Brussels condemnation board jams over Lithuania drone
A flip-tile display in the Berlaymont lobby now handles every Russian provocation, from the flares fired at a Danish helicopter to the drone shot down over Lithuania, so nobody has to write another statement.
The European Commission has replaced written condemnations of Russian provocations with a flip-tile departures board in the Berlaymont lobby. After a warship fired flares at a Danish helicopter and Nato downed a drone over Lithuania, the board jammed for the fourteenth time this month. Its technician says it last hung in the League of Nations.
The board in the Berlaymont lobby jammed at ten past nine on Wednesday morning, stuck halfway between "reckless" and "dangerous". A cleaner freed it with a broom handle. It was the fourteenth jam this month, which is also the number of Russian provocations it has had to process.
The board is new. The European Commission installed it in August after a working group concluded that the press office had run out of fresh ways to say it was concerned. Now, when a Russian warship fires flares at a Danish helicopter, or an Italian jet shoots a drone out of the Lithuanian sky, a clerk types in the location and the tiles do the rest.
The rest reads much as it always has. "Part of a broader pattern." "Reckless and dangerous." "We stand with." The tiles clatter like a railway station in 1962, which is fitting, because the timetable is also from 1962.
The clerk is Piet Hollenbrandt, Deputy Head of Unit for Recurring Grievances. He sits at a desk beneath the board with a keyboard and a mug. "I used to draft these," he said. "Then I noticed I was drafting the same one. Now I press a button and go for lunch."
The board offers fourteen categories. FLARES. DRONE. JETS SCRAMBLED. THING ADRIFT IN OUR WATERS. There is a spare row at the bottom marked OTHER, which Hollenbrandt says has never been used. "They are not, whatever else you say about them, original."
Wednesday gave the board a full afternoon. A Russian warship fired two emergency flares at a Danish helicopter over the Baltic. An Italian Nato fighter brought down a drone carrying an explosive device over Lithuania. Poland scrambled jets and fished a stray drone out of the sea, as one does now, the way one used to fish out mines.
Two flares, out of two
The Danish response arrived first, as Danish responses tend to. Commander Astrid Kjeldgaard, speaking for the Royal Danish Navy's Office of Incident Grading, confirmed the helicopter crew had reviewed the flares and awarded them two out of two.
"They were flares," she said. "They went up. They came down. Our pilots have seen better from a Copenhagen harbour festival, but the festival does not point them at aircraft."
Kjeldgaard added that the crew now keeps a small chart of Russian flare colours in the cockpit, the way birdwatchers keep a chart of finches. Red means annoyed. Green means very annoyed. There is no colour for a change of policy.
Nato's reaction came by way of a spokesman named Teodor Bălan, who described the Italian pilot's work as "clean" and the drone as "less so". Asked whether the alliance shared the Commission's board, he said Nato prefers to write its own statements, then read them aloud and hear how they sound. "Ours have a bit more steel in them. Ours also say 'pattern'."
The last time a continent processed its warnings this efficiently was the summer of 1914, and I shall say no more about that.
Moscow objects to the board
The Russian mission in Brussels sent a man called Arkady Volosov to stand outside the Berlaymont and object to the board itself. He described the flares as "a courtesy" and the drone as "probably weather". He then called the display a provocation.
"You have built a machine whose only purpose is to accuse us. We consider this an escalation. We would also like to know where you bought it."
Hollenbrandt, informed of this over lunch, said he would add a tile for it. He then remembered that he already had one.
The savings, Commission officials insist, are real. Adjectives were costing the press office a fortune. Each new statement required a fresh word for "unacceptable", and the supply of such words is not infinite, whatever the Oxford people say. The board uses the same nine tiles over and over and has never once been accused of understatement.
There is also the matter of speed. A written condemnation used to take four hours, two of them arguing about whether to say "deeply". The board now condemns in the time it takes a Danish helicopter to bank away from a flare, which pilots report is not long.
Where the board came from
The Commission bought the board second-hand. The technician who repaired it on Wednesday, a Geneva man called Reto Ambühl, said he had serviced it before. It hung in the Palais des Nations until 1946, when the League of Nations ran out of things to announce and, shortly afterwards, out of members.
"Same tiles," Ambühl said, wiping his hands. "Same words, more or less. 'Grave concern.' 'Pattern of behaviour.' It jammed then, too. Usually on 'dangerous'."
He had the mechanism running again by four o'clock. At a quarter past, the tiles flipped without anyone touching the keyboard. Something had happened over the Baltic. Nobody in the lobby looked up.
