Now when following the war in Ukraine I finally understand how war can be incredibly localized in specific regions of a country with long-range attacks targeting only high-value infrastructure targets.
Now when following the war in Ukraine I finally understand how war can be incredibly localized in specific regions of a country with long-range attacks targeting only high-value infrastructure targets.
The Ukranian utilities people are relentless, resourceful heroes, keeping power on, under the conditions they're facing.
What do you gain from bombing residential buildings?
And how it would happen? Putin calls an AA site and tells them "tehre is two missiles your way - one for ammo factory and other for the children's hospital - it's your choice what to defend"?
edit: the value of cheap Iranian drones is specifically that they potentially tie up expensive AA.
And this is precisely why targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime, as is hiding/embedding military infrastructure in or below civilian infrastructure.
For Russia/Ukraine I'm less certain that anything will come around because even if Russia gets driven out of Ukraine in its entirety, there is zero chance any Russian will be held accountable by anyone on the world stage.
Failure to "hold accountable" makes the failing part accountable.
Remind me, who was tried for this?
>> NATO planes have attacked bridges, oil refineries and other targets in raids that have affected civilians. But until Monday they had refrained from striking the electrical system. The alliance has repeatedly insisted its fight is with President Slobodan Milosevic, not with the Yugoslav people.
>> "The fact that lights went out across 70 percent of the country shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch now," said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. "We can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want to."
>> "We realize the inconvenience that may be caused to the Yugoslav people, but it up to Milosevic to decide how he wants to use his remaining energy resources: on his tanks or on his people," Shea said. While NATO sought to downplay the effect of the strikes on civilians, the raids remain politically sensitive.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/eu...
I agree that the US / NATO has bent and crossed international rules (way) too much in the past and without consequences - the US didn't sign the ICC accords for a reason.
>> But until Monday they had refrained from striking the electrical system.
>> "The fact that lights went out across 70 percent of the country shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch now," said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. "We can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want to."
>> "We realize the inconvenience that may be caused to the Yugoslav people, but it up to Milosevic to decide how he wants to use his remaining energy resources: on his tanks or on his people," Shea said. While NATO sought to downplay the effect of the strikes on civilians, the raids remain politically sensitive.
It sounds like you think the dilemma can only appear in the spur of a moment. Once the missile is already in the air. But the dilemma also appears before that. When you decide where to put your AA batteries, and when you set policy on when and how to engage.
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.
But one of the more resilient findings of 20th century warfare is that terror-bombing does not work to pacify a people's will from the bottom-up, only their pulse. It strengthens resolve in some people, in AT LEAST equal measure to weakening it in others.
Ukrainian military did not go into Kazantip[0] and surrounding villages in Crimea to kill and rape rave-goers and families.
Gaza, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, Ukraine, you name it. We have several active genocides and government-led terror campaigns built upon projection and manufactured consent.
I literally made no claims about Ukrainian soldiers doing anything. Did you respond to the right comment? Your link just goes to a Wikipedia page on a music festival, with zero information relating to your comment.
Disasters often increase GDP, because money spent repairing damaged stuff moves thru the economy. Of course that doesn't mean this spending is productive or really is making the economy grow. Just one of the reasons GDP, as any other metric, has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Chechnya and the Syrian civil war were no different, but now there's video evidence and admissions of guilt all over the internet (and more than that, they laugh about firefighters and medics being blown up by drones and bombs), and yet still people deny it. It's nuts.
If you're saying this stuff, you're either not actually paying attention to the evidence or you're deliberately closing your eyes to it. It's that absurd.
https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/1858613355734593549
https://x.com/giK1893/status/1853605570844237863
https://tochnyi.info/2024/11/steel-leaves-the-autumn-brings-...
https://x.com/kelley7622/status/1851283166645858647
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GUrNPPTSWM
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/russian-general-t...
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/russia-is-using...
https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/1848832251561132221
Here you can see the area was ordered evacuated OVER A YEAR AGO: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/ukraine-orders-civilian-evac...
If you see a drone striking a home, it's because UAF setup a position there, not because they're targeting civilians.
Kherson is not empty of civilians. Your link only claims that "southern" Kherson was evacuated. If you look at a map it's pretty clear why - it's at low elevation and hard to reach due to various waterways. It was also hit hard by the flooding after the Khakovka dam was destroyed.
