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Comment by imwillofficial | Hacker News Reader

There are multiple fronts to this war; each one distinctly different in its outcomes. It’s not especially clever to blithely conflate them and then accuse your own confused interpretation of being propaganda.

They're leveling cities near the areas that they invaded in 2014 which don't require extensive logistics. They're losing in the rest of the country because the Ukrainian military is pretty effective, the Russians are logistically incompetent and can barely maintain air superiority (due largely to the West providing highly effective AA weapons), and Ukraine is a huge country with a very determined populace.

Levelling cities in the rest of Ukraine wouldn't be hard either, if Russia chose to do so. Carpet bombing, cruise missiles, ICBMs, etc. would all do it, kill a lot of civilians, and are within Russia's military capacity.

Killing soldiers in bunkers, dug-in in trenches, and underground? Not so much.

Ukraine still has working air defense, Russia is quite obviously afraid of sending bombers deep into Ukraine.

Sort of. A lot of it depends on precision and altitude. I think a high-altitude bomber, carpet-bombing, with a fighter escort, would be pretty safe from Russia's perspective.

Stingers can hit up to 3.8km. Starstreak is 5km. Etc. For comparison, a B2 flies at 15km.

Ukraine does have some defences there -- an S300 will shoot down targets that high, and fighters will go that high -- but it's a much harder problem. That's why Ukraine is asking fighter jets, S300/Patriot-style systems, and a no-fly zone.

If Russia starts carpet bombing before Ukraine get those, it's game over for Ukraine. That doesn't mean Russia won the war -- the military will keep fighting -- just that Ukrainan population will have lost:

- The country will be rubble.

- Massive civilian causalities

- Economy on par with Iraq during ISIS or Afghanistan today

- Need for post-WWII style reconstruction

... and so on.

The rebuttal to this argument of "Well russia could just flatten them if they want" is, well, why hasn't russia done so?

Because it's a bad idea to do so. If Russia were to commit true genocide -- kill 40 million people in Ukraine by levelling the country -- it would serve no military purpose. On the other hand:

- Putin would go down in history as worse than Hitler

- Thousands of people -- including, for example, Russians with relatives in Ukraine -- would want to kill Putin. Russia would have a terrorist and fifth column problem unprecedented in the history of the world.

- Russia would go from "outcast" to "North Korea level outcast." China and India would almost certainly turn against it

- It just might be far enough to draw NATO / EU into the war. That's a war Russia is guaranteed to lose. If nukes fly, everyone loses. If they don't, Russia loses.

... and so on.

How would it advance Russia's interests? The above far outweighs the benefits (oil, Crimea, and a bit of a buffer zone).

"Russians are logistically incompetent and can barely maintain air superiority" This is categorically false, look at the insane 1200 airstrikes that were launched in the last week.

Like pointed out elsewhere, "1,200 strikes" includes artillery, missiles and airstrikes so most of those were clearly not delivered via planes.

In any case, where are they striking? Nearly all of their air sorties are near DPR / Mariupol / Kharkiv, just across the border from Russia. They had deep air access when they were pushing to establish Antonov Airport as a forward base/landing site but when they failed to capture the airport, it seems like all of their plans fell apart.

It's been incredible watching the sheer number of downed Russian aircraft.. OSINT folks like Oryx have IDed a substantial number of these but the Ukraine MOD shows over 300 combined aircraft losses, over 800 tanks, 2000 APCs, etc etc etc. This is not a successful military operation:

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1517395823386050560

> This is categorically false, look at the insane 1200 airstrikes that were launched in the last week.

That'd be an insanely high number, yes. You misread things: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/zelensky-says-russian-inv...

"Russia claims to have hit more than 1,200 targets in Ukraine with missiles, artillery and airstrikes overnight as it launched a long-awaited new offensive in the Donbas region."

Also, no one doubts that the Russians are flying air missions, but "air superiority" means something far more than that.

The propaganda is that Kyiv was merely a diversion and that the real war is about to start now. The reality is that Russia tried really hard to take Kyiv and several other cities and failed due to a combination of their own incompetence and absolutely inspired Ukrainian defense, so instead they resorted to just bombing cities into dust.

The many civilian casualties, and munitions quite obviously targeted at civilians, have been widely reported.

This is what happened in Grozny.

Levelling cities is easy.

Fighting entrenched armies, especially ones using Fabian tactics, is hard.

A punching bag doesn't hit back.

I hope that helps. Even North Korea could probably launch an ICBM and level a US city. That doesn't mean they'd have a shot at winning a war.

Both, the only thing the Russian army is good at is killing civilians apparently, they can't manage anything against a real army.

A chained dog is still potentially dangerous if you get in range.

It isn't a binary thing perhaps researching the history of war will help you understand more.

There are greater challenges in attacking the capital than attacking Eastern cities

Both. They do very badly in terms of logistics, but they still have a lot of munitions for the artillery, especially their unguided Grad units that basically destroy everything indiscriminately.

Also, Mariupol is close to the border and so doesn’t require as much logistics as Kyiv, which is in the center of the country.

Point taken, however Kyiv is not in the center.

Slightly northwest center? I’ve done a lot of driving all over Ukraine, it “feels” central to me. But that’s not really the point I was making. It’s quite a bit further from Russia than Mariupol, and much closer to the center of the country.

Just to be clear, are you under the impression that leveling residential areas is how you win a war?

That was eventually the successful Russian strategy in Chechnya.

(I don't think it'll work as well here. 40x the population, Western support, better Ukrainian equipment.)

what eventually worked in chechnya is that they found a local warlord who was willing to work with the russians, not fight against them.

The flattening of Grozny (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1999%E2%80%9...) caused the fall of the separatist government and their exile.

