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'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.
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.
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.
Nobody knows the objectives as they were never stated first and now everybody had reason to lie. (Except prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons)
What they accomplished seems reasonable to make a guess at objective around, and regime change by killing the leaders is a reasonable guess considering they did it.
Getting irgc hardliners more power is obviously not a goal. It is what happened of course, but not the goal.
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.
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.
Say Russia lobs some ordnance at Poland. Kills a kid. Claims it was an accident and definitely totally won’t happen again.
What in your mind does a response look like? Find a Russian kid? March on Moscow? Nukes? Air strike? Angry letter?
Obviously it’s a test and there is a need to push back but how is the tricky bit. Anything you do would be an overtly action against grey zone deniable action.
>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.
Please break down for me how you think they are losing, I’m legitimately curious how you came to this reasoning. Try to do it without bias, but from an objective technical and military standpoint.
Where are the goalposts for "losing"? Is "not winning" considered the same? Because the "three day to Kiev special military operation" has turned into a 5 year war with very little progress made in terms of conquering Ukraine.
Unless they do a general mobilization, they've already lost. They can hit Ukraine with missiles, but they're losing territory and their rate of attrition is extreme. If they do a general mobilization they might beat Ukraine, but that will likely result in a full political collapse.
There is no winning or losing in 21st century hybrid war between to states. THere is no natural offramp and the capitulating blows are stayed to the point that it doesn't "escalate".
In that light, it's not many leaps and bounds to assume that of the two, Russia is certainly "suffering" more in the grand scheme when viewed from the perspective of sunk cost fallacy. Their goal was to blitz the country in one month. 4 years later, Half a million confirmed dead, no western support, endless sanctions directly affecting the working class. That working class has been in a war economy against a foe who's GDP (nominally, no outside help considered) is 12 times smaller than it.
Naturally this is not ideal, and on the other side, Ukraine has suffered massive territory and personell loss. But having the world "behind" you and not needing to support a gargantuan economy/civil base allows them to always "spring back" more. Esp with western assistance, and especially if there is still territory to defend.
of course, all of this is moot if Russia ends up controlling ukraine. But at current pace, it will take roughly 10 million dead and 20 more years (minimum) of this form of warfare for ukraine to "fall". THat seems like losing.
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.
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.
Some recently deployed Starlink ground stations appear to be larger, i.e. more radomes in the physical cluster of radomes, than alexfoo's linked 3x3 cluster nr Winchester. Here's 10 at Woodwalton hr Huntingdon with space for another 14 ( https://maps.app.goo.gl/e5uQKSypeqUXEaVq8 ).
I've recently seen images of Starlink sites closer to the equator that comprise as many as 40 radomes, I expect that's a geographic thing with more Starlink satellites in equatorial, low inclination, orbits.
The dishes at Telehouse South are (more or less) statically directed south for GEO satellites over the equator. The Starlink antennas use smaller reflectors inside the radomes for Ku band service and they're continually tracking satellites from horizon to horizon.
> 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...)
It's more sensible if your goal is to not go "directly to the internet" which was the original statet motivation I replied to and also what I'd expect to cover most use cases. If you have additional requirements then sure something else might make more sense.
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?
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.
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)
Musk was the only figure that heard reconciliatory rhetoric from Trump/Vance after their spat. Perhaps because knowing how instrumental he was to bringing them into power they realize how detrimental he can be as the enemy.
Russia is winning the war FAST, that's why the US, its European vassals and NATO increasingly commit false flag operations to facilitate common military action.
The globalist are loosing everything on all fronts and that's why they are panicking right now. Extremely dangerous actions incoming!
Bro maybe keep the violence down. HN is bearable because I can cleanse my palette at the end of every session with humor from the few commenters like you.
I don't want to see my fave HNers all get banned for rare but deadly infractions (although I can see something like the above comment written by myself)
violence?,hmmm,no!, I think it IS noteworthy, given that the verbal/written attacks on elon are ,by times, stacked one on top of the other,and as far as I know, he has never been attacked, perhaps elon is the chosen devil, to be hated, even viciously, but then kept remote and safe, preserved to be hated another day.
perhaps we should start marketing custom pinyatas, donkeys with an elon head filled with confetty and bubble gum.