It is extremely trivial to find out that Kherson still has a significant civilian presence, although many have indeed left.
And FFS you can see in the video that several of the people targeted are clearly elderly or medics / firefighters.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1155191
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/22/europe/kherson-russia-advance...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMpTUOgqkuo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zye_R7M0nFU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8C2k37I6N8
So again, if you don't actually know what you're talking about, maybe pipe down about Ukraine.
From the CNN article:
> At 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, three shells landed near the home of Hrigorii, who did not want to give his surname. He said he believes a nearby hospital was the intended target.
That's talking about artillery, that's what 'shells' are. Artillery has a very finite range. Why in God's name are their still civilians in the city, let alone WITHIN ARTILLERY RANGE? That's beyond stupid. So either these stories are complete fabrications, which is likely, or there will need to be a lot of Ukranians tried for war crimes after they finally surrender.
Only that most residential hits are not in that category. The majority do seem to be misses / redirects.
Language is tricky sometimes, I know. But in this case, it really wasn't.
When hospitals and supermarkets are being hit repeatedly by multiple "precision" munitions, and then (sometimes) the Russians post drone footage of the impacts because they just happened to have been watching that location, and when the Russians have also used video footage of strikes on Syrian hospitals to market the effectiveness of their munitions, it's not crazy to suggest that they engage in terror bombing tactics.
Actually it is, and the commenter's language was perfectly clear.
If it helps try thinking in terms of, you know, sets and stuff.
Don't know what else to tell you.
Any specific posts you can point to?
You can watch this video instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYKuNfwNbaU
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/31b630b3-2639-456c-ba50-3caea7a9b...
>> Since mid-July, Kherson and its neighbouring villages along the western side of the Dnipro river have suffered more than 9,500 attacks with small drones, killing at least 37 people and injuring hundreds more
other times individual foreign soldiers are stationed there - and doom whole building as a target
Source?
"stationed" as in "lived while not on the frontline"
Russians always cover their crimes with lies.
and soldiers won't be stationed in the cities half a country over anyway - and gliding bombs are enough to reach Kherson/Kharkov/Zaporozhie
I googled a bit, but all I found was gliding bombs falling nearby and doing some damage to the buildings, but not direct hits.
After seeing reports like this one[0], saying that those inhuman Russians hit Kharkov residential area destroying a shopping mall and then seeing true picture where two Ukrainian MLRS launchers were parked nearby and were hit by Russian missiles during the night when mall was closed[1][2], I'm a bit skeptical.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/world/europe/russia-ukrai...
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...
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.
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 about Americans? - is a usual answer of brainwashed by Russia Today person.
Russians are people who eager to enlist to kill(rape and loot) neighbors for a relatively small salary(2000$ per month).
Its how you do war, you bomb everything and shoot everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariupol_theatre_airstrike
Last time we spoke, they said something about an urgent need to "de-nazify" the area.
Statistical estimates put civilian casualties in the Iraq war at about 10x the rate of the current Ukraine war.
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.
A town of 10 000, completely destroyed, uninhabitable. Current population: 0. With scenes like these, threats of nuclear attack lose potency. Marinka looks indistinguishable from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bakhmut and other frontline towns didn't fare any better. A group of scientists tracked the destruction with a synthetic aperture radar:
“After Hang processed the images and we saw the end result, it looked like a checkerboard or mesh,” Barbot said. “We asked, ‘Why is that?’ and we realized that it’s only the roads that survived. Everything else was collapsed, destroyed, evaporated, and the entire city is completely flattened.”
“You can see a neighborhood going away, and then another and then there’s no progress because of a natural obstacle like a river,” Barbot said. “After they’ve bombarded enough stuff, the front line begins to move to the west and the Russian army advances through the crumbles. Eventually the story repeats itself and after a year, there’s just nothing left. It looks like cancer spreading throughout the body.”
https://today.usc.edu/ukraine-devastation-cutting-through-th...In Iraq, there were 10s of thousands of civilian casualties estimated within the first few days of the invasion. That's more than the entire casualty estimate for Ukraine so far.
The outside estimates I've seen from Ukrainian sources say 25k total.
Your estimate is 2x-4x higher. How is that?
In Mariupol alone there were ~10,000 new graves on satellite imagery and some of them are large enough for multiple bodies, which we know was done in Lyman when those mass graves were excavated.
