Nearly half of Mariupol has suffered grave damage
economist.com
economist.com
Not just Mariupol - I just finished speaking with my neighbour (fixer for international media org) who interviewed a young girl not far from Kyiv. The sister and mother of the girl were beaten and raped until they died, by Russian soldiers. The girl was forced to watch. She then lived in her apartment several days, with the corpses, until she felt safe to escape. Most Russians support this war. I'll leave it to you to find any reliable sources that disagree with that statement.
Russia is a very, very, sick nation.This is why Ukraine will never surrender. Can you imagine surrendering, and your "reward" is to live under the Russian regime?
BTW, I live in Kyiv, I'm not Ukrainian.
(that really doesn't require any encouragement from the UK, or the US)
(I note your account was created in response to the Russian invasion - your motives are very transparently pro-Kremlin)
My motives are not pro-Kremlin, but indeed I live in Russia and consume pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian propaganda. However, I can also read popular Ukrainian Telegram channels (> 1 mln.) and I see the mockery of corpses of Russian soldiers in every second video. Ukrainians are happy to savor photos of disfigured bodies. I quite often see videos of Ukrainian women and men with bare bottoms tied to poles because they are supposedly looters, and if there are such videos, then it's scary to imagine how many did not get on the video.
I see how the Ukrainian government contributes to the process of dehumanization of Ukrainian people. And I know why this is being done.
Given the murders and rapes your countrymen are doing non-stop, this is a purely sick thing to say. I'm glad it's here for all to see - it's a worryingly common Russian attitude, that somehow the Ukrainian government are the dehumanisers, the "Nazi's"...
...and the poor Russians soldiers are the victims.
I strongly against this war. I want it to stop it right now.
The purpose of my message is to show that most people only read pro-Ukraine propaganda and they don't want to figure out what were the reasons for this war.
They don't want to know that the National Guard of Ukraine has a real neo-nazi battalion, which in 2019, 40 US senators recognized as terrorist. Most people don't want to know that there was a war in the east of Ukraine for 8 years and now it's final stage. They don't want to think about Odessa massacre in 2014 when pro-Ukranian activists burned their opponents alive. Air attack on Luhansk in 2014?
I understand that it is easier to construct a chain of thoughts where the Russians are to blame for everything. But not everything is so unipolar. I recommend to watch George Friedman's talk, a man who can hardly be called pro-Russian, but who predicted this conflict: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLu_yyz3tc
Russians invaded Ukraine, and are raping and murdering civilians - not one or two, countless. Rapes. Executions. Beatings. Murder. Theft. Destruction. Deciding which country is to blame for these barbaric atrocities is very easy for most people.
Russian people will be paying for this for a very, very, long time.
Oh no! Now Russia will have to invade them! Oh, wait...
Not to mention that Russian state media has basically declared every Ukrainian who isn't actively helping Russia, to be "Nazis", and they should all be killed or put to slave labour. That's an outright call to massive genocide. Ukrainians have no option but to fight.
It’s because all the Russians that would not support it know how sick Russia is, and have already left it behind.
All the Russians I know are sane people, but all of them live outside Russia :/
If you ever wondered what you would have done to stop Hitler, you're doing it now.
If Russia has really been cremating remains in Mariupol, people may remain missing forever.
If we were to take his nuclear threats to Ukraine seriously, he has all the potential to be one.
In that scenario, "I have nukes" becomes a joker you can pull out to achieve anything less bad than a global nuclear war. Peel off a bit of a neighbour? OK, less bad than nuclear war. What about a "minor" NATO country? What about, "pay me money or else"? And so on.
So either you accept that (no thank you from me) or you accept that sometimes you must set limits, even if the other side threatens nuclear war.
In that respect it's the same, just different scale. Allies could have said "no" to Hitler earlier, at risk of a devastating war, but chose to say "ah, go ahead" for fear of it. And got that war served up to them anyway.
The irony is that WWII could possibly be over in a few weeks, if Hitler's ambitions were stemmed earlier. In September 1939, it is unlikely he could fight on two fronts, and against the British and the French - the actual superpowers of the day.
