It's not "seen as an attack by Russia on NATO" because per the NATO treaty Russia nuking Washington DC won't be "seen as an attack" either, that is, until the country being attacked officially declares it as such through the mechanisms the treaty outlines.
The Czech republic hasn't invoked that mechanism, therefore it's a non-event as far as NATO's concerned. NATO doesn't have any mechanisms for pro-actively monitoring attacks on member states, outside of those states themselves.
The most egregious acts can be downplayed or politely ignored, if the aggrieved party really wishes to avoid war. On the other hand, the smallest provocation can serve as a justification for war, if the aggrieved party wants war.
North Korea regularly shells South Korea, sometimes killing South Korean civilians. It's absolutely a cause for war, and they might indeed be justified, in a sense, with breaking the ceasefire and marching on Pyongyang the next time NK does so. But they will have to live with the war that would cause.
One everyone knew about that could not be played off as an accident or one small unit that got carried away. Read war histories, large conflicts often start out with a succession of small scale feints, probes, and black operations.
Any attack during which the country attacked invokes article 5. Czechs didn't, and I'm not surprised.
Similarly Russia launched a cruise missile back in 2023 that flied over half of Poland and crashed in forest near Bydgoszcz. Poland did not invoked article 5, even if it could be justified.
Reason is similar in both cases:
- war is a BIG DEAL, it would likely cause flight of foreign investment and other businesses
- if NATO helps it would be an easy win, but there would still be loses in the region
- it's possible many countries in NATO don't see that as a sufficient justification for the war, which might cause problems in NATO and reduce the security guarantees for when they are REALLY needed (i.e. if Russia invades somebody in region for real)
TL; DR: it's not worth it for the attacked country, even if Russia is long past the point of "deserving it"
For the same reason that shooting down an Iranian passenger airliner or blowing up its centrifuges isn't considered an attack on Iran.
Also because most of us aren't interested in nuclear war over anything less than an existential threat. And the odds of conventional war between nuclear powers escalating into nuclear war is too fucking high. You'll need a better reason than 'someone blew up a weapons stockpile' to risk that.
If you're not going to risk open war over a full invasion of Ukraine, we sure won't risk it over an arms depot.
De-escalation-by-default is a feature, not a bug in a world where the push of a button can kill a billion people (much to the chagrin of people who have never had war waged against them).
And then Czechia in 2021 randomly decided it's not worth it? (Russia did not cut access to their resources as a result anyway). Does not make sense.
The breakthrough in the investigation came only post 2018 as a result of Skripal poisonings where the same agents were involved. It took a while to connect the dots.
The EU, Germany in particular, was not interested in making a big deal out of it for fear of getting cut off from the Russian teat. German economy was set up to run on Russian gas and oil and Germany has a lot of influence over Czechia so there was likely some pressure to keep things quiet. But in 2021 there was enough evidence on who did it and what was being planned to take action.
Because Germany is the biggest ally of Russia in the EU and has investments in Eastern Europe that benefit from cheap labour available in the region and cheap oil and gas from Russia (well, no more), so it was not interested in upsetting the status quo.
Vanishingly small amount of facts that affect us are proven in court or by scientific experiment.
When living on this world, one must do a lot of “speculation”, to derive most probable explanations based
on limited information available. I guess one could call it “personal opinion”, “informed opinion”, or even “expert oponion” depending on the context.
In this specific case, worth remembering, that speed of investigations depend on resources allocated to it; resource allocation is easily impacted by politics.
Here is an unrelated example, but it illustrates an attempt to appease Russia: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-14202371 (there was European Arrest Warrant for ex-kgb guy over old eastern Europe stuff; in 2011 Austria detained him, but then swiftly released him within 24 hours)
That's a very good question. The problem is what's next if they acknowledge that.
Say it is acknowledged as an attack on a NATO member, but nothing is done. That immediately turns NATO's worth from whatever its is worth now, to less than the paper it was printed on in 1999 when the Check Republic joined the organization.
That's the achilles heel of NATO, and the Russian government knows it. Same goes for Baltic countries and possibly Poland. Currently what is Americans' and West Europeans' appetite for starting WWIII over an arms warehouse, or a small village in Baltics? I want to believe they would step up, but I am not convinced. Those kind of attacks becomes very attractive for Putin: blow something up here, hack something there, assassinate this or that person, and then watch NATO do anything.
That's why the predictable response it so look away and pretend nobody saw anything.
Since the invasion of Ukraine I think it's pretty clear to everyone involved (and many have been making it publicly and loudly clear) that appeasement doesn't work with Putin. So if any of the Baltics gets invaded for whatever reason, you can bet that a majority of NATO members will join to defend (even traitors in some countries like Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria will definitely will try their best to stop their country from joining).
Sure, but as the commenter above you was saying, it wouldn't be an "invasion." It'll be a series of escalation provocations. Blow something up "by accident", poisonings of escaped dissidents, "little green men" stirring stuff up in the "persecuted" Russian-speaking minority, and then using that as a pretext for more and more strident interventions.
And at each point NATO has to make a decision whether it's "worth it" to escalate into armed conflict over it, and Putin can just keep "bending the stick" until he finds where it's about to snap, and not push any further, while the stick gets a bit weaker and weaker...
