the USA, and it mostly comes from former USSR republics.
3. The truth of this narrative would be far too politically convenient for the people who have been trying to tie Trump specifically to Russia for over a decade despite many of their stories completely falling apart.
4. The proposal supposes that Russia assumes far more direct control over foreign populations than is plausible. It makes more sense to suppose that "desinformatsiya" is about chaos rather than complacency.
And the required investment is minimal.
It is staggering to me the difference in people that come to HN.
This is one of the thousands of ways a hybrid war is fought!
Or another ai has broken containment and has a fixation about freezers...
The hell makes you think food supply chain refrigeration is non-critical? How do you think safe food supplies work? This type of attack should be treated as an overt act of war.
Not saying we know anything about who did it, but senseless vandalism is usually a hallmark of kids.
Will it work, or will it harden their resolve to fight?
Russia knows that if they want to keep annex countries, they'll have to take them piece by piece, with little resistance.
Your explanation and mine equally have zero credible evidence.
Given the fact that public awareness will quickly push companies to scan all software for vulnerabilities using AI, attackers will be making the most of this period to find daily flaws in hundreds of software packages that we previously saw as either "robust" or "robust enough" given the attack time/cost vs. incentive, before these defensive tools are deployed and operationally effective.
Nation state security services and rogue actors must surely all be scrambling to decide what to do with the millions/billions of dollars worth of exploit development time that forms their tool-set, including potentially using up zero day exploits etc.
The other factor is in the midst of such hysteria as "rouge agents" and other crap piped by the media, along with the actual risks of individuals with a few hours now having as much power as teams with weeks of time to spend did just a few years ago, coherent reports of what's actually going on is drowned in the noise. Attackers take full advantage of this.
Why you would assume that Russian strategy is optimal?