Devil’s advocate: you should still have a reason to do the bad thing in the first place. I’m not a good enough politician to understand how this benefits anyone’s interests (don’t get me wrong, I do suspect Russia to be behind this, but still don’t get the objective - but then again I don’t get the objective of their special bullshit operation either)
Indeed many people who subscribe to Rational Actor theory of politics are stupefied by this. However the thing about personalistic dictatorships is their foreign policy and aggression are all subject to the whims of one person, even though the media still refers to them as if they are real countries with collective decision-making. And they indeed may be acting rationally just not in the axiomatic framework any sane person would even consider.
Say some dictator lived through a trauma that he projects onto some group of people. Or that he considers himself a spiritual successor (perhaps even the reincarnation) of Ivan the Great, the Collector or Lands. Once you ease yourself into this mindset you see the logic.
"personalistic dictatorships is their foreign policy and aggression are all subject to the whims of one person, even though the media still refers to them as if they are real countries with collective decision-making. And they indeed may be acting rationally just not in the axiomatic framework any sane person would even consider."
Hmmm...why does that sound so familiar with a major western country??? ;-p
The reason is resentment rooted in an inferiority complex. Russia's state ideology is that they're being oppressed by "the West", and they really believe it up to the highest levels of government. They're quite convinced that hurting their "enemy" this way amounts to securing their interest, because by damaging "the West", their own relative power is elevated and that makes them a serious player on the international stage.
I think sabotage is at least partly signalling: "Don't support Ukraine too much, or more bad things will happen to you."
The point of the "special operation" was that there would not be a culturally-adjacent functioning democracy next door, because that might give the Russian people ideas.
For signalling you need the signal. You need to break the train track and then say if you keep supporting Ukraine we'll do worse things. If you stay quiet, it doesn't work.
For the record, it was me. I committed terrorism to bring awareness to Rust's excessive use of punctuation marks.
No, (apparent) ambiguity works fine, as long as the recipient of the message understands it. The Mafia can put a brick through your window, and you know what's going on, even without them signing the brick.
Only if you recently did something that you know the Mafia hates. If I got a brick through my window right now, my best theory would be that they got the wrong window. What would yours be?
Russia is desperate for leverage. Apart from China, they are severely isolated from rich markets. Targeted violence is an attempt at generating leverage, in the same way some racketeers would hit shops that refuse to pay "protection" money.
Creating chaos in democracies is forcing the elected politicians to focus on the interior, thus leaving them less resources (or public interest) for stopping remote invasions.