I do think the Russians are vulnerable right now in the sense that if they provoked excessively in the fashion they were used to before the invasion of Ukraine, they could open the floodgates to more serious support for Ukraine.
> Since the invasion of Ukraine I think it's pretty clear to everyone involved (and many have been making it publicly and loudly clear) that appeasement doesn't work with Putin.
The world sat idly when he invaded Georgia, Crimea, Donbass. When Russian agents sabotaged facilities over Central and Eastern Europe, murdered dissidents and civilians.
I’m not sure what the opposite of appeasement is in this context. A great power state invading/annexing/assisting a “separatist group” (whatever you want to call it) does not lead any direct escalation with another great power/superpower in this day and age. In turn I don’t understand how Putin has been getting appeased any more than other great powers.
One would have to reckon with all the wars and troubles that other great powers/superpowers make and how they are “appeased”, also. And that is awfully uncomfortable.
That sounds like BRICS. Non-declared economic warfare is in use now. There was also the 2023 Russia-Africa summit, which I was astonished to learn did not take place within Africa.
One way to alleviate patch up that achiles heel is a bit shady: proportional indirect responses. (E.g. Wagner forces in north Africa are not officially part of Russian army…)
Yes, exactly! And it should be escalated a bit more so Russians would be dissuaded from doing this again. "Oh look, that Crimean bridge fell, how unfortunate!" or "another munitions warehouse blew up in Siberia: oh that's too bad". Sadly, I don't think current Western leadership [1] is up to it. It requires playing dirty and getting on Putin's level. Sadly, I think that's the only language he understands. Any appeasement is seen by him as weakness to be taken advantage of.
[1] Macron recently showed some surprising boldness, probably noticing Americans dragging their feet with the aid package and Germans being terribly indecisive as well. Not a bad political play.
If responding to this would mean nuclear armageddon, then what is Russia doing by attacking NATO in this way?
Rolling over beacuse somebody is a nuclear power only seems to come up when Russia is in the chat. If China or Israel attacks someone, nobody says "we can't respond to it because it would start a nuclear war."
What is it about Russia that makes Russia so irresponsible? And if it is, isn't it time to completely eliminate all economic ties with Russia, and pressure every other country in the world to do the same, until Russia decides to be a responsible country with their nuclear weapons.
Bluntly put, what makes Russia so "irresponsible" is that they know they can get away with it from experience. This will continue for as long as the collective West keeps behaving in ways that make it clear that it would do anything possible to avoid a confrontation.
Note that there's a difference between talk and action. The West likes to talk about holding Russia accountable, and making a show of it with token sanctions. But when even those token sanctions are routinely skirted by Western companies operating through intermediaries in third countries while Western governments look the other way, Russia knows that all this talk doesn't matter and can be ignored.
It also doesn't help that talking about what needs to be done to be able to reliably push back - i.e. more defense spending, more investment into military infrastructure and manufacturing, helping your allies etc - gets politicians voted out of office in so many Western countries these days.
> If responding to this would mean nuclear armageddon, then what is Russia doing by attacking NATO in this way?
Doing low-stakes trial runs of its capability for sabotage in a future conflict.
The reason it can do this against NATO is because NATO has non-war means to tit-for-tat punish Russia for this sort of behaviour. Those means are called sanctions, and there could always be more of them.
NATO does not do much of the converse, because Russia has very few non-war ways to punish NATO. NATO would really not like Russia's tit-for-tat response, which is why it prefers to fight arms-length proxy wars, instead.
>because NATO has non-war means to tit-for-tat punish Russia for this sort of behaviour. Those means are called sanctions, and there could always be more of them.
Except that they don't really work well against Russia, if you ask anyone in those small and formerly depressive Russian cities where property prices are currently rising. Parallel imports and proxy exports do magic, bureaucrats in the financial block of the government handle monetary policy extremely well, China is helpful and half of the world simply does not care or directly benefits from this war.
So all it took to unfuck the Russian economy is for it to be subjected to sanctions and import/export restrictions? Weird, countries rarely tend to prosper under those circumstances.
I thought that the crooks in charge were running it into the ground for the past ~33 years, I didn't realize that this was all it took to get them to start managing the country well.
> if you ask anyone in those small and formerly depressive Russian cities where property prices are currently rising.
Not sure which properties you're talking about, most of the Soviet construction in my home town is - quite literally - falling apart, with no motivation or economic capacity, or money to repair, rebuild, or replace any of it.
Sure, you can inflate property values to whatever amount you want, if you start printing money to finance a war, but that doesn't on its own result in economic prosperity. You actually need to make stuff, and Russian industry has lost the ability to do that decades ago.
> I thought that the crooks in charge were running it into the ground for the past ~33 years, I didn't realize that this was all it took to get them to start managing the country well.
You are completely misunderstanding modern Russian economy. The “Running into the ground” part ended 20 years ago. Organized crime was contained, necessary reforms were mostly done, entrepreneurial culture emerged, they started developing industrial policy and digitalization. Old Soviet industry and monocities around it were dying, true, but whole new sectors emerged and they are damn good. Banking and telecoms, hospitality, IT and e-commerce to name a few. Even industry is not completely dead, on the contrary: whole new automotive clusters have grown with increasing localization of components etc. One very good indicator of the shape of industry is the current output of military industrial complex: they scaled it incredibly fast and currently outperform the entire EU on a number of positions. This means that not just some factories are working but their entire supply chain is ok. This is the part of Russia that actually prospers and has been growing for a while now.
> Sure, you can inflate property values to whatever amount you want, if you start printing money to finance a war, but that doesn't on its own result in economic prosperity
The thing is, they don’t print money. Their head of central bank is one of the most competent professionals in Europe if not the entire world.
What is happening now is redistribution: oil money going into the pockets of the poor people, a family member of which has signed the contract and went to war. No wonder the war feels “justified” for them: they have never seen this kind of money before and they spend it. Just for example take the small town Mtsensk. Since the start of the war property prices there increased by 50%. Old Soviet panel building is still a big upgrade for those who were used to go outside to the toilet. This is another part of Russia, forgotten and abandoned for a while, which won a lottery ticket while supplying the war with cannon fodder.
Both parts exist and when counted on average, negate each other. Omitting one of them is oversimplifying.
> Rolling over beacuse somebody is a nuclear power only seems to come up when Russia is in the chat. If China or Israel attacks someone, nobody says "we can't respond to it because it would start a nuclear war."
>What is it about Russia that makes Russia so irresponsible?
Consider the contents of the training sets. China hasn't "been" our "enemy" until relatively recently, it takes a while for "reality" to propagate to all nodes.
Nobody wants to start a nuclear war, that's my point. But it is only when dealing with Russia that some people say, "we can't do anything in response to their aggression" whereas with China or other nuclear powers, nations can respond to aggression without the threat of nuclear war.
Its a difference in the character of the countries, and it implies that Russia is far more dangerous than China, and that there must be a vigorous international collaboration to contain Russia's apparent aggression.
Wars are never waged as responses to attacks or insults, they are waged when the rulers have determined that they will be profitable. Until then, all attacks or atrocities will be ignored.
When it's time for war, the rulers will make up any kind of excuse, order the media to whip up the population to a war frenzy and mothers will cry tears of joy when their sons get sent away to die in agony in some forest or desert with their guts spilled all over the ground.
But if you think the honour of the Czech Republic or NATO needs to be restored, the question is what are you still doing in front of the computer?
Haven’t you inverted it rather flagrantly? In this scenario it is Russia that attached the Czech Republic.
> Wars are never waged as responses to attacks or insults, they are waged when the rulers have determined that they will be profitable
It is a meaningless truism that nations don’t start wars they don’t think they can or will win. No need to dress that up as any sort of profound insight.
Nations don't start wars, rulers do. The rulers can still profit while the nation loses. That's the standard outcome of war, the nation will suffer greatly and lose immense amounts of human life and destruction, whether winning or losing the war. Even a nation who only wages war overseas looses much more than they gain, because of productivity that has to go to the war effort. It is only ever the rulers that have anything to gain from war. And of course those who enjoy war and battle for itself.
> In this scenario it is Russia that attached the Czech Republic.
Winning the war isn't enough if you suffer greatly to win it and get little if anything to actually show for your victory. "Profit" is necessary.
In this case, the cost of ignoring Russia's attacks is far less than the cost of winning a war against Russia. If this relationship flips, then we might get war.
NATO countries have been consistently looking the other way or downplaying Russian aggression because nobody actually wants to have to get into the sty and get dirty wrestling the pig to the ground.
I don't even think it's based on any realistic concerns of nuclear or conventional escalation... incumbents just don't want to be the ones in power when war happens. I think many aggressors have learned to capitalize on this weakness.
What for? To start a war between nuclear powers just because of sabotage? Furthermore, we the members of NATO sometimes sabotage other members, like when some pipes of the Nord Stream pipeline were destroyed two years ago. So...
Suppose ot were true, how would you turn the evidence into profit? Sell it to western media? Let the wrong person know and they'll tip off western intelligence and then your car will drive you into a tree. Sell it to Russia? Maybe they would pay, but would you like life in Russia? Once you're there, maybe they don't pay after all. Or maybe you sell it to Russia, stay in the west, and spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.
The proof, if any exists, is worse than worthless.
You mean we don't know who managed to blow up the pipeline that some NATO members threatened to blow up several times? Yes, we only have this official investigation from two ""independent"" countries that wouldn't hesitate to point their finger at Russia if they had any evidence, no matter how weak, yet they closed it "without identifying perpetrators". You're right, no clue!
You can argue that if it was Russia, western countries might want to ignore it, because otherwise they'd have to do something.
Much easier to respond by supporting Ukraine.
For a NATO ally to do it would be extremely risky -- what if the others hadn't kept quiet?
(You can't always predict what your allies will do)
It's worth a lot less in a hypothetical scenario where everyone's decided its in their best interests to forget all about it, which may be similar to the scenario we're currently in.
In politics, the truth isn't usually worth very much, and is second fiddle to the ends.