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.
As a person living in the west, but contrary to most of Ukraine's fans here, knowing a bit more about whats going on there, you are deluded by your propaganda.
First, this is not "Putin's war". Maybe it was to some extent at the start, though you forget Donbass and west backed repressions against people considering themselves as Russians in Ukraine.
But by now it is you - yes, you - who wage war against every Russian person in the world, who does not deny reality.
It is a fact that you put Russians at the same position with regards to you, as jews were in nazi Germany. You can claim it is "propaganda", but it is for Russians to decide, and not by their killers.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 69.2 ms ] threadWhat 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.
Still seems like any of Russia, Ukraine or Ukrainian citizens on their own initiative could have dove it.
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
No one wants to go near that because everyone will reliably die.
[1] https://youtu.be/yg-UqIIvang
did America's current Special Military Operation not made it clear that missiles and jets alone don't win wars?
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.
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?
What they accomplished seems reasonable to make a guess at objective around, and regime change by killing the leaders is a reasonable guess considering they did it.
Getting irgc hardliners more power is obviously not a goal. It is what happened of course, but not the goal.
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
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?
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.
Principles, doctrines, ideas aren’t a response (or even an active decision to not respond)
Yes im asking what that response would be.
Say Russia lobs some ordnance at Poland. Kills a kid. Claims it was an accident and definitely totally won’t happen again.
What in your mind does a response look like? Find a Russian kid? March on Moscow? Nukes? Air strike? Angry letter?
Obviously it’s a test and there is a need to push back but how is the tricky bit. Anything you do would be an overtly action against grey zone deniable action.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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 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.
I must say a web/world without them and the quatari /iranian influence operations would be pleasant.
In that light, it's not many leaps and bounds to assume that of the two, Russia is certainly "suffering" more in the grand scheme when viewed from the perspective of sunk cost fallacy. Their goal was to blitz the country in one month. 4 years later, Half a million confirmed dead, no western support, endless sanctions directly affecting the working class. That working class has been in a war economy against a foe who's GDP (nominally, no outside help considered) is 12 times smaller than it.
Naturally this is not ideal, and on the other side, Ukraine has suffered massive territory and personell loss. But having the world "behind" you and not needing to support a gargantuan economy/civil base allows them to always "spring back" more. Esp with western assistance, and especially if there is still territory to defend.
of course, all of this is moot if Russia ends up controlling ukraine. But at current pace, it will take roughly 10 million dead and 20 more years (minimum) of this form of warfare for ukraine to "fall". THat seems like losing.
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...
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).
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've recently seen images of Starlink sites closer to the equator that comprise as many as 40 radomes, I expect that's a geographic thing with more Starlink satellites in equatorial, low inclination, orbits.
The dishes at Telehouse South are (more or less) statically directed south for GEO satellites over the equator. The Starlink antennas use smaller reflectors inside the radomes for Ku band service and they're continually tracking satellites from horizon to horizon.
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...)
The ground stations look like this. https://www.srf.ch/static/cms/images/1280w/o-dpr-2/2aa021.we...
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?
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/lka-brandanschlag-muenchen-...
https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-attacks-disrupt-intern...
The globalist are loosing everything on all fronts and that's why they are panicking right now. Extremely dangerous actions incoming!
Episode 9: Is Ukraine Committing National Suicide? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmatx3ZJDKY). Unfortunately, yes.
I don't want to see my fave HNers all get banned for rare but deadly infractions (although I can see something like the above comment written by myself)
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.
As a person living in the west, but contrary to most of Ukraine's fans here, knowing a bit more about whats going on there, you are deluded by your propaganda.
First, this is not "Putin's war". Maybe it was to some extent at the start, though you forget Donbass and west backed repressions against people considering themselves as Russians in Ukraine.
But by now it is you - yes, you - who wage war against every Russian person in the world, who does not deny reality.
It is a fact that you put Russians at the same position with regards to you, as jews were in nazi Germany. You can claim it is "propaganda", but it is for Russians to decide, and not by their killers.
You are bloody murderers, and we will not forget.