The stasis, at least for now, is one of mutual defense pacts backed up by nuclear weapons leads to very hard boundaries given MAD. Ironically, the pitfall that led to WWI turned out to be a stabilizing force (at least for now) under MAD. Everything outside of those hard deterrence boundaries, if we're being honest, is fair game for proxy wars. Ukraine isn't in the boundaries. People who are arguing that we should start shifting those boundaries (ie, changing the 'rules' by directly engaging despite them being non-NATO) are playing with fire. As soon as the rules are broken, the fundamental premise of deterrence goes out the window, and all bets are off as to where it takes us. This is also why it's incredibly dangerous to admit countries into NATO with disputed, actively fought over territory like Ukraine, since we'd be exposing a new level of risk whereby there's a conflict between conventional rules of escalation running up against nuclear alliance deterrence.
I’m not sure. Rationally, Putin shouldn’t have started the war; he was told Russia will get sanctioned to oblivion, which it did and is genuinely hurting Russia, and he should have known his forces aren’t up to scratch. Due to some kind of delusion he pressed ahead. Hitler may have done so too. For example, hoping that the western powers won’t risk MAD over a bit of Central Europe, much as they didn’t care much for Western Czechoslovakia.
Of course sanctions aren’t MAD; but then nothing is, and no analogy is very close.
That's not a rule, and has never been suggested to be a rule until invoked as an excuse for inaction in this particular crisis, and is, in fact, contrary to the public claims and past actions of NATO as a regional security organization with a mutual defense commitment and not a pure mutual defense organization.
They spoke in Korean sometimes (but especially under stress, spoke Russian), and flew Soviet jets based in China and nominally assigned to Air Defense, not Frontal Aviation.
They weren't maintaining plausible deniability, but a transparent fig leaf. We knew they were Soviet pilots, and they knew we knew they were Soviet pilots.
And the Soviet anti-aircraft crews shooting down American jets in Vietnam didn't even have a transparent fig-leaf of not being Soviet troops.
Sure, the potential cost of getting it wrong is even higher, but the same answer is wrong for the same reasons.
“Letting Ukraine do all the (overt, at least) fighting but flooding them with arms and intel will be sufficient to check Russia” is, OTOH, somewhere between Sudetenland and Poland as a response, and it's a very high stakes gamble.
Yes, those Russians in jail right now for protesting against putin should be ashamed /s
Edit: the statement is about “should be,” but the replies talk about whether they do/did feel ashamed. But *should* they? Those people who ended up in jail were acting heroically by jeopardizing their careers and freedom. I think those specific Russians deserve to feel good about themselves
The limit of shame is entwined with the information we consume.
If you were presented the War through the lens of "denazification", you might think the war was ethically justifiable.
At this same moment USA, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are involved directly in illegal aggression against multiple sovereign states, fully supported by many other NATO members. They were responsible for much more death yearly than Russia in this war, yet nobody seems to care.
Is it because USA do it to spread democracy? Then what about Turkey? They used word for word exactly the same justification to invade Kurds in Syria.
Where’s the outrage about other wars.
Either condemn all wars, or stop pretending you care about people affected by wars.
Nice example of moral and discipline of US troops. Just Google if you need more.
Murderers are murderers, regardless if they wear Russian, US or Taliban uniform.
But yeah, Russian army killing anyone suddenly makes US army winning humanitarian contest.
What a weird thing to say. Humans are hypocrites.
We can absolutely not care one whit about the Kurds (or only in the abstract anyway), and then get extremely upset when people that look like us, in a society that mostly functions like ours, get attacked by a country that really should know better
And frankly, until they started this shit, I didn’t feel particularly bad about Russia any more. They shot themselves in the foot so hard…
Can we do better as a humanity? Should we just accept that we are all racist assholes and stop pretending we are better than that, or try to become better than that?
You would prefer Ukrainian border to be locked so that they can't escape at all anywhere. And you don't seem to want to care countries next to Syria to treat refugees better, it is just about sticking it to countries next to Ukraine which you know nothing about.
How come Arabs are more likely to fight ISIS and help Arabs over going over to Ukraine or help Arab refugees. Better no one helps anyone ever, not even when threatened by same aggressor again and not even if they are literally the next country over the border.
ad hominem ad nauseum.
This is not a realistic stance. We are all humans, and it's obvious that some global tragedies affect us more than others (for whatever reason). Just because somebody is vocal about the Russo-Ukrainian war but less so about other wars doesn't mean they don't care. It just means that they are personally and emotionally more impacted by this.
Furthermore, people do what they can. Should I either donate all my money to all causes or not donate at all? Should I either not do any action that has a negative effect on the environment or live in a forest alone without electricity?
We complaining about Russia and Russians and Iraqians complaining about USA will not stop any war. We need a strong international peace movement. It kinda worked in the case of Vietnam.
