the article reads like too much wishful thinking. I am from Ukraine originally and like most sane people I want this war to end ASAP with Russia's failure and Ukraine emerging stronger.
But I do hope Western militaries are not counting on Russia's "incompetence and inexperience".
I don't see much "wishful thinking" in the article? It points out a surprising fact (that Russia is not using the air power to the extent that everybody expected) and posits some possible explanations: intentionally holding back (but why?), inability to pre-emptively destroy Ukraine's air defences, lack of guided munitions, etc.
I haven't read this article, but a few days ago another article was explaining how Russian air tactics are different from the US ones, and how they see the air power in a war, which is something you're not considered in your explanations.
The gist was that the US goes immediately for dominating the sky. Russia sees ground forces as the main engine of the army, and the Air Force only supports the advancement of ground forces near the border, without bombing far into enemy territory (which is a task for the army's missiles).
How do they expect their ground forces to advance when Turkish drones are allowed to circle overhead? Keeping control of the skies is not unique to US tactics...
I could not find the source article I read, and I guess there's a non trivial chance it might even have been based on Russian propaganda... as usual, take everything with a grain of salt. I just find it hard (and reassuring) to imagine that Russia's army and air force are in such a terrible state.
No, you're right, there has been a difference in doctrine. The Russians put much more emphasis on SAMs traditionally, to enable their ground forces to operate even if they their airforce doesn't own the sky. That's why they have everything ranging fro Iglas to S-400s. They seem to have missed developing a good counter for the Bayraktars though. :)
I don't find it hard to believe, but agree the safest option is to assume they're not incompetent and do our best to fight them off as if they were the best.
Maybe that's what parent comment is concerned about when saying "I do hope Western militaries are not counting on Russia's 'incompetence and inexperience'"
First as a doctrine, it would be a stupid one - they tend to use paratroopers for surprise taking of advanced positions, and air support is vital to help them keep their position until reinforcements can arrive. Point in case, the failure at Hostomel. Their doctrine emphasises anti-air defenses because air superiority against a superior enemy ( NATO) isn't certain, but that doesn't mean the Air Force shouldn't be used at all, especially against an inferior enemy
Second, they don't seem to be even doing that - there are small scale ( 1-2 planes) raids deep in Ukrainian territory, and neither their planes nor their SAMs can deal with the drones Ukraine fields, even over Russian held territory
I've read many times that the major Russian military reforms over the last decade or so - successful or not - included combined arms, including air and infantry.
I think everybody has been surprised by just how bad Russia is doing. They have been overestimated by magnitudes, it seems. Their gear is in a much worse condition than anybody would have guessed, they have logistical problems all over the place etc.
This is not a reason to relax, but one can certainly observe that.
If the point is to take a country, competent armies minimise damage. Otherwise at the end you’re just king of the ruins and have trouble extracting all the resources you came for.
Mass bombings is almost the bluntest last-resort weapon you can use. A bloodless coup followed by a (probably quite bloody) purge would have been the best outcome for the Russians.
> I would take the (sadly looks more like wishful thinking) incompetence over the current destruction.
You get me wrong there. The current destruction is a result of the incompetence, not an alternative to it.
If they were a well organized well maintained troup going full Blitzkrieg they would have overwhelmed the Ukrainian forces so fast they already would have taken the capital more than a week ago. This is what they intended to do.
Now if they can't get forward because the majority of their transport can only happen on roads they are definitely in dire need of air superiority, because air superiority would keep the convoys safer. They started shelling civilian infrastructure because they want to break the unexpected fighting spirit and they have no other ways to do it. But this was definitly not what the leading heads in Russia would have preferred, they thought they would go in full Blitzkrieg and after 3 days the capital would have fallen due to overwhelming force.
> The current destruction is a result of the incompetence, not an alternative to it.
Does "Fallujah" ring a bell? The mirage of the clean, surgical war was created by the Clinton administration for the first war in Iraq. Such a thing does not exist and has never been observed accept in carefully manufactured narrative.
The first Irak war (aka "Desert Storm") was not under the Clinton admin, but Bush I, but I agree that the lingo it gave us ("surgical strikes" and the rest) is mostly bullshit.
Wasn't Bush Sr the one that went to Irak for the first Gulf war? And this one was clean, at least compared with US war that followed, and way cleaner than any European war of the 90s.
> Paired with the total sell-out of the Democratic Party to the military industrial complex in the 1990s came the demise of that thing called "pacifism". I find it grating how literally nobody seems to take that idea seriously anymore.
If there's any thing I'm taking away from this, it's that Pacifism is dead. You need serious deterrence. Pacifism is what let Putin get this bad.
No war is perfectly surgical, but Russia itself recently fought successful wars with all objectives achieved with minimal casualties within days (certainly Western narratives around those Russian invasions weren't manufactured to praise them). It's also currently fighting a war in which the main advances stalled because they couldn't supply their troops, and as such has resorted to artillery bombardment of cities it can't seize or in some cases even surround despite incurring more casualties in two weeks than the famously messy US conquest and occupation of Afghanistan suffered in decades.
Is there are single instance in history where a country the size of Ukraine was overthrown in less than a month? It took the Nazi army 35 days to conquer the western part of Poland. Ukraine is twice the size of Poland. Huge landmasses just have... mass.
Sure, it's not straightforward to roll tanks into Lviv. But I don't think not moving in a week whilst sustaining heavier losses than NATO sustained conquering and occupying famously difficult to conquer Afghanistan over two decades (a country which did collapse in a month after they left) was part of the original plan. Open for debate how much of the cities they originally intended to flatten but I can easily believe artillery bombardment was Plan B, with Plan A being the hope Ukraine's command structure would implode and they'd rapidly sue for peace
On the other hand, Kiev is just next to Belarus. I would not expect them to take entire control of the whole country that quickly (look at how long it takes in Syria where the insurgents have nothing like the Ukrainian military), but it was certainly possible for a competent military to blitzkrieg their way into the presidential palace.
> The mirage of the clean, surgical war was created by the Clinton administration for the first war in Iraq.
Come on, now. The mirage of a clean and easy war is probably as old as war itself. Hell, just look at the media just when WWI was getting started. I can criticise American imperialism as well as anyone but this is ridiculous. Besides the fact that the first Gulf war was under Bush.
it makes one wonder, abstractly, if this is a symptom of Putin's / Yeltin's embezzling schemes, where stolen capital (money) would have in a less corrupt alternate reality provided more competent equipment.
Yes, (somewhat) obviously. This is the second Russian non-democracy in thirty years to get close to structural failure, and one common interpretation is that a system of this size cannot succeed without the mechanisms of transparency and accountability that are inherent to democracies.
A small dictatorship like NK can be controlled by a handful of people, often relatives. The family model also works for mafias, up to a certain size. But grow your association of lawlessness beyond a point and you’ll find yourself in desperate need for the protection of the law.
Another issue I heard about is that all the top oligarchs are in raw materials and energy. The oligarchs doing actual "complex" tech like weapons, coal extraction machinery etc, are only in the second tier at best. As you can imagine a environment where they can take your company away at any moment doesn't breed innovation (or the wish to do things particularily orderly).
Allocation of capital is terribly suboptimal in a badly managed state without good checks and balances.
Consider USA where there is a mismanagement problem with healthcare -- onerous regulations, rent-seeking, gatekeepers, state capitalism, crony capitalism, corrupt bureaucracies, anti-trust issues, and insufficient investment in training and development.
If healthcare is unnecessarily expensive by 10% -- then that's 2% of the American economy misallocated. Also, the lost human potential because of worse healthcare outcomes is another drain.
Now imagine if that was par for the course everywhere you look.
