Fires on French railway tracks have delayed journeys for 800,000 travelers in what the transport minister described as “coordinated attacks of malicious intent.”
A co-ordinated arson attack on the French rail system is turning the first weekend of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris into a nightmare for hundreds of thousands of travelers.
French rail company SNCF announced on Friday its high-speed train system had been hit by “deliberate arson attacks to damage [its] facilities” causing delays and cancellations which are expected to last all weekend.
The disruptions are affecting trains heading East, North and West of Paris, and travelers have been asked to postpone their plans.
How does this help their cause?
If you think a bunch of trains running late for a day causes terror, you don’t know the French rail system.
Lmao you absolute muppet. This is just Paris doing Paris things. The Olympics generally bring a lot of annoying and negative side effects to a city and region, in addition to (and often, because of) the increased tourism. Parisians and the French in general are famously unapologetic about engaging in direct action when they think their government is being a bunch of dumbasses, or they wish to express staunch displeasure with a policy or event that they strongly disagree with. This is just that.
If you mean Russia, and if it was Russia, the cause is to sow chaos.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/05/gerasimov-doctrine-russia-foreign-policy-215538/
To weaken France’s image, to sow chaos, to get security forces focused on other things while they try to get specific targets.
There have been reports about both Russia and Iran being potentially involved.
So far I’ve seen an article about a Russian getting arrested 2 days ago.
French newspapers don’t mention any of those for now, the only mention is that the methodology is similar to previous far-left activism (source: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/live/2024/07/26/en-direct-attaque-massive-contre-la-sncf-reprise-progressive-du-trafic-un-tiers-des-trains-circuleront-vendredi-apres-midi_6258634_3224.html), which could be a disguise of course. As to why the far-left would do that, there are radical-ecologists that argue it is an unacceptable waste simply for entertainment, considering the climate crisis, for example. It could also be both, local activists helped by foreign influence, willingly or not.
From what I’ve seen, French newspapers have only mentioned the Russian for now.
Russian spy arrested in Paris after alleged plan to ‘destabilize’ Olympic Games (Le Monde, English)
there are radical-ecologists that
…are way too small in number and connections and frankly energy to pull off a covert stunt like that. This isn’t like getting a bunch of people to live in treetops to make it complicated for the forest to give way to a chemical plant.
Sure there’s folks with ideas like that but as all other urban guerillas it’s doomed to fail. Embarrassingly so. The type of people willing to do these kinds of things aren’t the kind of people who’d agree with anyone on anything much less trust another affinity group to not be moles. The higher the stakes you insist on the more isolated you are the less you can coordinate.
If this was a chain of attacks over a longer time-span, sure, then one group could have inspired another, but everything coordinated? Forget it.
