Just yesterday my partner showed me an ad that popped up on her Twitter feed for Nokia and Iceye, some kind of satellite phone shit collab. Nokia is a household name here, but I hadn't heard of Iceye before. A short internet search later it turns out that Iceye is a local microsatellite constellation provider, originally for ice sheet surveillance in darkness or cloudy weather or some shit like that. It's been receiving foreign and local funding in the hundreds of millions and is being used by some European armed forces (including Finland, and Ukraine through Germany) so the partnership with Nokia could be seen as a way to reduce dependence on the US and Starlink specifically.

The missiles will fall here among the first, I fear. When the Nazis did Operation Barbarossa the Finnish state's close access to St. Petersburg via the Karelian isthmus was to be the northern arm of a pincer movement, if I understand military history. Once again our state is going along willingly with the fascists against our much stronger neighbour, and once against it will be the Finnish people who would be dying for our leaders' hubris. Maybe war won't happen, I'm holding my breath. But I think a revolution would be needed to steer this ship clear of such blunders, and unfortunately many finns are those bloodthirsty liberal dipshits you see on Lemmy, completely deluded by "russia bad" and their great-grandparents' war traumas they've inherited.

Sorry for hijacking a thread with my own fears but it's bleak, the possibility of fuel shortages and worsening inflation for the coming winter aren't helping my seasonal effective disorder. Maybe we all will live to see the sun again next spring. Maybe we die of hunger and cold and missiles. Maybe a fascist paramilitary rounds me up and drives me out to the eastern border to be eaten by wolves in the dark. I fucking hate it here.

Yeah but trying to get Europeans to understand this is like trying to tell a flat-earther that you can reach the east by sailing west. It is objectively true but they are unable to process what you are saying because it does not fit into their mental model of the universe. They just look at you like you just told them 1+1=3, it does not compute.

The current situation is that Europe is fighting Russia with one hand tied behind it's back while Russia is fighting Europe with both hands tied behind it's back. European missiles and drones are going into Russia and killing Russians while Russia can only attack Ukraine. At some point, it might make more sense for Russia to just throw down and go all out, they are already being assaulted with half of NATO's capabilities anyway.