A coordinated online campaign has reportedly encouraged users to alter fuel station information on digital maps across Russia, creating confusion among drivers.
The activity involves changing station statuses by marking locations with available fuel as empty or showing closed stations as operational.
Supporters of the campaign claim the effort is designed to disrupt travel decisions, increase uncertainty, and create additional pressure around fuel availability.
Here we go, you’ve finally you’ve said it, it’s not really anything, was it? Of course there is an asterisk.
Now thats cleared up, lets go back to the original comment. Does posting misinformation on community gas maps do anything to end the threat? How? I’ll remind you that it does not affect military in any capacity as they dont use public gas stations.
It affects the population. Who will get pissed off and start causing trouble at home. Dividing the Russian governments attention. It affects commerce so there’s less money moving around, therefore less tax to pay for the war.
As I’ve said in the other thread, realistically it only diverts from hate towards their own government for failing to protect critical infrastructure, and onto Ukrainian people who went out of their way to ruin someone’s day. Realistically, the economic damage is like wasting 10 minutes of a few people who will drive to an empty station, find none, then go to another station. And maybe like an hour of site admins time to ban and clear those trolls out, which I’m pretty sure they already did. And then those annoyed few will open the news and see a written confession from those trolls that they will do absolutely anything to ruin any random russian’s day, just because, and cheers from clueless folk in the comments below. Do you think seeing this would rile those russians against Putin, or make them support him even more?
I mean as a parallel situation, Iran closing the straight and raising gas prices for me certainly didn’t make me back Trump or dislike Iran more. I blame Trump for that. I think any reasonable person can see that a country who’s being invaded doing whatever they can to fuck with the invader is the invader’s fault. Maybe not everything will be totally effective but smaller/weaker nations have to get their shots in however they can.
You went a bit short in your analogy. US and Iran are both governments duking it out, and it’s completely normal to blame Trump for failing to duke it out in his favor. But what if on top of that and the resulting gas price increases, Iranian activists and supporters decided to, IDK, hack and DDoS EV charger maps or something. You’d be completely reasonable in being more suspicious of your Iranian-American neighbors, remote coworkers, or taxi drivers, be more receptive to anti-immigration policies, as who knows what else they might pull off, and, if you’re in position of power, like customs officer, policeman, or just corporate HR, to question them more than others, and as a site admin to just block the entire IP range of the country. This results in life for said Iranians being just a tad more difficult, but they themselves probably fled Ayatollah regime a long time ago and just want to live in piece for once. If that happened I’d condemn it as well and call them shitters too. I myself dislike Israel and could in theory make calls to Israeli businesses and make bomb threats, but then I’d be a shitter myself as this would only make life of my Russian Jew friends more difficult for little economic impact.
How is that any different than making gas prices higher? Both are creating logistic problems for the USA and they’re 100% justified in doing so. They’re not even doing anything violent like we are to them. I wouldn’t blame them one bit. Anything they do is justified, we would all just be facing the consequences of not dealing with Trump during the last administration when they should have. FAFO. Just like Russians are for not dealing with Putin.
As I’ve said one is about inter-government foreign relations other is matter of individual people. I don’t see how there could be a coherent worldview that lumps the two together. It kind of erodes the idea of a difference between military and civilian targets, and also makes all terrorism completely justified. It could only be viable in a world where every single country is a fascist enthnostate, where if your state is at war with another, then every national of that country is your personal enemy.
I kinda vaguely get your idea that without Trump and Putin none of this would’ve ever happened, but what you’re suggesting as a right course of action, which I assume is to attempt to forcefully depose a leader whenever they do dumb shit, this means not only civil wars throughout the world, but given your implication that foreigners are allowed to join in the action, a full on WW3 that’d never end. I’d rather live in current state of affairs where only a few countries fight each other with at most a million soldiers and the remaining billions of people living mostly peacefully and chill with each other, over a world where everyone always takes direct action against anyone involved in any group that ever wronged them, even if indirectly.
This is getting too complex, so let me simplify it: If me, you, an Iranian and Ukrainian meet somewhere, none of us should punch each other, nor vandalize each other’s property, steal from, nor try to mislead or scam each other, even if we disagree with each other or with each other’s government’s actions. Neither we should cheer or stay inactive if either one of us does any of those things. If someone agrees with their government actions they are free to join their respective countries military. If not we could pressure our respective governments directly through votes, legal actions, representatives and whatnot, and through positions and stakes at our companies, to stop the offending and provide aid to the victims. We could all go volunteer and donate to charities in any of the countries, and we could even organize ones in our respective ones. We could boycott offending countries, and support victim countries economies together. We could even realistically all join victim’s state’s foreign legions, but this is a bit iffy by my books. And we definitely shouldn’t go Al-Quaeda flying planes into buildings, for any reason, ever, no matter the amount of victims or the potential economic impact, I hope at least that we can agree is peak shittery.
One thing I would like to add, I’ve talked about this years before, but I guess with NATO troops in Ukraine now being completely out of the picture, the equation of the outcome of this war boils down to Ukraine’s budget and Ukraine’s headcount versus Russia’s budget and Russia’s headcount. And despite that, it’s largely independent of Ukraine. Let me clarify: The only way balance the headcount given the Ukraine’s smaller population, is to reduce the Russia’s headcount, which it still is balanced out by majority of Russia’s population unwillingness to participate in this unjust war, not by disproportionate KIA as propagandists on both sides might say, really it’s been floating in 1-1.2 range. So better keep it that way and not piss them off needlessly, as every time a bunch of NAFO fucks joke about meatcubes or something, somewhere in Russia someone joins the army. Yes, Z fucks do that as well but for the same exact reason it’s to their own detriment. On the budget part, Ukraine’s economy is completely fucked, 50% of revenue coming from foreign aid, which is still not enough tbh, but to at least keep it coming they better not commit any atrocities, you’ve said you’d find them justifiable given the situation, but someone else might not, and given how every penny counts, they wisely do not. But do buy Ukrainian products if you can, it really does go a long way. On the other hand, Russian budget is roughly 28% fuel exports, 45% VAT and other business taxes, 20% personal taxes and 7% rest, which all goes 32% to war and 8% to cops. It was already squeezed hard by sanctions and companies relocating voluntarily, which has lead to the current stalemate as Russia can’t really afford any more guns or people, and it can be squeezed even further by even more sanctions, diplomacy with third countries that are still buying and/or engaging in re-barelling, developing alternate fuel sources/routes, and, counterintuitively, by helping Russians get out of Russia so that they don’t pay VAT and income taxes to Putin. It hits very hard and is effective, and none of it involves direct sabotage or pissing them off. On the contrary, countries like Georgia and Armenia have boosted their GDP quite significantly since 2022 with minimal inflation in no small part due to influx of Russians and Russian companies. Imagine if Ukraine allowed them in, two birds one stone as they say, empty Putin’s coffers and put in Zelensky’s, but, very much understandably, not going to happen. Don’t take it as me begging to let Russians in either, me and my friends already landed places to stay :P Just dreaming of one day where this does happen and some wannabe warmonger finds themselves with no people, no money, no manufacturing, and all their yesterday’s income going to their now enemy, that’d be hilarious.
God did I went on a tangent, and yet haven’t mentioned NGO’s, why RDK/LSR failed, astroturfing and troll factories, CIA and state hackers, etc, but I think that’s enough rambling for today as is.