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Comment by kklisura | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this was intentional as real attack on Poland as that would take course which will not end up good either for Russia or for rest of the world. I see this as accident, until more information comes. And given similar accidents before, like India-Pakistan missile incident from this year [1] or crash of a drone in Zagreb [2] in March of this year - this will yield nothing.

Edit: Another data point re accident: MH17 [3], Iran Air Flight 655 [4]. Both of those still yielded nothing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_India%E2%80%93Pakistan_mi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Zagreb_Tu-141_crash

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

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One missile just crossing over the border is an accident. It's kind of hard to see how two missiles could cross the border by more than a few miles unintentionally. I mean, we are talking about Russian cruise missiles, so maybe their INUs are that bad, but still...

We _are_ talking about russian missiles, thats why no one is surprised they errored and are convinced this was an accident. The real question tho is why did our defence systems fail to intercept them?

They fell right at the border (barely 6-7km away from Ukraine), I'd assume that there is no air defense prepared to shoot a target that close to the border before it could hit the ground. Air defense isn't impenetrable.

> hard to see how two missiles could cross the border by more than a few miles unintentionally

Given the state of the Russian armed forces, it's not entirely surprising their missile accuracy is in the tens of miles.

We've had this masterpiece, so really anything is possible when it comes to Russian munitions and direction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IwqmezeSuQ

They probably mixed target and launch coordinates when they programmed the missiles.

Targeting error is always a possibility. Somebody read the map wrong and chose the wrong target without realizing it.

No matter how much technology advances, warfare still involves incompetent idiots making choices under pressure based on partial and incorrect information. Sometimes those choices go wrong in a catastrophic way.

Hi, Clippy here! It looks like you're about to attack a NATO member, have you double checked your attack coordinates?

They're not missiles they are rockets - unguided munitions. It's easily understandable how two out of one-hundred plus rockets misses its target. In fact it's more understandable than all one-hundred hitting their targets dead on.

"Russia has intentionally conducted an act of war (which did no serious damage nor improved Russia's strategic position) on an enemy that it cannot possibly defeat, for unknown reasons" doesn't really stand up to Occam's Razor, when "human error" is also on the menu.

> doesn't really stand up to Occam's Razor, when "human error" is also on the menu.

In questions like this, there should be some demonstration of attempts to avoid human errors. Here we have a massive attack on the whole territory, including regions at the border. We can wait for next actions from Russia - if they'd bring apologies and some good offers - but meantime it's a good idea to keep reaction going. After all, it's the approach proven to be most reliable when dealing with current Russia.

> In questions like this, there should be some demonstration of attempts to avoid human errors.

If I told you that a surgeon made two fatal mistakes, you can't conclude from that information whether or not he's made a lot, a little, or an average number of attempts to avoid human error in his work.

Yes. I wonder if coordinates have to be entered manually.

Seemingly, they do. Apparently its all loaded in via thumb drive. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2022/10/24/the...

Another possibility is that it's intentionally borderline "oops or maybe not oops" to have plausible deniability while knowing Poland is going to take it extremely seriously. This lets them test Poland's and NATO's reaction to see how much they will tolerate and how eager NATO actually is to mobilize its military.

While Occam razor can be useful for creating models, it is a common misconception to use it as a tool for assessing probabilities of hypotesis

Can be one Russian X-101 and Ukrainian S300 which intercepted it. Could also explain how it landed on Polish territory: it is possible that interception only damaged Russian missile but took it off the course.

Very plausible.

Remember - you're talking about a country that instead of turning the valve counterclockwise blows the underwater pipeline up.

I agree, it's hard to tell if it was intentional. However, it might have been designed to be that way, as a test of the resolve of the West (US, really). It's just impossible to tell, which means we have to respond in a way that will stop Putin from pushing into Poland and other places, yet not pushing too hard on him that WW3 starts.

Haven't we already been doing this? Here's a better idea - how about the US and everyone else GTFO of Ukraine and stop meddling in Eastern Europe? Biden and Kerry and the US have been doing it since the fall of the Berlin Wall and now we risk WWIII because these greedy politicians can't get enough kick backs from the US military industrial complex.

So far the way the war is going I don't think we desperately need to respond to these missiles, and it may be a gambit to try to draw NATO more directly into the war for Russian domestic political consumption.

Putin is losing right now, just continue to let him keep losing. That is going to be the course of action right now which is most damaging to him.

Russia is losing, but they aren't losing quickly. We'd likely see another 100,000 or more Ukrainian lives lost if we continue the current course.

Would you prefer several billion lives lost globally with WWIII?

Unfortunately Ukrainians are going to have to do a lot of dying for us. We should definitely remember that debt in the future.

Giving in to nuclear blackmail today increases the risk of nuclear war in the future.

We can still send HIMARS to Ukraine and support them defeating Putin, we don't have to negotiate.

And there's historical precedent for this since a million or so Vietnamese died defeating us in a proxy war (and now we're friends and like buying Pho for lunch).

You also sound like you're regurgitating a talking point. That one works better against arguments that we should do some kind of negotiated settlement that gives Putin territory and rewards him for launching this war.

> That one works better against arguments that we should do some kind of negotiated settlement that gives Putin territory and rewards him for launching this war.

Your original comment called for staying the course in response to an escalation by Putin. That sounds much like rewarding him to me.

Kicking him out of Ukraine, not conceding any territory and handing him a complete military defeat sounds like rewarding him?

I’m not convinced he will accept defeat. Once he feels he’s actually lost then he’ll let the party poppers fly.

War has a military and humanitarian side. On the humanitarian side, I agree with you. On the military side, dragging out this war is in the best interest of NATO, because Russia is getting more exhausted by the day.

That's very likely. But of course, an accidental attack is still an attack. Will Russia stop attacking Poland and Ukraine? Doubtful, unless NATO makes it stop.

Otherwise we can wait for the next "accident" where Russia fires missiles into NATO countries and murders people. All the while they're committing war crimes in Ukraine, day by day, for the world to see.

These countries have been committing war crimes against one another for nine years now throughout this history of this proxy war.

Why should we start caring now or sacrifice global stability because of two errant rockets? Your fear-based rhetoric about other NATO countries being targeted because of two errant rockets (rockets are unguided munitions btw, not cruise missiles) is ridiculous.

Stop being a war monger.

Let's all hope it yields nothing - the alternative risks article five and global peace. While I'm sure the war hawks in DC and in the white house / capitol building would love to start another world war, I'm not so eager to be thrust into one. I'm sure that sentiment is the same for most of the readers of HN.

As a counterpoint to your data, the only one that hit a NATO country seems to be [2]. In that instance, nobody died.

It was an accident like the JDAM bombs that accidentally hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the Turkish F16 dawning a Russian Su-24 near the Syria-Turkish border in 2015.

What this will only accomplish is another military aid package to Ukraine and who knows what it will be this time? Longer range ATACMS and MLRS rockets for HIMARS? Also THAAD and Patriot deployments to Poland.

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