Because you don't know what source I'm referring to, how can you possibly know?
Baghdad still stands. Many Ukrainian towns are nothing but a name on a map and a pile of rubble on the ground. I didn't mean to leave an impression as if all inhabitants have been killed, but the towns have ceased to exist as places of human settlement.
> In Iraq, there were 10s of thousands of civilian casualties estimated within the first few days of the invasion.
Certainly not, that's an insane number. Common estimates put the number of civilian casualties in low thousands for the entire invasion phase that lasted several months, and these figures include deaths from indirect causes such as crime related to breakdown of social order, which contributed roughly as much as the invading force itself, if you trust the data from Iraqi Body Count project.
> That's more than the entire casualty estimate for Ukraine so far.
Everyone doing estimates stresses that they severely undercount due to lack of access to occupied areas. You are comparing a clearly inflated Iraqi figures against clearly undercounted Ukrainian figures.
While formally not civilians, many who have died as Russian combatants were Ukrainian civilians who were forcibly conscripted from occupied areas. These so-called "mobiks" alone make up tens of thousands of dead because they were untrained, poorly equipped and expendable.
[1]: Russia routinely fires cluster munitions into densely populated cities, eg https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/features-60941459
Like I said, I heard first hand from a US veteran who served there in Iraq and was with me in Ukraine. He said Iraq was "much worse" in terms of civilian casualties in his estimation. Almost all statistical estimates you can find online also seem to confirm this, the civilian death toll was much worse in Iraq.
The claim is definitely extraordinary since both wars are extensively documented, and we just know (like, we have verifiable videos) that Russia has much, much less regard for civilian casualties, employs much less precise fires, and Ukraine is more populous and dense than Iraq.
Besides, the numbers I could find are the other way around. This study [1] estimates 3,750 civilian deaths in Iraq, and this UN report [2] says 10,582 recorded civilian deaths (that is, it's definitely an undercount, unlike the estimation in Iraq).
[1]: https://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html#3.3.%20Total%20Iraqi%2...
[2]: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/two-year-u...
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.
Even more chilling is the interview with Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state, where she literally says the 500,000 died Iraqi children was worth it.
The US intentionally took out water and sewage treatment facilities in the Gulf war and placed particular sanctions to make sure the population didn't have a clean water supply and so diseases could spread. Based on Wikileaks and declassified documents. https://progressive.org/latest/pentagon-documents-show-u.s.-...
My point is about false equivalences. In support of some extreme ideology, you have basically reached for every false equivalence you could have, without thinking through it at all.
The mental gymnastics many people make to justify the war crimes in Iraq and all the other places the US invaded, terrifies me as to what new atrocities we are yet to witness.
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.
Anyone can see the extent of the uninhabitability of Mariupol on the video:
While you're sitting there in your cozy office in one of the neighboring countries, and your biggest worry is that you've run out coffee beans.
The long range “precision” attacks by Russia often just end up randomly killing civilians.
Eg: missile strikes on Kyiv blowing up a children’s hospital, or the September strikes on Lviv blowing up a random apartment building and wiping out almost an entire family.
You can easily go “what are the chances” even when shahads are flying over your head and the sky is lit up with tracer fire from mobile air defense units after some exposure.
It’s not so much that there is no danger or the war is far away. I woke up many times to explosions in the distance and air raid alarms in the capital are a daily occurrence. Attacks are absolutely not limited to critical infrastructure. Even if Russia didn’t deliberately target civilian populations (and they definitely do), air defenses don’t vaporize enemy ordnance so it’s going to fall down somewhere, and when attacks are happening in cities then it’s likely that it will land on something populated.
It’s more that the odds of being killed or wounded as a civilian in the capital are higher than in a peaceful country but low enough that the mind just gets used to it and you go on with life.
I finally left Ukraine a few weeks ago, for fear of how bad the winter will be with the infrastructure bombing. My wife and I moved to Budapest. Believe it or not, we miss Kyiv and want to move back in the spring, war notwithstanding.
Having said all that, I was in Baghdad in 2006 and I do not understand why any Iraqi family would move back there during that time, unless they were Kurdish and moved to the northern Kurdish territory.
Kiev was wonderful in the peace time, but what made you stay during war, given your ability to move around freely
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.
I had a similar confusion as a kid, but for me it was how Ireland and Northern Ireland were portrayed in the news — I was 14 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed.