With the threat of Russia on their doorstep, five nations are bolstering their defences by turning to a tactic the world tried to ban

Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have announced they will leave the Ottawa Convention of 1997, which prohibits anti-personnel landmines. Later in June, all five states are expected to give the United Nations formal notice of their withdrawal, allowing them to manufacture, stockpile and deploy such munitions from the end of the year. Together, they guard 2,150 miles of Nato’s frontier with Russia and its client state of Belarus.

Military planners are already working out which expanses of European forest and lake land would be planted with these deadly devices, laden with high explosives and shrapnel, if Vladimir Putin were to mass his forces against the alliance.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    22 hours ago

    You can’t suggest that the Russian military is capable of using modern troop mobilization strategies. Or that mass media to the contrary might be a part of a racialized propaganda campaign to dehumanize conscripts in the opposition. Or that the Russians (who are curiously still closely aligned with the Saudis, the Israelis, the Indians, and a patchwork of far-right factions across Europe and Africa) aren’t a distinct uniquely horrible imperialist faction that good liberal Europeans need to use all military options to obliterate at any cost.

    Only a Russian bot or a paid shill or a Tankie idiot would make such a claim. Why, when I read a post like this, I question whether it could even be produced by a human at all. It must be the viewpoint from the deepest bowls of the Nine Hells.

    there is no evidence that the RF is seeking to expand westward

    It’s weird to see NATO expand eastward for forty years, slowly gobbling up ex-Soviet states and replacing them with right-wing oligarchies and reactionary-lead business cartels. And then hearing how Russia is the expansionary power.

    Weirder still to see the US bomb its way into Iraq, Afghanistan, and the length of North Africa, only to be told that armed opposition groups and disaffected insurgents are the product of Russian disinformation and imperialism.

    If the US were to re-invade Vietnam, I genuinely do not know if folks on this sub would understand that the Vietcong and the Northern Vietnamese military were fighting for their independence and not some cat’s-paw of Evil Internationalist Socialism seeking to rapaciously colonize the native peoples of the French Catholic South.