Ukraine's three nuclear power plants have restored electricity production

Russia made it clear that if those "misguided Russians" insist on staying misguided they will have to genocide them.

Terror

Some percentage of those are missing their actual targets due to GPS jamming (others, just straight up terror bombardment). Also, part of the purpose is to create dilemmas for an air defense with limited resources - save the ammo factory or the children's hospital.

Fear. Terror. Destabilization. This lowers GDP, causes frustration, and "make this just go away" sentiment.

Also, I think it happens out of frustration on the russian side. When the "three day special operation" failed, there was a wave of random bombardment of urban areas.

On a side note, I do heavily recommend watching 20 days in Mariupol.

If you want to know what's really happening, follow one of the mappers on Youtube. They have daily updates on what bombs fell where, usually with footage and everything. You will get a really good idea of why this is happening.

In most cases residential buildings are not the original target, some rockets/drones just miss, some get shot down and fall wherever. It happens to the both sides of the front line, btw. Not to downplay the humanitarian catastrophe that is the current war on Ukraine, but it's just a war, no need to add drama, there's more than enough as it is.

What do you gain from hunting civilians? [1] [2]

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/31b630b3-2639-456c-ba50-3caea7a9b...

[2]: https://archive.ph/v5qeA

Terror.

in some cases drone production is placed there (like in a bowling alley)

other times individual foreign soldiers are stationed there - and doom whole building as a target

Why does Russia bomb medical facilities, hospitals, and maternities in Ukraine? Why did they do the same in Chechnya?

It's terrorism and one of the many crimes of genocide Russia is committing in Ukraine:

> A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group [0]

While the comparisons to Nazi Germany don't make sense, because Nazis were their own thing, Putin's Russia is also their own thing and should have a reserved space in History for their atrocities. Their contributions to people's misery are enough to sustain their place.

Like people forget the propaganda campaign about freezing Ukrainians in the winter after the destruction of their power grid? This was boasted with pride on Russian propaganda, there's pride in making Ukrainians suffer.[1][2]

[0]https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition

[1]https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-factcheck/3912830-russian-p...

[2] https://en.detector.media/post/a-terrible-winter-awaits-ukra...

Russia has so much ammunition from the Soviet times with maybe 500m CEP. Who knows maybe 5% hits the target. Either way it is cheaper to just fire them more or less randomly than to keep them in stock.

They use for example air to air or naval rockets that were designed to hit an aircraft or ship. But in ground mode their seekers are just not used.

It is just who russians are, have always been.

Russians cannot win, thus continue to commit war crimes just because they can and no one wants to stop them.

Bombing huge cities with 400kg of cluster munitions or old missiles with 100+ meters of CEP is nothing else than a war crime.

> What do you gain from bombing residential buildings?

Its how you do war, you bomb everything and shoot everyone.

You'll have to ask the aggressor. I'd imagine they'd tell you it's the same benefit they hoped to derive in targeting a theatre in the middle of town that was known to be in use as a bomb shelter, and had the world "Children" painted in large letters out front:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariupol_theatre_airstrike

Last time we spoke, they said something about an urgent need to "de-nazify" the area.

There are no official, broadly recognized statistics for Iraq nor for Ukraine.

The lowest Iraq estimate 120k dead civilians or so in the course of decade long conflict. This certainly tracks with estimates of Ukrainian civilian deaths.

And while Kharkiv was not thoroughly obliterated it was mainly though the strength of defensive efforts. Other cities were left in a condition that makes any comparison to Baghdad laughable.

Remember some context here: much of what happened in baghdad was localized on the ground internal violence and also the US faffing about getting involved in internal violence. Civilians got targetted and collateralized in ways that are categorically different from a state actor indiscriminately killing civilians from without with limited long range weaponry.

There are places in Ukraine, like bakhmut, where it was ground combat and not long range weaponry, where you wouldn't make that side by side comparison with Iraq.

Multiple Ukrainian towns and villages are erased. None of Iraq towns or villages are erased.

