I love that the Guardian article in that thread cites the head of NATO's statements as proof of Russian involvement. This is even lazier than Russiagate.
And? There's nothing here denouncing nuclear. Also, Nord Stream AG? You mean the Swiss holding company of which Gazprom is a partner? So the millions of dollars that Exxon, Chevron, etc. have spent on misinformation to undermine climate change concerns over the decades implicates the US government as well?
BUND specifically states that they never opposed to construction of the Nord Stream pipeline, because they viewed natural gas as a good alternative to nuclear:
Wow, well as someone who straddles the US and EU, he sure as heck seemed to be extremely pro-Putin at the very least, and Putin was very clearly very pro-Trump. Whether Putin has kompromat/direct control of Trump is unknown, what is clearly known is that Putin and Russian nationalists much preferred Trump in charge. I cannot find a single thing that Trump said which is negative about Putin, and Putin is a man who considers the USA his greatest enemy.
I honestly did not think it was debatable at this point that Putin's and Trump's interests were very vocally aligned. It's like you and I live in different multi-verses yet are somehow communicating. How truly bizarre.
There were a couple actions Trump did during his presidency that directly hurt Putin, namely the sanctions on Nord Stream 2 that caused Allseas to drop out of the project and delaying the completion of the pipeline for some time. The EU was quite upset by this.
He also criticised Europeans for not meeting NATO defence obligations, although whether he would have been fine with them just increasing their expenditures or if this was just a rhetorical point to find support for leaving NATO is perhaps only known to him.
On these points I agree with you! The idea that Trump was a Russian asset is laughable given his own actions in office, not to mention many of his appointments. He certainly admired Putin, but that's due to his own psychology rather than any supposed dirt they had on him.
It's a consortium. Majority owned by Gazprom. Still doesn't support the notion that the Kremlin was coordinating or even funding some elaborate misinformation campaign against nuclear. Private companies always lobby in their own interests-- worst of all in the US where this sort of corruption is legalized and highly lucrative.
NICE. So two of those are just opinion pieces quoting Western cut-outs/think tank hacks, and the Guardian piece is relying entirely on the statements of NATO's chief. Funny how low the barrier of proof is when you're "the good guys."
"He declined to give details of those operations, saying: “That is my interpretation.”" LMAO
Firstly, it's incredibly difficult to track funding for entities like these, so when someone like the NATO chief isn't citing sources, it's probably because the sources aren't for the public to know.
Second, this is something that Russia has done dozens of times. It should be shocking to you if they aren't funding this sort of narrative in the countries they want to be dependent on them.
The entire conflict is created by the environmental NGOs though.
Many countries & people fund those NGOs, either thinking they are helping the environment, or they have ulterior motives (promoting their investments).
The NGOs are tricking people, they want to reduce nuclear to further solar/wind because they have investments in it.
Russia is playing into the NGOs because they have the same end goal, wanting to reduce nuclear, but for their nat. gas. investments.
Russia, and before them the Soviet Union, has been backing domestic groups in Western societies fir ourpose of destablization, disrupting economic progress, etc., and weakening military stance for a long time. The anti-everything-nuclear movement ticked all those boxes in different ways.
(And, yes, this kind of geopolitically-motivated propaganda works in all directions.)
Why would Russia promote anti-nuclear disinformation? The Russian state-owned entity Rosatom is a major exporter of nuclear technology, so doing that would be against Russia's interests.
Those revenues have specifically gone up as a result of climate change measures. NS2 had a projected cost of 9.5 billion euros, and that's not even including any gas; you don't spend that kind of money without the expectation of making it back and more.
1. Guaranteed windfall profit now is better than speculative profit later; a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
2. Russia has long planned on a 'pivot to Asia' in the event Europe does ween itself off of natural gas. Not that that has panned out very well so far; the Power of Siberia pipeline has reportedly been quite unprofitable, allegedly because of the nepotism on the project regarding the contractors. Which brings me on to the next point...
3. It is a mistake to assume that leaders of countries are competent or their interests are inherently linked to 'national interests' or 'geopolitical strategy' (principal-agent problem).
3a. Even if Russia is out of money in 50 or 100 years because of some green energy revolution, nobody running the show today will be alive enough to care about it.
3b. Natural resources are easier and more profitable to exploit than human resources. If you want to build a technology-intensive industry, you need to keep the talent happy (or otherwise prevent them from leaving as the Soviets did) and keep up on innovation against competitors. E.g., Roscosmos has been coasting for decades off of the reliability of Soyuz, but have they designed anything good lately? SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and several other startups present a real risk to their business.
If you have something in the ground you can dig up, you don't have to keep anybody happy, you might have competition, but changes in the market won't come as any surprise. You don't even have to have local expertise in resource extraction - just hire Exxon to do it for you, like they did in Sakhalin. Whereas if you want to extract money from people, you're going to have to tax them, and if you do that too much, they'll get upset or leave.
If you're running a country and want to personally enrich yourself, the best way to do so is to prioritise resource extraction and exploitation.
I think our analyses of the Russian state are based on such fundamentally different premises that we will never come to any meaningful agreement, and further discussion is pointless.
I'm actually saying that I don't think having a debate about the nature of the Russian government on the internet would be a productive use of my time.
Yes, but doing that by undermining nuclear is a poor strategic move. It would leave Russia with no fallback strategy in the case that Europe did cease fossil fuels imports, and would undermine export of nuclear technology to other regions.
Russian's main export is oil/gas/coal/etc. It's roughly half of all their exports and over a $100 billion worth every year. Yes, squashing new nuclear plants profits them tremendously, and protecting their oil/gas/etc export business is likely one of their top priorities.
You would think it would be a lot more straightforward and effective to just directly bribe policymakers than to crank out propaganda and hope 1% of it sticks.
>Why this and not some other objective? Why can't they sway the global opinion on Ukraine? Surely they are trying.
The Overton window is a thing, right? "Nuclear power might be really unsafe" is a much easier sell in the public discourse than "it's OK to invade your peaceful neighbors".
That is exactly what I mean. There is virtually no public support for invading your peaceful neighbor, and no amount of misinformation is going to fundamentally change that. Support for building nuclear power plants is a contentious issue. Of course Russia wants to nudge the outcome in their favor, but saying Russian misinformation is mostly responsible for the anti-nuclear sentiment is crazy.
> There is virtually no public support for invading your peaceful neighbor, and no amount of misinformation is going to fundamentally change that.
I mean, there is a sizeable minority who have been convinced by Russian propaganda on this; typically they refer to Euromaidan as a coup, blame the invasion on Ukraine for not implementing Minsk, claim Ukraine is banning the Russian language, and so forth.
If propaganda can bump this from zero to twenty percent, why not from 40 to 60?
These points are literally made on fox news many nights. How much does it cost to get fox news to broadcast your propaganda to 60 million americans versus bribing enough american politicians that have enough sway to actually disrupt things.
Russia buying a politician would hopefully be a huge story. Russia buying advertising in the US to push for dis-unity or their abhorrent propaganda about Ukraine being full of nazis or that 1 billion dollars is a lot to pay (in old, out of date, expensive to decommission hardware) to absolutely defang the largest rival we had last century is derogatorily labeled as "Russiagate" and "conspiracy theory" and "liberal brainworms".
> Out of all objectives that further Russian power, you have decided on the squashing new nuclear plants.
it's not like it's a team of five guys slogging away in the propaganda mines with pick axes. they can pursue a number of goals simultaneously, limited mostly by budget and probably other geopolitical concerns, rather than video game-esque restrictions on the total number of things they can propagandize about simultaneously.
> Why this and not some other objective? Why can't they sway the global opinion on Ukraine? Surely they are trying.
they've had a lot longer to work on nuclear than the current invasion.
they've also had plenty of success in the past with ukraine-related misinformation, see walter duranty.
