My guess on why they do this: It's a cheap way to distract us from focusing our investments into Ukraine. If we think they they could strike anywhere we're less likely to focus our efforts.
It probably has the long term cost of making us more willing to invest in defence though.
No one is really going to invest (financially) in Ukraine while there's a shooting war going on. These Russian attacks on European infrastructure targets (including other means like arson) are more intended to discourage foreign aid and political support for Ukraine. Essentially Russia is signaling that they can make the conflict more expensive for everyone. Hopefully it won't work.
Yeah, that's what I meant. Invest as in investing in Ukraine's ability to defend itself so that we don't need to invest as much on our own defence.
Investing in Ukraine's ability to deal with Russia is clearly the most economical way to deal with Russia for everyone else. Hence they want to distract us from that.
Yeah, in the way I can invest in a new GPU for my gaming computer.
Paying military subcontractors is not putting resources into improving the military, it's spending. Be it bombing a country for no profit (like Afghanistan), for resources (like Irak), or geopolitics gain (like Syria/Ukraine), it's an expense, not an inversion. The military will not get ROI from oil or geopolitics.
"What is hybrid warfare? – Kilcullen's theory about liminal maneuver"
by
"Anders Puck Nielsen, an officer and military analyst at the Danish Defence Academy, specializes in Russia, Ukraine, and maritime operations."
It's electronic signals warfare. Depriving your opposition of power or communications destabilises command structures.
Now you might say "...but these cables are so low value", but these are easy targets that reduce the resilience of the Baltic states. Any more conventional attack would now be more effective because they've taken the backups out first.
The ones under the Baltic (with the exception of some islands) are not 'critical', as in they're used for reasons (cost, latency, directness), but those reasons are not b/c there's no other way to connect to the Internet.
But cutting a few of them doesn’t mean the transactions don’t happen, they’re just slightly delayed, so you can’t count the full value of those transactions as a loss.
To adapt the old saying, the internet interprets cut cables as unreachable intermediate nodes and routes around them.
It could also be a distraction from them cutting and inserting their equipment somewhere else along the line. Dunno how detailed the monitoring is of these cables, but visibly cutting it one place would apparently give them two weeks to play around along that cable.
Or they're just being bullies, or testing willingness to defend. At this point, I'd assume it's some type of aggression, at least. Unless cables have been cut all the time, but now suddenly it's becoming headlines for political reasons...
If we're talking about the Chinese state, I'd say it's viable. Perhaps not breaking AES 256 outright, but screwed up implementations of cryptography. And perhaps even backdoors.
Yes, it's garnered a ton of attention on the shadow fleet carting oil around. It's counterproductive for Russia to fund this kind of guerilla vandalism.
It probably has the long term cost of making us more willing to invest in defence though.