Maybe that's true for Kharkiv, but entire portions of other cities like Bakhmut were entirely leveled, and the bits that remain standing will need to be demolished. No person could live there.

This is a category error. Baghdad was subject to capture by an invading force, Kharkiv was never captured.

What was done to Mariupol, Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Vulhedar, Popasna, Mariinka and dozens of other places far exeeds the damage done to Baghdad. These places are basically uninhabitable now.

That’s a long story. Mostly just a series of unexpected turns and a search for meaning in my professional life.

As for why I stayed, it’s hard to believe but even today, modulo the air raids, my life in Kyiv is just better than the life I led before in Miami, and vastly better than my life now in Budapest. I fell in love with that city when I started traveling there on business in the 2010s, and decided to move there to build my next company in 2018. The people, infrastructure, services, startup culture, healthcare, etc are all much better than a country with Ukraines history and geographical fate would suggest. That’s down to the Ukrainian people who have by force of will achieved some remarkable things with very little.

The war is already destroying some of what they have achieved, and depending on how it ends may destroy it all. But as I said, even now in a brutal and relentless war, life goes on.

I should also point out that as recently as last month I heard a lot of American accented English from obvious tourists on the streets in Kyiv. I was at a trendy restaurant with a Ukrainian colleague and nearly every other table had at least one foreigner. Some are there to cash in on the wartime opportunities with drones and other offensive and defensive technologies, some are deniable operators doing god knows what, but my sense is that a fair number are just tourists. Go figure.

Men are not allowed to cross the border, also everyone has family and relatives, it is not straightforward to just take everyone with you to another place and be able to support all of them also financially.

True, they have the information game stitched up tight. But if it was retaliation I’m sure it would be ok.

The dirty games Ukraine is performing are exactly the same as Russia is doing. Both countries are corrupt in an extreme fashion. Just check out how the Ukrainian TCC grabs people from the street and send them to the meatgrinders. Warcrimes are everywhere there.

Ukraine can build it,especially drones

I know that, I just mean if Russia hits the power plants, the chance of severe retaliation is growing.

The meat feels nothing while contracting in waves.it does not rebel against the butcher, its certainly not thinking in western projections.

Maybe, or they might get all of NATO running to attack Russia. China is also currently giving Russia support (while claiming to be neutral, their actions are clearly leaning to support Russia), but is very likely to invade. Nobody wants nuclear weapons used in war again.

More practically, the fallout would blow in their direction.

Or, with the wrong weather, nuclear fallout heading towards Moscow.

They areenot accacking the plant.

I got a SMR on my roof: Small Modular Receiver, for fusion energy.

50Hz is so low that peaks can be synchronized via atomic/GPS-sourced clocks if it were ever necessary to decentralize.

Which isn't hard. Many people in the US own something that could be used and we are not even under attack. While most home depot generators deliver dirty power the better ones can provide stable 60hz (US uses 60hz not 50) - those could be used to provide the 60hz to the grid (it wouldn't be worth everything needed to actually do this, but in theory could). there are a lot of "solar generators" that also can provide stable frequency. Many houses are off grid completely and have their own stable source of frequency when they want it (those most often those run on DC, they have the ability to provide AC for things they can't get a DC version of)

Devil in the details, as always. If every home has its own PV system, that's almost as hard to damage as the population itself.

But also yes, making the PV into an IoT system… as the saying goes, the "S" in "IoT" stands for "security".

The amount of missiles needed to circumvent even a quatuor of anti-missile equipment placed nearby a nuclear plant which produces at the very least 2% of your gridpower (France) and maybe up to 33% (Ukraine) is way, way lower than the amount of missiles needed to blast unprotected wind turbines or sonar panels producing a similar fraction of your gridpower.

Then your ability to repair various wind/solar sites also is very probably way better because few want to work on a damaged nuclear plant (especially with all local population running away as far as possible), spare parts (nuclear-grade) are less commonly available in other industries, the site may once more become a target because it isn't one-among-hundreds...

Nuclear plants have generally not been attacked. NATO and China have both strongly implied if there is nuclear anything attacked used they will jump in and force end this war in Ukraine's favor. We don't know for sure but it seems likely that would happen.

