Comment by rank0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rank0 | Hacker News Reader

Obviously I don't actually know whats going on over there, but I find it hard to believe that the Russian military as a whole is "deliberately targeting civilians".

From the first estimate I found searching the web:

On April 10:

> Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 4,232 civilian casualties in the country: 1,793 killed and 2,439 injured.

<2000 civilian deaths in a full-scale invasion of a country with ~44 million citizens seems FAR too low to declare that targeting civilians is a goal. Mariupol is currently fighting to the bitter end, despite being surrounded for weeks and even bisected by Russian forces. This is a city that had a population of >400k at the start of the war.

If the goal was really to kill everybody in sight, the Russians would've just carpet bombed their targets day 1 and killed hundreds of thousands. It seems like everyone has forgotten what war is. There's no "humanitarian" way to commit war. It's always awful and always creates unintended death.

Again, not an expert here nor do I believe any statistics to be 100% accurate.

"deliberately targeting civilians" is not the same as "going out to murder everyone". Obviously, Russia could just nuke Ukraine. They haven't done that. However, they have verifiably used cluster munitions in cities; abducted, raped and murdered civilians in areas they control; bombed hospitals; shot and shelled civilians trying to flee; and so forth.

All of this is very much what they have form for in Syria. Is it not getting reported in the US? It is in Europe.

> OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Popasna (Luhansk region), and Borodianka (Kyiv region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics.

Give a 20 year-old Russian conscript a gun and drop him in a warzone. Anyone not wearing a Russian flag is now a potential threat because he's in hostile territory. Then, at some point, the young man gets tired of all the potential threats and just starts eliminating them. At that point, Russian military as a whole is quite culpable.

But if you're going to make up a story, why not make up a different one? A nicer one where this person who doesn't exist isn't guilty of doing the thing that didn't happen, and the entire country of Russia wasn't to blame.

The OSCE published a report yesterday: https://www.osce.org/odihr/515868

Some quotes:

“The Mission is not able to conclude whether the Russian attack on Ukraine per se may qualify as a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population. It however holds that some patterns of violent acts violating IHRL, which have been repeatedly documented in the course of the conflict, such as targeted killing, enforced disappearance or abductions of civilians, including journalists and local officials, are likely to meet this qualification. Any single violent act of this type, committed as part of such an attack and with the knowledge of it, would then constitute a crime against humanity.”

“It is not conceivable that so many civilians would have been killed and injured and so many civilian objects, including houses, hospitals, cultural property, schools, multi-story residential buildings, administrative buildings, penitentiary institutions, police stations, water stations and electricity systems would have been damaged or destroyed if Russia had respected its IHL obligations in terms of distinction, proportionality and precautions in conducting hostilities in Ukraine.”

Why do you find that hard to believe? Targeting civilians doesn't mean wiping out the population. And if there wasn't such a large body of prior evidence I might be tempted to agree that some of what we are seeing is isolated, or simple incompetence. But it now seems undeniable that Russia is intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure. And although that may have been effective in Syria, I have no idea what they hope to accomplish with it in Ukraine.

how can you read what they did in Bucha (raping, torturing, execution style murders in the street) and say you don't think they're targetting civilians. That was a warning from Putin to Ukrainians about what happens if you fight back and don't surrender 100%

You deliberately omitted the part saying "OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher".

Most of the civilian deaths are still under rubles or in mass graves like Bucha. Many of them are also in areas still controlled by Russia.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com