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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

For all the talk about this being a massive attack, the number of casualties is in the tens and blowing up a few apartment buildings seems to be unlikely to be consequential to the war. It all seems like a waste of money and combat power on the part of the Ruzzians.

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Main targets of the attack were components of electirc grid, hence relatively low casualty numbers. For some reason western media mentions this only in passing, while pushing what seems to be the misses to the front page.

It might be because in countries other than Russia, targeting civilians to maximise casualties is not the default, quite the opposite.

I am not sure I follow. My point was that strikes have not really targeted civilian population, they targeted electrical grid.

Of course they targeted the civilian population. That’s the common modus operandi for Russia: they don’t do well against an opponent who can shit back, so they focus on killing civilians. Here’s some data: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1579977066736680960

But yes, this time orcs also happened to hit parts of the grid. Which is still targeting civilians instead of military targets.

People are usually pretty quick to fix the power grid after that kind of attack.

Cruise missiles are pretty expensive. (The US Tomahawk costs about $2M) My understanding is that ballistic missiles are even more expensive (The 9K720 Iskander costs about $3M)

If you are trading these for $50M fighter jets that's one thing, but spending them on transformer yards might be just digging a hole for yourself.

If the large power transformers are hit the repairs are neither that quick nor cheap

I understand more consequential damage is generally not reported, so as not to give free damage assessment reports to the Russians.

None of it makes sense from military point of view; it's yet another case of Russian terrorism. The consensus seems to be that it was required for domestic policy, a sign of Putin yielding to hardliners.

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