That the Russians found a puppet to install afterwards isn't surprising.

It is one strategy to victory yes.

There is thousands of years of military history from all sides employing the same things. War sucks.

It's the only way to beat an enemy entrenched in a city. See Fallujah or Raqqa for similar battles.

Not at all. That’s terror tactics when you cannot achieve your goal otherwise. It’s also completely counter productive in a country or region you plan or want to annex. Fallujah, Raqqa, and even Mosul were organised operations, during which neighbourhoods were isolated, reduced, and then taken street after street more or less methodically. Nobody ever sat there just bombing indiscriminately. The closest example you could find is Aleppo.

Taking Fallujah: ~2000 insurgents killed, ~1000 captured, ~800 dead civilians, ~10000 buildings destroyed out of ~50000. Even without taking the 90% destruction rate at face value, Mariupol is already much, much worse (at least 4 times the number of civilian casualties, double the number of dead Ukrainians soldiers, and more than half the buildings destroyed). And the numbers will likely grow more and more as mass graves are recovered.

Fallujah sounds like terror tactics to me. It was defended by a poorly armed militia far smaller than the western trained and armed forces in Ukraine and America still had to destroy 20% of the city. Years later 200,000 of the 350,000 residents still hadn't returned, birth defects from depleted uranium had sky rocketed and people were still suffering white phosphorus burns.

And Raqqa was far worse.

The difference is propaganda. When we destroy a city it's methodical and proportionate. When our enemies do it it's genocide and terror tactics.

But urban warfare is always awful.

No, "we have no choice because enemy soldiers exists" is an excuse when you want to level the city.

Why would Russia/DNR voluntarily level a city they want to incorporate into their breakaway republic? That's just falling into the "they're all orcs" propaganda trap.

The use of artillery etc ramped up as the Russians realized they wouldn't take the city any other way, but if the Ukranian army / Azov had vacated Russia would have happily taken the city without a shot fired.

Russia invading is already a war crime, but we don't need to pretend that they're behaving any differently to the way we did in Iraq.

> Why would Russia/DNR voluntarily level a city they want to incorporate into their breakaway republic?

DNR, isn't the main or controlling actor doing it, and “incorporate into a breakaway republic” isn’t Russia’s primary, much less sole, goal with their operation.

> Russia invading is already a war crime

Technically, no, it's a crime against peace, a separate category of breach of international law.

In fact, they had an option of not leveling it. They also have option to not bomb hospitals too and they don't take those options.

"Why" is speculation. Possibly because strategic impossible of city is in land and not in existing citizens who don't welcomed them anyway. Possibly to create pressure on Ukraine President. Possibly because this is what Russian army do routinely and don't need super concrete reason to do - this is not first time they leveled the city. They did not needed to do so in Syria nor in Chechnia.

Genocides don't necessary happen because aggressor had no choice. Starting with assumption that they had no choice is judt yet another fallacy.

If you start from the assumption that the war wasn't necessary then you are correct to point out that leveling residential areas also wasn't necessary.

However, we wouldn't have re-occupied cities in Iraq that resisted without leveling them and Russia wouldn't have conquered Mariupol without leveling the parts of the city that contained entrenched defenders.

That's the awful thing about urban warfare. Luckily we're not at genocide yet, though.

Even if was was necessary, leveling residential areas of major city was not. But, that war was not necessary in the first place.

Both war and the destruction of city were optional and deliberate.

> However, we wouldn't have re-occupied cities in Iraq that resisted without leveling them and Russia wouldn't have conquered Mariupol without leveling the parts of the city that contained entrenched defenders.

Both are crimes and mass murders of civilians. Neither was necessary.

> That's the awful thing about urban warfare. Luckily we're not at genocide yet, though.

Who is that "we"? USA in Iraq did not committed genocide. Russia in Ukraine is committing one now.

What Russia is doing is evil. But if you call it genocide you do a cruel dis-service to the millions killed in Rwanda, the holocaust and even Ukraine during the holodomor.

That's not actually how those were fought at all.

The result was the same. Maybe we used less arty and more airstrikes I guess.

Why do you imply these are exclusive? Seems dismissive for no really discernable reason

It's a soundbite to spurt the idea that pro-Ukrainian position or any conclusion that Ukrainians have successes on the battlefield is simply a "propaganda".

Probably due to the ghost of Kiev.

Both,

And for some reason Russian propaganda prefers you to believe that their biggest warship in Black Sea sunk before of Russian incompetence and not a chance it was some Ukrainian missile. Let's see how many weeks until Putin admits most of the soldiers died on the ship.

> Let's see how many weeks until Putin admits most of the soldiers died on the ship.

From the photos that've come out, this seems unlikely, unless they were all ordered below decks to fight the fire. It stayed afloat, listing but upright, for hours, with the life rafts deployed in calm seas and nearby supporting vessels. I don't doubt people died in the strike and the fire, but loss of entire crew seems unlikely.

I said most not all died. Makes no sense why Russian propaganda did not said something like "a few soldiers died from the smoke" at least that would give them a bit more flexibility on the lies they can spin when families post on social media their goodbyes or they anger for their mysterious disaperence.

To be clearer: I still doubt it's "most". https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/18/europe/ukraine-moskva-warship... doesn't look like a ship that lost most of its crew. Some, certainly. Most, probably not.

yes, it is possible you are right, from what I read this ship usually has 500+ people , Russia did not want to specify how many were on board, and this days they showed the survivors in some kind of festivity and they were around 100 people. You could explain that maybe some were in hospital, or there were just 100 on board or maybe Putin send them into a special operation.

Anyway, for sure some died , there is evidence and I am waiting Putin video and his clever phrasing admitting it.

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