Oliver Boyd Barrett on “Sinking Russian Ships, Propping Up Bankrupt Losers and Supporting Genocide. Your West This Christmas.”

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Communications professor Oliver Boyd Barrett ponders “Sinking Russian Ships, Propping Up Bankrupt Losers and Supporting Genocide. Your West This Christmas.”

Excerpt:

Kevin Barrett: So it looks like we might survive to see another year after that was a dubious prospect for a while there. But where do we even start with the way this geopolitical crisis is going way off the rails with grossly irresponsible behavior from the Western side? And what many would see is inadequate ripostes from the pro-multilateralism and pro-multipolar world side? I know your latest article started with that mention of these mysteriously sinking Russian defense-linked cargo ships Are we in a war of vandalism? Communications cables just got cut again and they're blaming Russia. And of course, the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up by Biden and company. And now Russian ships are mysteriously sinking. Where is this all going?

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Oliver Boyd-Barrett: This is a new wave of escalation with the West accusing Russian and Chinese ships of putting out cable links between Estonia and Finland. I'm not quite sure and I haven't seen any really convincing assessment yet of the actual damage that ripping up these cables is alleged to have done. My understanding about the internet at least is that it is constructed, the infrastructure of the internet is built precisely in order to protect internet communication from specific attacks on specific locations. So I think that the issue of the cables being dragged up by a ship's anchors, I believe the story is, is not totally implausible, although one wonders why these kinds of instances haven't happened more frequently. And I find it difficult to imagine that ships would deliberately even be capable of identifying and then using anchors to pull these cables up. I'm even surprised that the Baltic Sea is not sufficiently deep to make it impossible for this kind of accident to occur. So in brief, Kevin, I'm very skeptical about these stories. But I'm open to persuasion and I hope that we'll see some firmer evidence in support or at least evidence that would allow us to perhaps to dismiss these stories.

More credible, although we're still lacking in hard evidence, are stories to do with the sinking of Russian cargo ships, And at least in one case, and I suspect in more cases, these were tankers carrying alleged to be carrying Russian oil to European destinations, but skirting the sanctions regime against Russian oil and gas exports imposed by the European Union.

So we haven't seen this phenomenon before, particularly in the Mediterranean, and also in the Black Sea.. That is, I think, alarming. So it's very likely to be a new wave of escalation that has to do with direct attacks on infrastructure, whose ultimate aim is to further cut infrastructural links between Russia and the West.

(Full transcript available at my Substack.)

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