This is a nice link share. I am surprised something like that did not make HN front page. Was Ukraine and Moldova previously 50Hz, but not synced with EU grid?

> if you do then, well, you are already going to jail for war crimes anyway.

realistically, only if you lose the war.

> destroy the three gorges dam

Through what non-nuclear means would they hypothetically destroy this massive concrete structure?

I don't know, I think that's always been a possibility. Hitting massive civilian infrastructure has always been kind of a MAD thing. And hard to spin as anything other than a war crime - floodplains covered in civilian bodies looks bad.

What seems scarier to me is the newer possibility of a huge number of very small remote attacks that utterly devastate the fabric of civilian systems, but none of them individually look like egregious war crimes. With the right PR, they can be defended as "limited" and "surgical" attacks denying "dual-use" infrastructure. Put all the blame for "looking suspicious" onto the locals with advance warning. Solar panels on the roof? Just like a command post. Radio antenna, looks like a communications relay. Fuel tanks? Vehicle pool. You can even give notice of all the strikes, you don't need to bomb them personally, they'll be out of mind without food, water, sewerage, healthcare or heating. For bonus points, then you can blame the defending government for failures of governance when they can't organise, say, waste treatment any more.

That's so completely impractical I don't know where to begin.

There are hundreds of thousands of substations in a modern country, and more transformers on top of that. And the bigger substations are huge. An urban 275kV substation could easily be 10 acres in size.

"Wires" are also not especially cheap or easy to replace either, even at "low" voltages like under 33kV. It's not a few feet of twin and earth and an h-clip.

And a couple of inches of steel will absolutely not stop small drones if they're designed from the ground up to be anti-materiel devices. Anduril are hawking these right now complete with their wierdly gleeful videos, and if they're the only ones in the world then short my secondary and call me a slagpile.

And that's ignoring weapons anyway in use like those tungsten filled rockets that just shred everything in the area. They'd go right though both sides of your armoured switchgear.

They're probably both fighting at maximum capability already.

That said:

While we all know that Russia isn't fighting all of NATO, it does claim that it is fighting all of NATO.

Do they believe what they say? I don't know.

I think if Ukraine attempts Hail-Mary tactics, if you assume the hypothetical that Russia really does believe that Ukraine is only capable of such things with NATO support, it is still bad for NATO.

There's certainly Ukrainians who want nukes now, who think giving them up was a mistake. Some say it would only take them months to get nukes… and they said that months ago. If they do develop their own independent capability, and Russia just assumes it's an American or French or British nuke, that's still bad for the rest of us, even if Trump is shouting about how the USA didn't do it.

Not even in theory, it's solidly science fiction. And since you presumably need to park up and plug them into something to actually use them, they'll always be an blindingly obvious target. They'll be the things surrounded by wires, pumping out megawatts of heat.

"attacking electrical infrastructure is a war crime" is quite a woolly and interpretable thing. It's not blanket, there are questions of purpose and proportionality. If, for example, you strike a single civilian substation because by doing so you take out the power supply to a critical defence radar and are then able to attack an otherwise defended military target, then it's hard to argue that's a war crime. Any more than bombing civilian infrastructure like roads and railways.

Doing it as part of a deliberate campaign of terror whose main purpose is to harm and intimidate civilians is probably a war crime, although it's very easy to fig leaf it if there's any way that attacking the infrastructure impedes war production directly. Doing it proportionately in retaliation is less likely to be.

I suspect we may see a tit-for-tat rider added to modern warfare since the big guys no longer bother trying to live within the spirit of the Geneva conventions. Russia is literally raping and geocoding all through their controlled areas of Ukrainian territory. Saw a video just last week were they ordered POWs to lie on the ground and they just shot them for no reason, this is common place. Why should Ukraine just throw up their hands and say “nothing we can do!”

> Modern war has done a lot of studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight.

Russia is pretty inclined to fight, so I'm not sure if I understand your point here.

>"... studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight"

Is this why NATO did it in Yugoslavia? /s