alt Hacker NewsI 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.