What's different is that it is widely publicised pretty much live and that it hasn't happened in some time (although in the Syrian civil war Aleppo was similarly flattened). The invasion of Iraq is a bit different in that the gap between Iraqi and US capabilities was so great that the US did not really need to go all the way on that occasion (and of course they didn't want to show you, anyway).
It is also plausible that some residents would prefer to go east to west. Not every resident of Eastern Ukraine supports the government. And we don't hear about it much, but reprisals and extra judicial killings of "collaborators" are happening.
Finally there is self interest. It's by no means certain that refugees who go west will be able to return to Mariupol after the war.
This will all get me voted down because it doesn't suit the narrative. I don't like the Russian invasion and I want it to fail but I also wish we were interested in the truth more than "winning the information war".
I should know better than trying to discuss this sort of topic as it's obviously always impossible.
On the other other hand, I think the West has not really been involved in this type of warfare since WWII/Korea, so we don't really have a point of comparison with Western tactics.
Putin didn't sprung up from nothing. He was nurtured and cared for by all western leaders. He's that disease you did nothing for for so long. And now you're complaining? That is like a cop blaming the victim for what a criminal did to them.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” Bush said in remarks he later regretted. “. . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/bush-saw-put...
That polls sound for me like an Internet survey showed that 100% use the Internet.
Are they using artillery on cities?
I’ve thought about offering to show them personal evidence of dead family and friends in Ukraine, but I don’t think that will really change anything. There’s always some excuse or way for them to deny it.
The rubble and ruins of war across the Middle East, state brutality of all scales from China to the U.S., unprecedented destruction by weather events... all delivered to your screen in near real-time then 24/7 pundit-ized until the next event... non stop for over a decade.
If you grew up in this cesspool of information, you tune out. If you yearn for the ignorance of yesteryear, conspiracies are easier to digest than critically analyzing the deluge of info... and that doesn't take into account all of the people who are just out there mostly concerned everyday with food and shelter for themselves and family.
To your point... As I started to write this, a nearby group of senior citizens meeting for morning coffee (in East Bay, CA) started fawning over this "refrigerator magnet set that helps you construct your own conspiracy".
I think of artillery as less precise, with the idea of using it to indiscriminately level a large area. It’s fired from 10-20 miles away, with a few rounds a minute.
Howitzers, for instance, will be important in eastern Ukrainian
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/30...
Even conventional unguided howitzer artillery is more than accurate enough to be effective against things as small as vehicles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerhaubitze_2000
Up to 3 roubds in 9 seconds, 10 - 13 roubds per minute continously. Depeding on the shells accuracy can be around 1 m per 48 km. Arguably, that's among the most advanced, and expensive systems. The accuracy comes from the shells, so in theory a lot of manually loaded artillery pieces should be able to achieve the accuracy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
At 70k USD per round not nrcessarily cheap so.
That's not terribly expensive either when the accuracy can save civilian lives or the lives of soldiers using it.
Cruise missiles are used for higher value targets.
Not saying that this particular report is not believable, just that "the media already said so" is not an argument in 2022.
Are you actually living under a rock?
In Mariupol fighting is going on within the city so that's what happens. If you look at previous historical examples, the same result ensues. Stalingrad being a very famous one, Berlin as well, Beirut in Lebanon during the civil war, recently Aleppo in Syria. Before that you can find pictures of the American Civil War. Dresden and Tokyo were flattened during WWII without any actual ground fighting going on there, just large scale air bombings with incendiary bombs...
In conventional warfare since at least the 19th century, cities get flattened.
In the media, and judging by the reactions to this comment, people are driven emotionally in the moment for the purpose of manufacturing public opinion (i.e. war propaganda) but it's always useful to keep distances and keep some perspective. Especially since this is the first large-ish scale conventional warfare in some time, at least with this level of media coverage.
Yes, also aircraft dropped bombs, missiles, rockets, mortars, direct fire from tanks, etc.
The thing is that they've done it really badly, so they've suffered all the propaganda penalties without convincingly getting the upper hand. And they've killed a lot of civilians too, obviously.
What on earth did you think they were using it for?
Absolutely baffling that someone could not be aware of this.
In isolation it would be fair to be sceptical of the intercepted conversations where commanders are calling in strikes on residential areas, but this is a recurring pattern with the Russian military.
It's important to distinguish here between the Russian military and the Russian people. Conflating the two feeds into the Putinist propaganda that Russia will be hated in the West no matter what it does.
That is the operating rules, because Russia isn't competent to do anything else, but even they can attach an apartment block.