> A small dictatorship of NK can be controlled by a handful of people
This is an interesting observation because it is the opposite of Alexis de Tocqueville‘s observation that democracy was well-suited to small states like Athens and Britain but large states like Russia needed autocracy.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you write, but how do you explain the Chinese Communist Party still being in power since 1949? It's anything but transparent or accountable.
My private theory includes that this cuts both ways. Everybody wants to continue with business as usual: peace talks with a puppet government installed, lifting of sanctions for some concessions here and there, and then go on as if nothing happened.
This state of indecisiveness wasn't anticipated by anyone. Germany did even want to skip the sanction part since the war would be over in 3 days.
Now we have to actually deal with it; and the plans on both sides are made up as we go.
But the sanctions, as they have been carried out were so organized and swift (badum-tiss) I don't actually believe the plans for this were not in some drawer and only had to be signed.
I'm surprised by how many people are unquestioningly believing every bit of propaganda the side they supports puts out. How do you know they're doing poorly? Where is your information coming from and how have you verified it is correct? Quite a bit of what is being put out by pretty much everyone with an audience is laughably not plausible. Do you believe Ukraine's story that Russia paratroopers to plummeting to their deaths in large numbers because of missing parachutes? Some of the stories are absolutely ridiculous and I'm not sure if we're meant to believe them or if they're there simply to make everything else more credible in comparison. This isn't just Ukraine doing it, it's everyone all around coming up with these stories that defy logic. Russia might indeed be doing poorly but I don't see how anyone outside of the war theater, or even most in it, have much confidence in knowing the state of things very well.
I think most casual observers, myself included, expected to see the Ukrainian government fled/killed, a new puppet leader installed and Russian tank columns occupying Kiev within a week of the invasion starting. And this seems to have been what Russia expected as well, at least if the notorious plan "leak" on Belarus state TV is to be believed.
The fact that this has clearly failed to happen indicates that the war is not going as planned.
For comparison, it took the US three weeks total from launching their invasion of Iraq to taking over Baghdad, despite there being approximately 5x more distance to cover and Iraq fielding an army twice as large as Ukraine.
Let's just not forget that the US bombed Iraq (including its civilian infrastructure!) so much during the 13 previous years, and also imposed sanctions that delayed any Iraqi recovery. Ukraine, despite its obvious problems is not in this situation. Russia would have probably been able to decapitate the Ukr gov in a week in 2014, though.
There's plenty of OSINT available ( Oryx was even mentioned in the article). Take a look around, the only "side" which doesn't make it abundantly clear the Russian advance is an objective failure on every possible front - terrible logistics, ad-hoc consumer equipment like mobile phones used for communication, poorly maintained everything, low morale, hell, even poor planning and navigation ( lots of vehicles stuck in the mud), is the official Russian government propaganda. They've been thoroughly discredited by the lying before the war, and the accidentally published article about it's successful finish ( which is further indication of what the original Russian plan was).
Both. If I would travel back in time two years and tell myself the issues one of the armies were having in the battle at Ukraine, I wouldn't have assumed it was the Russians.
So it is both: Russians doing fat worse than expected and Ukrainians are doing much better than I feared they would do.
It has been two weeks and Russia lost 12000 soldiers and 1200 vehicles, while capturing one major city (Kherson). They have also made no gains in last week.
That is somewhat of a fiasco for someone who is supposed to have deployed order of magnitude more soldiers, tanks and airplanes than their opponent, and claimed they will win in few days.
EDIT: thanks for the correction, got the cities mixed up.
And the number of injured soldiers is usually 2-3x greater. Which means that Russia potentially has up to 36,000 troops out of action - that's between a quarter and a third of their entire forces in Ukraine!
Some of the stories coming out of Ukraine are implausible, yes, but I wouldn't say 'quite a bit'. We have huge amounts of on the ground reports on social media from ordinary Ukrainians, and these reports are very consistent. That would be impossible for the government to co-ordinate. My girls play internet video games and in the early days you could talk on chat servers to Ukrainian kids about what was happening.
The only way to spin a false narrative is thorough censorship and control of the internet and public media, and we just don't have that in the west. We do have high levels of surveillance, and a tiny amount of editorialising on social media compared to Russia and China, but not state censorship and suppression capable of obstructing public discourse.
Vehicles stuck in mud, running out of fuel, expired food, sending old buses to Ukraine, using cope cages are defense, Russian soldiers stealing food, soldiers arrested by policemen, and the interminable list of tanks and armored vehicles being towed by farmers. I've never a war in which farmers just take tanks! How incompetent are the Russians?
Easy: The war is still going on. There is a lot information that is indeed very unreliable, but undeniable Russia has not yet won the war. A thing that Putin himself said on Russian television could be easily done within two weeks. We are now way past that and there is no end in sight.
Now if we take that indicator of bad performance seriously we can wonder what got into the way of the Russians. And there are some suggestions like badly maintained vehicles, lack of logistics (fuel trucks), vehicles that are unable to drive offroad, bad morale, lack of airsupport and so on.
Now we can take all these theories and try the ones that fit the perceived reality most — not looking at individual instances but on trends — and the theories that fit that picture best win (for now).
The fact is, that Russian explainations don't square with what can be observed long term. Ukrainian explainations are propagandistic (and sometimes lies), but they fit what can be observed if you look onto the bigger arcs of development much better.
What makes you say they are unquestioning? There's a lot of evidence of Russian military incompetence, including that they are struggling against a much smaller, much less-funded and less-equipped military.
one hypothesis from the article is that Russia is saving its good bombs for a bigger war, which is troubling. but by doing so they're wasting planes, right? it doesn't make sense to me.
I think the parent means that Russia's biggest income source is oil and gas. Now that he demonstrated to it's biggest customer (Europe) just how problematic this is, the demand is not going to go up.
Other than in the US where russian Oil is like 3% of the used oil and russian gas is basically not used, in Europe no russian gas means cold houses and problems in the industry.
Russia borders something like sixteen different countries. They have to keep in mind all of those other avenues of potential attacks which might account for some amount of holding back.
Nobody is going to "attack" Russia. Out of those sixteen neighbors there is exactly one, China, which could even begin to contemplate taking on Russia in a land war. (And they still would not, because nukes.)
On the other hand, China could try and strongarm Russia into concessions (no idea which ones) while politely performing military exercises on the other side of an undefended border.
Similarly, if NATO starts politely performing military exercises near any of the other borders of Russia, Russia needs to be able to demonstrate that they have an army guarding said border.
While there has been some drunken bar-talk about retaking Karelia and re-establishing the pre-WW2 borders, It's not likely Finland will attack Russia.
It's more likely the russians are a) incompetent, or b) saving the bulk of the air force for a potential escalation of the current hostilities. One does not have to exclude the other.
Seems to be enough of the losses inflicted by MANPADs and "Strela". Beside naturally helicopters the planes are also shot down this way. Russia doesn't really have high-precision weapons, especially battlefield level ones, (i mean they have very small number of them and have already pretty much exhausted the stores) and thus the planes forced to come closer to dump their unguided bombs - FAB-250/500, ie. 500lbs and 1000lbs, the same like in Syria - to get any result. One can enjoy this official Russian TV glorifying report (a good link seems to be taken private https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrekdY2FgD0 so one can go here
https://rutube.ru/video/4b400cbcfbbd6c1b730b5e80138fe598/ at the starting timestamp 24:40 and at 24:56 there is the plane's payload full frontal. These links are 2 different Russian official TV channels slightly different edits of the same propaganda scenario) on supposedly a "high-precision" strike carried out by a plane loaded only with unguided bombs (FAB-250) where they call those bombs "missiles of point-precision" and even show a video of supposed launch of a ground attack missile from that plane - a Russian propaganda miracle of an unguided bomb conversion to the missile while in flight :)
The S-300 do seems to be working as Russian planes are forced to fly all the way over Ukraine to their targets at extremely small altitude.
- The Ukrainian ground forces are saturated with MANPADs after 8 years of continuous pumping (to the point of untrained personnel getting them), which has significantly accelerated at the end of the last year. So the Russian Air Force can not operate easily on low-mid altitude far from their ground forces.
- The remaining Ukrainian anti-air missile systems (like S-300, but there are also older ones) are heavily supported by NATO radar infrastructure in Poland, so it's risky for Russian planes to stay long on high altitudes.
- The Kalibr missile is quite sufficient for striking stationary objects, so you don't need planes for those. It's hard to strike mobile forces, because they quickly get intelligence from NATO about planes in the area and thus able to hide in cities, thus making it hard for RAF to strike them (the Russian forces have enough firepower to level cities to the ground, but they have orders to minimize damage if possible).
- Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much, since operating a plane is far from being cheap.
>thus able to hide in cities, thus making it hard for RAF to strike them (the Russian forces have enough firepower to level cities to the ground, but they have orders to minimize damage if possible).
that is pure Russian propaganda. Most of the videos of destroyed armor in cities is Russian armor - i.e. it is Russian armor hides in cities (yet it doesn't help them against Molotov cocktails and RPG and high-precision strikes https://youtu.be/D5WoCUqNWIs?t=13).
Russian airforce and artillery indiscriminately bomb and shell Ukrainian cities using unguided bombs and unguided missiles (from "Grad" and "Smerch" systems), and among the huge amount of videos of Ukrainian cities destruction by Russians there is no videos with Ukrainian armor inside destruction - ie. Russians attack residential areas without any Ukrainian hardware there.
Russian bombing of cities is done to force Ukrainians out. That is ethnical cleansing, a part of the announced by Putin destruction of Ukrainian ethnical and national identity.
>Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much.
that just doesn't make sense, especially given how many Russian ground hardware is being lost to drone fire and to drone guided fire.
> If you want to see what the Russian forces are capable of on the city-leveling front, simply watch footage from the second Chechen war and compare it with big Ukrainian cities today (preferably shot by simple people, not media outlets).
Grozny wasn't destroyed in one day. It took 2 wars to achieve that. There is still less than 3 weeks of Ukrainian war, and i'd say Russian destruction speed of Ukrainian cities beats the Chechen war - not surprisingly as Russia uses much more hardware for Ukraine cities destruction. If anything looks like Russia is going at it at the maximum speed it can with the available hardware (and giving the current war failure Putin would have brought the additional hardware if he could without leaving naked the rest of the country - there is a reason he is asking China for the hardware help).
>I will not comment on your blatant propaganda piece. There is enough of footage of Ukrainian armored forces hiding near high raise buildings, "territorial defenses" assembling in schools and hospitals, and artillery being stationed in school yards.
Still, what Russia can't show is footage of actual strike on city civilians with a valid military target in the strike zone while there are lot of footage of Russian strikes on city civilians without a valid military target in the strike zone.
Anyway, Ukrainians have got to defend their cities. By your and German Nazi logic the defenders of Stalingrad are guilty of destruction of Stalingrad.
> I think you significantly overestimate how many in practice the Russian forces lose to drones.
Note that the parent said not only drone fire, but also "drone guided fire". With help from drones artillery can be quite effective [1]. The more limited firepower of drones is used instead for more "surgical" tasks, like targeting artillery command posts [2], or supply behind the front line (seemingly, they are small enough that they are hard to target by Russian air defense)
Are you sure it is not in turn Ukrainian propaganda when they claim the opposite? We only get to see the Ukrainian version of things. I also don't think enemy tanks are the only military reasons for bombing something.
Obviously there never is a "clean" war where only military is being hit with surgical strikes. Armies always promise that (like the US did in its invasions), but usually don't deliver.
I watch the Russian TV too. They could have shown say an Ukrainian tank destroyed while hiding in the children sandbox or something like this. Yet, no, they can't show anything meaningful despite also having video cameras and supposedly controlling the airspace. I already shown an example of the crap they show https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30669531 - their celebrated high precision missiles being just dumb unguided bombs of the WWII period, and they lie right into your face about it.
Sure they're available, but you don't have to watch them. I only see his daily extremely cool quote about needing more ammo and such.
The Ukrainian MoD does release estimates of Russian losses, and they're probably fluffed 2-3x but not more than that. I think part of their strategy of appearing like a modern Western country involves actually seeming truthful unlike Russia/China.
As Putin has lied to the world about essentially everything regarding Ukraine, I tend to not believe anything Putin or Russian officials tell us about the war.
A key objective of Russian propaganda is to instill the notion that "nothing can be trusted". It has the same effect as telling people that "all candidates are the same": convince people to sit on the fence while you strengthen your side.
A couple of days ago there was a job search for US PsyOps posted here on HN. What makes you think it is a specifically Russian strategy?
It also could be a general feature of war or people quarrelling that both parties have different versions of events. They could even both be right in a sense, even if from afar their positions seem to contradict each other.
Social Meia and search engines are downranking or censoring it, though. All I see (without TV) is general statements like Putin saying "war is going great".
> The Russian version of events is very easy to access
While technically true, it is evident that people in the west have some mental barriers on visiting RUnet.
> widely reported on in the west
That doesn't seem to be the case. Quite a lot gets omitted or even blatantly misrepresented. People even have trouble verifying sources, because they are afraid of "Russian propaganda", despite the fact that their news medium has just referenced this particular piece of "propaganda".
Unfortunately there is a tremendous amount of propaganda being peddled by all actors involved in this war. This is just objective reality and the nature of war, though partisans on one side or the other want to pretend that everything "their side" states are facts while everything the "other side" states are lies. Amazingly, some of this propaganda is being openly pushed despite being debunked, by people who admit that it is false propaganda! The rationale offered is that fake stories are okay if they "increase morale" (by those who seemingly lack the capacity to understand the concept of credibility or its importance).
Among unbiased observers with a grasp of the situation it is clear that Russia could be doing much more damage to Ukrainian cities, and we can only speculate as to why that is. They could be trying to save munitions, they could be doing it for public relations purposes, they could be doing it because they want relatively intact cities if they eventually succeed in taking over Ukraine, or any number of other reasons.
The one thing you can be sure about, is that anyone who claims to know with certainty what is happening in the war zone, or what the "true" motivation of Russia is at the current time, can be safely disregarded as someone who is either confused or pushing an agenda.
>Unfortunately there is a tremendous amount of propaganda being peddled by all actors involved in this war.
There aren't "actors" nor "both sides" in that war. There is Russian Fascist regime which is conducting genocidal war in Ukraine to erase Ukrainian ethnic and national identity. And there is Ukrainian people fighting for their survival. The propaganda comes only from Russia, as compare to Russian propaganda (say publishing 10-20x smaller Russian losses than they really are among other obvious lies) the inconsistencies in Ukrainian information (say publishing 1.5x larger Russian losses than they really are) are just that - inconsistencies natural for a country being invaded and bombed by overwhelming military force.
>This is just objective reality and the nature of war
That is your reality. The reality of Russian propaganda. "We lie and they must be lying too". A reality of the people who couldn't understand how normal civilized people think and behave.
>Among unbiased observers with a grasp of the situation it is clear that Russia could be doing much more damage to Ukrainian cities
nice. I see that new propaganda spin getting peddled by several pro-Russian "propagandons" like you. Whole world - "You, Russians, are committing grievous war crimes by the indiscriminate bombing of civilians". And the new Russian response - "Russia could be doing much more damage to Ukrainian cities. Be grateful that it isn't", and that is a lie too as Russia seems to be running at the maximum of the available hardware.
A “genocidal” war with about 600 civilian casualties according to the UN.
Stringing together lists of bad words like fascism, genocide is not an argument.
Neither is calling people propagandists. If this is the level of discussion you want r/worldnews is the place to be nowadays.
The UN estimate is several times lower than everybody else's (except of course Russian) like for example US's . Plus ~1200 Ukrainian military and volunteers which were killed for the same genocidal goal - erasing Ukraine nation. Millions displaced. Genocide isn't about numbers anyway, at least not about numbers in the less than 3 weeks. Russia kills about 150 Ukrainians per day. German Nazi were killing about 3000 Jews/day (6M in 6 years of WWII). So, how many more Ukrainians needs to be killed to satisfy your definition of genocide? Though i'd suggest you read this before commenting - https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml .
Current Russian regime is fascist according to the definition, and this is how it called everyday in Ukraine and Baltic countries.
>Neither is calling people propagandists.
Low moral peddling of pure Russian propaganda makes a person not just propagandist, it makes that person a "propagandon" - used in Russian combination of "propagandist" and an offensive for "condom". The guy has no shame with his "we could be bombing civilians more". The people like him is the base of Russian public support of that genocide, and thus they are actually willing participants in it. There is no "level of discussion" here. They are killing people right now. If anything HN should probably like the rest of the world block Russia.
>If this is the level of discussion you want r/worldnews is the place to be nowadays.
try it yourself as your post contains mostly empty incorrect charges without any factual/references/etc support.
What exactly is your interest in this war? The way you appeal to emotion and make everything personal, stigmatize others is just as damaging to discourse as so-called Russian trolls.
This is a place for having genuine discussions. If you don’t want that… the rest of the internet is currently a Russian bash-fest. So you’re welcome to partake, but remember that those that splash around in mud get dirty.
600 civilians and 1200 soldiers killed doesn’t satisfy anybody’s definition of genocide. Especially since the average HN user doesn’t know under which conditions those deaths happened. This might yet turn into a genocide, but that seems unlikely.
Finally, Russia is an authoritarian state. It is not totalitarian, although it could become so as a consequence of this war.
>make everything personal, stigmatize others is just as damaging to discourse as so-called Russian trolls.
you'd be right if it were a typical "culture war". Unfortunately a "culture war" stops being just a "culture" one and the discussion doesn't exist anymore when one side starts to actually kill people based on their ideological viewpoint they had expressed in the "culture war". Since the moment killing starts advancing the supporting viewpoint is materially supporting the killing.
>600 civilians and 1200 soldiers killed doesn’t satisfy anybody’s definition of genocide.
Only in Mariupol 2200 people have already been killed.
As you insist on your personal number based definition - i'll repeat the request, just for argument sake, for you to please state the numbers required according to your definition.
No. Those are just confirmed. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says:
> OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, especially in Government-controlled territory and especially in recent days, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Izium (Kharkiv region), and Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region) where there are allegations of hundreds of civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics.
This doesn’t change anything about the exaggerated claim that this is a genocidal war. Where’s the proof?
All signs so far indicate that it’s a war of conquest with the aim on putting space between Russia and NATO and potentially controlling additional natural resources.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
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;
"
Putin explicitly announced that the main goal of that war is his final solution to "Ukrainian question" - anybody not displaced is either to be converted/subjugated by stripping off their ethical and national identity or to be killed for resistance. That is exactly by the book of the Hitler's solution for Slavic people on USSR territories back then.
>I see that new propaganda spin getting peddled by several pro-Russian "propagandons" like you.
Flinging accusation of being "pro-Russian" at people who acknowledge the fog of war and the indisputable fact that there is propaganda coming out from all sides of this war doesn't bolster your position.
>Flinging accusation of being "pro-Russian" at people who acknowledge the fog of war and the indisputable fact that there is propaganda coming out from all sides of this war doesn't bolster your position.
It is you who are creating additional fog of war by raising unfounded doubts about reasonable sources of information and by attempting thus to decrease the doubt about the sources of total disinformation like the official Russian propaganda. It isn't an academical debate. That fog of war is one of the tools employed by Russia in their genocidal war in Ukraine and by building it up you're directly participating in it.
>The Ghost of Kiev begs to differ.
That is all you could come up with ?! Looks to me like a profound lack of compassion and lack of basic humanity on your side. Somehow you're able to suggest that it is 2 comparable things:
- outright denying of, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and thus providing material support for, committing of the war crimes of the massive bombing of cities
- people being bombed in their city inventing a legend that it is the same plane with the same pilot who saves them again and again by shooting down the bombing planes.
The Donbass war was a typical separatist war which i supported (in particular i supported Russian military help as a way to equalize the military chances and thus force the peaceful solution by making military solution unachievable for either side) as i in general usually support separatists. Conducting that war, Ukraine for example has never attacked Russian territory, say Moscow or St.Petersburg, as it would be pure war crime unrelated to war. You seem to be suggesting that current attacks on Chernigov, Harkiv, Kiev, etc. are part of that war. I fail to see connection here.
On Feb 24 Putin started a new war, not related to the Donbass war. The main goal of the new war was explicitly proclaimed by Putin as "Ukraine doesn't exist. Ukrainians don't exist. Anybody resisting to that is to be killed."
I'd take anything coming from captured soldiers with a big grain of salt, as they could be talking under duress. Though in that case it's clear that Russians are bombing Ukrainian cities.
> he Russian forces have enough firepower to level cities to the ground, but they have orders to minimize damage if possible
How do you square that with the mass destruction of Ukrainian cities, including by aircraft bombing? It seems to be a ridiculous assumption long debunked.
> Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much, since operating a plane is far from being cheap
Nope, Ukrainian drones continue to inflict heavy damage - either directly or indirectly with targeting, just this past day there were direct strikes on a railway bridge, command post deep in Russian held territory, and an indirect one with artillery on Russian troops in a forest. Check out Oryx the blog or twitter account, they verify posts and retract errors if any are detected. Furthermore, Ukraine still operated fighters as of what, 2-3 says ago at the latest? Russia does not have air supremacy, only local air superiority.
> How do you square that with the mass destruction of Ukrainian cities, including by aircraft bombing? It seems to be a ridiculous assumption long debunked.
One way to square it is that the perception of what is "minimal" is vastly different in their minds. Mind you, they decided to attack a well armed sovereign country that was definitely not welcoming them, and they have a total control of their media, so they don't really care about achieving surgical precision. That doesn't mean they must then choose to level cities to the ground. It's not a binary choice.
>How do you square that with the mass destruction of Ukrainian cities, including by aircraft bombing?
You can compare this "mass destruction" with the Grozny's state after the second Chechen war or, if you want a more recent example, with Mosul and Hudaydah.
It is not that different. Look up for example photos from Mariupol or Kharkiv and see for yourself. Smaller cities are being destroyed even more. City of Volnovaha for example is destroyed to the ground.
The biggest difference is that the cities are much bigger, so it takes more time to completely level them.
You do realize all of this makes a lot more sense if you grant the Russian army one simple thing, that they actually aren't interested in harming civilians in the grand scheme of this operation.
Constant aerial bombardment and complete immediate domination would massively increase the civilian casualty count and its clear from Crimea, Odessa, and other cities in the Donbas region, that Russians have a large Ukrainian support base that are anti-banderite and consider Zelensky's cooperation with Nazi groups a betrayal.
Btw, applying Occam's razor here does not automatically make one a Putin supporter regardless of what some western media outlets might claim. Sad that many smart people voluntarily or involuntarily turn their brains off when jingoism is back in vogue.
> You do realize all of this makes a lot more sense if you grant the Russian army one simple thing, that they actually aren't interested in harming civilians in the grand scheme of this operation.
For someone not interested in harming civilians, they're doing an amazing job at it.
> Btw, applying Occam's razor here does not automatically make one a Putin supporter
Certainly not, but applying Occam's Razor to such a trivially debunked argument might?
> For someone not interested in harming civilians, they're doing an amazing job at it.
I suspect that you have little reference about how many civilians are killed during conflicts. If Russia really wanted to kill civilians you would see tens of thousands of dead civilians already.
>if they really wanted to kill civilians I'd see the entire Ukraine population dead. It's a gradient, not a binary, isn't it.
Please do post your sources for civilian casualty counts so we can better understand this gradient.
My understanding is conflicts in population centers of similar size and density elsewhere in the world (parts of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the civilian casualty counts are much higher than we are seeing in Ukraine.
Not to put too fine a point on it but: this war is far from over and you're making some pretty wild assumptions about how it compares to wars that are much longer running.
Also this 'post your sources' for stuff that you know is going to be impossible to do accurately is not in good faith, either someone posts their sources and you will attack them or they won't, either case 'you win'. But it doesn't contribute at all.
>you're making some pretty wild assumptions about how it compares to wars that are much longer running.
This is wrong, there is a casualty count timeline over the course of each of the listed conflicts. They are not exact but the range is worth comparing.
>Also this 'post your sources' for stuff that you know is going to be impossible to do accurately is not in good faith.
It's not impossible, they made a claim and I want to see the sources that led them to the conclusion. This is pretty normal in fact based discourse.
> This is wrong, there is a casualty count timeline over the course of each of the listed conflicts.
Oh that would work so well for World War II. Really, this is meaningless.
> It's not impossible, they made a claim and I want to see the sources that led them to the conclusion. This is pretty normal in fact based discourse.
It's pretty normal for things where such sources are available, such as discussions about scientific subjects or other things that are easy to quantify in an exact manner. When talking about a war in progress it is just a way to throw shade.
While you raise a good point, one aspect to consider is that this conflict is still fresh.
For example, NATO bombings of Yugoslavia are estimated to have caused ~500 civilian deaths according to Human Rights Watch (Yugoslav estimates are higher) in the whole 2+ months.
By comparison, Russian attacks have caused ~600 civilian deaths according to UN (Ukrainian estimates are higher) in 2 weeks so far.
Originally I wrote it does not look like a directed murder of Ukrainian civilians by Russian military, i.e. the cases were true casualties of attacks on military targets. I am less certain it remains so clear-cut in recent days though, my impression through the fog of war is that civilian infrastructure destruction and by extension casualties have become more acceptable as a means to put pressure on Ukrainian government. If true, this would be a turn for the worse for ordinary people on the ground.
Unlike the supposed "large Ukrainian support base" for being invaded which has spectacularly failed to manifest itself in the current conflict, we have plenty of evidence that Russia is systematically levelling cities within range of its ground-based artillery.
It's not "applying Occam's razor" to insist that the reason Russia failed to take out the Ukrainian air force on day one and didn't start levelling cities in earnest until its ground based units were in range is due to Ukrainian enthusiasm for being invaded. The simplest possible explanation for Russia flying few air sorties doesn't involve Ukrainian attitudes towards the Azov battalion, it simply requires looking at their aircraft attrition rate.
The reports of them firing after fleeing civilians and more or less executing civilians in the streets makes it kind of hard to grant them that, even if one assumes not all of those are true.
I don't think that's fair. The Russians could have wrecked central Kyiv by now but clearly have been ordered not to, it's largely untouched. Of course there are good reasons for that, the Kyiv skyline is an iconic part of the shared Ukrainian and Russian cultural landscape. Images of it ruined by Russian bombardment would be impossible to square with Russia's propaganda position.
On the other hand, clearly any such 'minimize damage' directive is not protecting smaller Ukrainian cities and towns.
They have leveled cities. That Kyiv is still standing is because it is well defended, not because of Russians being particularly careful with damage minimization and as you may have noticed the war isn't over yet.
How does “well-defended” defend against missiles? Couldn’t missile barrages already have destroyed central Kiev if Russia wanted that? (Genuine question)
That's mostly a cost and availability issue. Missiles tend to be used against high value targets where accuracy is more important than cost efficiency. The cruel economics of war: civilians are soft targets, so you don't need precision or the ability to penetrate very strong defenses.
My guess would be that Kyiv is a barganing chip for the eastern part of the country that is the actual target of the invasion (Not being able to read minds, I'm on the "Putin wants the dombass mines and a buffer with NATO" team.)
I think I'm well aware of that, thank you. FWIW my grandfathers' house in NL was one of very few left standing at the end of WWII in the city where they lived, and my grandmothers diary makes for interesting reading, to put it mildly.
I'm not saying the Russian are trying to minimize damage to the city, but Kyiv are well within range of their newer rocket artillery like the BM-30; so if the Russian want to level Kyiv to the ground, they would be able to do it relatively easily. In addition, they can also do carpet bombing with their high-flying Tu-95; which is mostly safe from Manpads.
The VVS doesn't have robust jamming, anti-radiation missiles, or SEAD.
Like I'm sure they have them somewhere, but not in large enough quantities to reliably cover fat, slow bombers on regular sorties. They took down at least 2 transports full of VDV, for example.
Rockets are expensive, the number of rocket launchers is minimal compared to the number of artillery pieces (and the number of rockets is far smaller than the number of artillery shells) and they tend to reserve them for strategic targets such as airports. Artillery shells and bombs are much cheaper for the same level of destruction, assuming that's your goal.
The Kiev isn't touched much yet because they haven't started the full scale assault from all directions yet. They can't do that with Chernigov and Harkiv behind their backs left not taken. This is why Chernigov and Harkiv are being pounded right now. If/when they fall all that will move onto Kiev.
>Images of it ruined by Russian bombardment would be impossible to square with Russia's propaganda position.
You underestimate Russian propaganda and people brainwashed state there. Probably you're lucky to not speak Russian and thus not being familiar with their propaganda, for example with that big hit inside Russia (obviously not much success outside) of how Zelensky was using right hand to make a nuke to attack Russia while using left hand he was making chemical weapons also to attack Russia :) In case of Kiev unfortunately they would just declare that all those destroyed buildings were used as fighting positions, or may be even directly destroyed, by those Ukrainian "nazi and banderovtsy".
S300 is just the "brand". They have been upgraded over the years and it's a whole family. Of course it all depends on what version Ukraine has. I can't believe NATO would not love to have their hands on one, even an older generation one.
Edit: It looks like Greece ( a NATO member) also has S300
( How did that happen !!?? ) and Turkey ( also NATO member)
has the S400. Not sure if Turkey would allow close examination of their S400 capabilities, even as a NATO
member.
They cut a deal to get the Pantsir, and there may have been strings attached.
Plus, if you choose the next-gen AA over the next-gen fighter, there is an implication as to what you'll be shooting at. And since NATO chose the next-gen fighters...
The main worry has been that anti air missile systems are not isolated, to be effective they have to be integrated in a wide network with other missile systems, observation radars, flying radars, sensors on fighters, ships, etc. This is a complex computer network.
The systems operated by Greece and inherited by the Soviet Union in the cases of other Nato members are rather old with limited computational resources and limited software developed back in the 80s-90s.
In the case of the S-400 we are probably talking about millions of lines of code developed only years ago and potentially with an update schedule, there is absolutely no way to be sure there is no cutting edge malware that could either infiltrate the rest of the air-defense network, or just ship radar data back to Russia about the signatures of friendly f-35s, that's the real reason the US does not want to sell f-35s to Turkey.
It's one thing to pick up a return from an f-35 on your radar and another to be getting a return and also it's actual position along with IFF information. This data would be invaluable to the Russians and could actually undermine the f-35s stealth performance in a potential conflict in the future.
> Greece ( a NATO member) also has S300 ( How did that happen !!?? )
The Greek S-300s come from Cyprus (which AFAIK is not a NATO member). They were handed over as a way to resolve the crisis with Turkey about the system itself [1]
> Not sure if Turkey would allow close examination of their S400 capabilities, even as a NATO member.
These days Turkey is a NATO member more de jure than de facto, so who knows. Since the acquisition of S400 caused the expulsion of Turkey from the F-35 program, maybe that could be a bargaining chip to re-enter it in some form ?
> S300 is just the "brand". They have been upgraded over the years and it's a whole family. Of course it all depends on what version Ukraine has. I can't believe NATO would not love to have their hands on one, even an older generation one.
> United States – S-300P purchased from Belarus (1994). The system was devoid of electronics.[147] S300V was purchased in Russia officially in the 1990s[clarification needed] (complete set (except for 9S32 GRILL PAN multi-channel guidance radar)).[148]
Nope, it's total war. There are no civilians, everyone is fighting against the foreign invaders ( or should be - of course there are refugees and people who don't want to die, but they often don't have the option).
> The Kalibr missile is quite sufficient for striking stationary objects, so you don't need planes for those.
Perhaps, but how many of those does Russia actually have? Whenever I read reports of US Tomahawk inventory, I'm always surprised by how few they actually have in inventory (e.g. guessing they'd run out quickly in a hot war).
> Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down)
My understanding is that's not true. The airspace is contested, since neither Russia nor Ukraine have full control.
> Whenever I read reports of US Tomahawk inventory, I'm always surprised by how few they actually have in inventory (e.g. guessing they'd run out quickly in a hot war).
And most of those are old. Really old in some cases. Like half got used in Iraq II and the other half are still around...
Stockpiles of newer and scarier stuff is probably less known, however.
I keep seeing all these "experts are perplexed" type of articles pop up everywhere on the internet, the West fails to understand that Russians are just incompetent, they have only few capable pilots and those are afraid of fly missions in the skies that are saturated with Stingers and various USSR era SAM batteries.
Well... take a look at one of the pilots they shot down. This guy was apparently also flying missions in Syria. If this one guy's physical condition is any indication of the type of pilots Russia is putting in the field, they are seriously fucked. And before "propaganda", "fake news" etc. There are interviews with him after he was captured, while he's still got that bandage around his neck. It's actually a hilarious interview, basically he says he didn't know what he was doing there, didn't know he was bombing civilians and the Ukranian asks him if he didn't see the cars driving around, or if he thought they were driving themselves like Elon Musk wanted.
Where are some interviews with credible sources? Also, this person's life is in the hands of their captors; they will say whatever is most likley to keep them alive, including what their captors tell them to say. Generally, it's illegal to put POWs in that position.
I verymuch support Ukrainians, their freedom, and their democratic government, but POW interviews are propaganda.
What would even count as a “credible source”? It’s a cellphone video from someone in the warzone, it’s raw footage from the source. Yes I get he could and would say anything, they’re all saying the same shit.
They are indeed hard to find in war, if that's what you mean, but there are good sources - intercepted communications, for example; anonymous interviews with current Russian soldiers; interviews with people they talk to; etc etc
> It’s a cellphone video from someone in the warzone, it’s raw footage from the source.
Raw footage is less credible. It lacks the fact-checking around it. The NY Times, for example, has put dozens of reporters in Ukraine to corroborate, fact-check, etc. - that's the value of actual journalists compared to some video on the Internet.
> they’re all saying the same shit.
I have seen that but it could be that Ukrainian messaging is consistent, and spreading messages that enemy morale is low is a very common, basic tactic. However, there seems to be other evidence of low morale.
However true it is, I'm glad Ukraine is doing it effectively!
Michael Kofman, an expert in Russian mil., claims that one of the reasons for this is that Russia's military doctrine accounts for cases where air supremacy or superiority cannot be achieved.
Shelling a city with Grad and artillery is far cheaper.
It looks like the Oligarchs stole most of the money that should
go for effective logistics. The Russian Air Force probably cannot supply enough spare parts. Military jets need hours of maintenance for each hour of flight.
My theory is that originally they decided not to do a fast, comprehensive bombing/missile shock-and-awe campaign because even if it was aimed at military targets, it would be very easy to perceive (or describe) a comprehensive deployment like that as "carpet bombing", "brutal", etc.
In other words, they were trying to avoid bad press and having the population immediately perceive them as being indiscriminate or blowing up their entire country etc. There would just be so many videos on TV and the internet of so many bombs and missiles.
Its actually kind of like the discussion about LIDAR on Teslas. People always come up with these supposed scientific reasons that they decided not to use it. But the biggest reason was, it doesn't look good, or fit in at all with the sleek design of Teslas. Teslas would go from the sexiest car to the dorkiest overnight.
Anyway, pretty rough analogy, but similarly, the Russians probably decided not to operate in the most effective way, deliberately, due to "optics".
The Russians are murdering, kidnapping, looting and raping. The destroyed multiple cities. They deliberately target hospitals. They deliberately target refugees and journalists. Terror is their way.
The claims they are trying to minimize damage are misguided.
You know, there's information war on both sides, so all your assertions might have to be nuanced.
And even if the facts are 100% true, it doesn't mean automatically that they want terror. They might just be helpless about it (doesn't excuse it of course).
I think Russian actions in Chechnya, Syria and Ukraine and USSR actions everywhere they went are very good proof they want terror.
I mean how do you accidentally destroy maternity ward of a hospital? How likely is that to be an accident and opposed to deliberate terror bombing?
And then there's the kidnapping of Ukrainian officials and replacing them with collaborants. That is deliberate terror tactics as well. Watching them in action makes me thing their approach didn't really change since their Katyn days.
But I live in a place Russians visited in 1968 leaving in the 90's so you could say I'm biased.
Russian-caused war casualties have indeed consistently been huge compared to similar NATO-caused wars. On the other hand, specific incidents do happen quite similarly. NATO or the USA have bombed red cross hospitals, medicine factories, media outlets and others claiming that they were being used as human shield and so on.
The largest difference is scale (well, and perception in the media, though that is to be expected). The US may have bombed 1 or 2 hospitals in, say, Afghanistan, while the Russians seem to be on track for bombing 10 or more as this war drags on.
> I mean how do you accidentally destroy maternity ward of a hospital?
An army that uses un-ecrypted radio communicatuon and pins artillery targets on google maps labelled as 'farm' probably doesn't have the best targeting.
US has far better targetting, and they bomb two weddings or a funerals a year.
What we do know for sure two facts: the demoralised, corrupt and lying system goes all the day through soldiers, officers, generals, there is probably no accountability.
And that putin came to power by blowing up apartment blocks while his own people were asleep in them, so he is largely capable of anything
> I mean how do you accidentally destroy maternity ward of a hospital?
That's actually fairly easy without precision munitions or with bad targeting info. Stuff like that happens in war sometimes.
What makes it clear that it is not just that is (1) the frequency of repetitions, and (2) the explanations.
In Mariupol, which was a maternity and children's hospital, not the maternity ward of a hospital, that was destroyed, Russia first claimed they didn't do it at all and that it was Ukrainian propaganda, and that they probably did it to themselves, the claimed they (Russia) did attack it intentionally but that it had not been used as a hospital for years and was an Azov Battalion base and the women and children shown as victims were crisis actors, then finally (last story I heard) claimed they didn't know what happened and were investigating the incident.
I recommend looking at some WW1 depictions of Germans (often called 'Huns' back then). Or even better, German or Japanese depictions of western Allied forces in WW2. It's pretty much the same
Ukrainian state is already in a state of total war, they don't lose anything by escalating. Their goal is to drag other countries into the war, or at the very least maximize external support. Exaggerations, taking stuff out of context, hyperbolizing isolated incidents, or even outright lies - all the tools of trade are normally shunned are now allowed. Level-headed assessment of ground-level truth is not on the agenda right now
> There may be a lesson for nato. Russia’s initial failure to gain air superiority could be explained away by the Kremlin’s secrecy over the decision to go to war and a lack of planning time, says Mr Bronk. But in his view, the air force’s passivity could also reflect inexperience or incompetence.
Where is the line between "objectively assessing an enemy's weaknesses" and "blatant wishfull thinking" ?
While we're discussing how bad the russian air force is doing, cities are being bombed constantly, and the ukrainian governement is imploring for a no-fly zone that no one will enforce given it would mean engaging with, guess what, the air force. Oh, and starting a nuclear war at the same time.
Maybe it's an operationnal failure on Russian's side - but if so, they carved themselves a situation where they can't really _lose_, even if they can't win quickly.
Hopefully something will change the game - but I doubt "hoping for the other side to secretly be stupid" will cut it.
According to the US the Ukrainian Air Foce still has a lot of assets on the ground. So they might be overstating their case about the no fly zone to get
NATO involved. Can't blame them, as they face an existential threat.
"..A senior U.S. defense official added Friday that the Ukrainians “are not using their fixed-wing fighter aircraft very much. They have about 56 fighter aircraft remaining on the ground, and that is the majority of their fleet.” Kyiv is only flying about five to 10 sorties a day compared to Russia’s roughly 200, the official continued. The Ukrainians “haven't proven that they need to do more than what they're doing. They've been very effective with the other tools that they have used, very creatively, and those are having a good effect on Russian airpower...”"
> ... it would mean engaging with, guess what, the air force.
Beating the Russian Air Force in the air isn't the primary issue, we can do that. The bigger issue is that a no-fly-zone must be secured, i.e. bombing radar and SAM installations in Ukraine/Belarus/Russia.
> ... they carved themselves a situation where they can't really _lose_, ...
Quite the opposite, what does a Russian "win" look like here? A huge portion of the population doesn't want them there, a puppet government won't be internationally recognized, and the resulting insurgency would make Chechnya look quaint. Not to mention the humiliation that Russia has already suffered.
It's lunacy to think that Russia is gaining anything out of this. It's not even certain that Russia can beat Ukraine anymore, and it's already a pyrrhic victory if they do.
I am beginning to think that behind the apparent lunacy, a new & old kind of war is rearing its ugly head:
A pure resource-grab for arable land and natural gas & coal reserves, with no intention to preserve the existence of the local population beyond what's needed for forced labor, and no care for any international opinion...
Intuitively say, I would say it's a "kill two birds with one missile", situation: you get a buffer state with NATO _and_ some resources (water / minerals.)
By a very naive reading, this maps [1] seems to scream: "Dombass has all the mines. It's the mines, stupid !" ; but I could not find any resource on the topic (neither to tell it's the real casus belli, nor if they're nothing else to grab there.)
It would be extremely hard (if not impossible) to extract and transfer those resources under constant attacks by Ukrainian resistance. To suppress that resistance would require so much money (and soldiers) that it would probably bankrupt Russia. At the same time, the extraction of natural resources is threatened in Russia itself, because they use western financing and tech to do that, western companies are now leaving and it is not so easy to switch to China.
That is one strategic mistake Russia made. They are economically at the mercy of China, if they somehow manage to circumvent their economy being destroyed with China's help. China will squeeze them hard. China is much more subtle when it comes to taking over, using soft power, letting the money talk. Just take a look at Africa and other places of a new silk road.
> It would be extremely hard (if not impossible) to extract and transfer those resources under constant attacks by Ukrainian resistance
I've always heard a lot of talk about that (even before the war), especially by Western leaders trying to puff up the effectiveness of their support, but is that resistance actually materializing in Russian-controlled areas?
I would estimate that they made even the Russian-controlled areas much less stable. So if their plan was to extract natural resources... they seem to have torpedoed their own plan? I don't know, it does not make any sense to me. But honestly, the whole invasion does not make any sense. I fail to see any "rational" (however immoral) explanation that would seem believable and I tend to view it in terms of ideology gone haywire, perceived grievances, humiliation and revenge... those models seem to fit better than "rational" models like access to natural resources, protection from NATO etc. Just my $0.02.
Most of the fighting is happening in Eastern Ukraine that was until recently fairly pro-Russia. But you can only bomb hospitals and shell cities for so long before the population starts to hate you, even if you speak the same language.
I hope Ukraine does not lose its will to fight, so that they do never allow another land grab by Russia in the east. Russia has already spent lots of resources on this, not to speak of the many lives they ended, but in the long run, if they manage to "get the international community to the table" and try to have "peace talks" while holding a gun in their other hand, the west might cave in and allow them taking the whole east of the country, if only Putin pinky swears to stop the war. I hope that this is somehow unrealistic and that the Ukrainians do not stop until they got back all their territory. However the price is probably high in blood.
> If [Russia] manage[s] to "get the international community to the table" and try to have "peace talks" while holding a gun in their other hand, the west might cave in and allow them taking the whole east of the country, if only Putin pinky swears to stop the war.
IIRC, that's currently the expected best case outcome of this. The Ukrainians are fighting with everything they have, but the Russian Army is just plain bigger and better equipped, so they've only bee able to slow it down, not meet it and defeat it. I don't really see that changing unless the West stops tiptoeing around (at least) and offers more than halfhearted military support to Ukraine.
To be clear: the West's support is less halfharted than it was before the war, but it's still halfharted (e.g. the nonsense with the Polish jets, only supplying "weapons of a defensive character," etc.).
With climate change coming, and only so much land usable for things like wind and solar -- which is to say, optimal for wind and solar -- yea, fights over land will be a thing. I think the DoD and CIA put out a white paper a few years back re: how they think that's gonna become more common due to climate change.
Arguably, the Arab Spring was the first in these wars, since failed harvests and grain prices are what kicked off a lot of unrest to begin with.
There are many such studies, both inside and outside the defense industry. It's one of the more common predictions of the impacts of climate change. I think the IPCC includes it in their reports, which is probably the best starting place - the IPCC's job is to integrate research into one periodic report.
A Russian win would be formal secession of Crimea and Donbas to Russia, secure water supply to the Crimea and a puppet government for the rest. The government doesn't need to be internationally recognised, just beholden to Russia and act as the buffer to the West that Putin wants.
If he takes Kyiv and deposes the current government, getting a treaty that achieves that probably won't be that hard. I don't know enough about Ukrainian demographics to know if a puppet government could be stable without a huge Russian military presence. If the latter is needed then it would probably count as a failure.
They will need an impressive military presence to prop up a sham government. Anyone who wants to fund partisans will have ample opportunities to do so.
And there's no reason to believe that the Ukrainian government will give up once kyiv is taken, it's not a video game. In fact, western Ukraine is so terrifically safe I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of government operations are being run from there already.
> there's no reason to believe that the Ukrainian government will give up once kyiv is taken
I agree. But they don't need to give up for a puppet government to be in place. They need to lose control of the military and communications infrastructure. If the government is far to the west or in exile, it's hard to see how they would maintain control.
And I also agree that a new government would need a substantial Russian military presence. It wasn't that long ago though that a substantial voting bloc supported pro-Russian parties. It's likely that Putin calculated that they'd only get problems with western Ukraine. That's likely been badly misjudged.
> It wasn't that long ago though that a substantial voting bloc supported pro-Russian parties.
It'd be really interesting to get some polling data on those people. It's hard to imagine that they don't feel betrayed. After all, the russian speaking population has been subjected to the harshest and most violent portions of this conflict, albeit incidentally.
Russia's list of demands are demilitarization, a formal declaration to not join NATO and the two republics in the east of Ukraine. You will hardly ever find a mention of these demands in the media because it's considered advantageous to lead people to the conclusion that Russia wants to annex or occupy Ukraine indefinitely -- which they probably don't want to do.
Russia (or Putin to be precise) says that Ukraine is a fake nation. The goal was to unify Ukraine and Belarus as one country. The fact that Russia's demands are somewhat "smaller" now is just because their war didn't go as smooth as they wish it would.
The more they grab though, the stronger their position at the international negotiation table, to achieve what you describe as their goal. "You want us to withdraw from everywhere?? Nah ... The maximum we are willing to go for is withdrawing to the 'new republics'." And then some inconsequent negotiations may grant them that, thinking "Well it will be just as before then." And by agreeing to such a bad result to stop the bloodshed, Putin has got what he originally wanted. Maybe that is his long term goal and the redt is show for the west. An act to spread as much horror and terror as possible.
> You will hardly ever find a mention of these demands in the media because it's considered advantageous to lead people to the conclusion that Russia wants to annex or occupy Ukraine indefinitely -- which they probably don't want to do.
You don't find them sometimes because Russia is extremely untrustworthy. Demilitarization just means it will be easier to annex Ukraine later. Recognizing the Donbas republics is nonsense as Putin's men have already admitted they plan to annex them afterwards.
There's a reason why you hardly ever find a mention of Poland's attack on Germany in 1939[1]. It has something to do with the fact that it's not real.
The most convincing argument I have heard breaks down to two components.
Relative inexperience (not inability) in SEAD(Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) in the face of a robust Ukrainian air defense network.
A desire to preserve force and munitions in case of direct NATO involvement.
Additionally there is a third potential reason, I am no military expert by I assume the acquisition and engagement of targets in populated areas is hard from the air.
All these probably skews the risk/effectiveness balance toward a less aggressive air stance.
I agree with those points, but will also add that the VVS is likely as poorly maintained as the Russian Army.
They may have a lot of aircraft sitting around, but may only have the fuel, munitions, and parts to keep a fraction of it working.
There was a lot of discussion for a while about the state of the tires in the Russian army, and how that often led to break downs or troops getting stuck. Likewise, something as simple or mundane as not having enough flairs or chaff, could be enough to keep much of the fleet grounded, doubly so in the face of a reasonably effective Ukrainian AA network. Multi-million dollar aircraft are temperamental beasts, and missing even a few parts, or not being confident in said parts, is essentially a recipe for casualties, and they can't just conscript more SU-35s
> > But in his view, the air force’s passivity could also reflect inexperience or incompetence.
> Where is the line between "objectively assessing an enemy's weaknesses" and "blatant wishfull thinking" ?
Everyone expected the much, much larger Russian Air Force to establish air superiority in Ukraine within days, even hours.
When an organization systematically failed to be able to perform even its basic activities for no obvious reason, organizational incompetence is almost certain.
> Maybe it's an operationnal failure on Russian's side - but if so, they carved themselves a situation where they can't really _lose_, even if they can't win quickly.
That’s pretty much it in the short term, from what I can tell. They can only lose over the long term, by bleeding themselves dry to find their imperialist adventure in Ukraine just like the USSR did in Afghanistan. It is probably likely to happen. It’s cold comfort for the people being bombed, though.
> [...]a no-fly zone that no one will enforce given it would mean engaging with, guess what, the air force. Oh, and starting a nuclear war at the same time.
A thought experiment:
- if Putin is not insane and wants to live and enjoy his lifestyle (but plays his role to frighten everyone)
- that means he is unlikely to use nukes
- which means it might be practical to establish a no-flight zone, etc
If you believe he is insane, however, the West has nothing else to do than to let him grab whatever he wants (Estonia, maybe?). This is a dead end for NATO.
nuclear weapon aside, 40million motivated Ukrainians with NATO weapons are much much much more powerful than 140million lost Russians with dysfunctional weapons
> Maybe it's an operationnal failure on Russian's side - but if so, they carved themselves a situation where they can't really _lose_, even if they can't win quickly
They could very well lose and are likely to, according to most experts. Even if they do take Kyiv before they run out of money, materiel, and political support - which is uncertain - they are very unlikely to sustain an occupation and defeat an insurgency. Invaders often lose to insurgencies - look at the US in the last 20 years.
Or maybe the lesson to learn is that modern military aircraft are simply not particularly useful weapons. Fighters are way too expensive relative to the cost of ground-based AA systems, while a combination of missile and shell-based artillery can do most bombing jobs way cheaper.
In general modern military seems to be focused on delivering as much power as possible in a single unit, never bothering to ask if multiple lesser units could do a better job combined. And so we get destroyers and cruisers that look mighty, but can nevertheless be rendered inoperable, if not outright sunk, by a single torpedo.
You understate the capabilities of stealth, at least according to any expert I've seen, but yes, like any measure and counter-measure, it is not flawless. Stealth is designed to work against the best radar and other detection systems.
> less payload capacity
Not much is needed with precision guided muntions (which the Russians don't seem to be using, if they have enough).
224 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 426 ms ] threadBut I do hope Western militaries are not counting on Russia's "incompetence and inexperience".
The gist was that the US goes immediately for dominating the sky. Russia sees ground forces as the main engine of the army, and the Air Force only supports the advancement of ground forces near the border, without bombing far into enemy territory (which is a task for the army's missiles).
I could not find the source article I read, and I guess there's a non trivial chance it might even have been based on Russian propaganda... as usual, take everything with a grain of salt. I just find it hard (and reassuring) to imagine that Russia's army and air force are in such a terrible state.
Maybe that's what parent comment is concerned about when saying "I do hope Western militaries are not counting on Russia's 'incompetence and inexperience'"
First as a doctrine, it would be a stupid one - they tend to use paratroopers for surprise taking of advanced positions, and air support is vital to help them keep their position until reinforcements can arrive. Point in case, the failure at Hostomel. Their doctrine emphasises anti-air defenses because air superiority against a superior enemy ( NATO) isn't certain, but that doesn't mean the Air Force shouldn't be used at all, especially against an inferior enemy
Second, they don't seem to be even doing that - there are small scale ( 1-2 planes) raids deep in Ukrainian territory, and neither their planes nor their SAMs can deal with the drones Ukraine fields, even over Russian held territory
This is not a reason to relax, but one can certainly observe that.
I would take the (sadly looks more like wishful thinking) incompetence over the current destruction.
But yeah let's hope they keep like that
Mass bombings is almost the bluntest last-resort weapon you can use. A bloodless coup followed by a (probably quite bloody) purge would have been the best outcome for the Russians.
You get me wrong there. The current destruction is a result of the incompetence, not an alternative to it.
If they were a well organized well maintained troup going full Blitzkrieg they would have overwhelmed the Ukrainian forces so fast they already would have taken the capital more than a week ago. This is what they intended to do.
Now if they can't get forward because the majority of their transport can only happen on roads they are definitely in dire need of air superiority, because air superiority would keep the convoys safer. They started shelling civilian infrastructure because they want to break the unexpected fighting spirit and they have no other ways to do it. But this was definitly not what the leading heads in Russia would have preferred, they thought they would go in full Blitzkrieg and after 3 days the capital would have fallen due to overwhelming force.
Does "Fallujah" ring a bell? The mirage of the clean, surgical war was created by the Clinton administration for the first war in Iraq. Such a thing does not exist and has never been observed accept in carefully manufactured narrative.
If there's any thing I'm taking away from this, it's that Pacifism is dead. You need serious deterrence. Pacifism is what let Putin get this bad.
Come on, now. The mirage of a clean and easy war is probably as old as war itself. Hell, just look at the media just when WWI was getting started. I can criticise American imperialism as well as anyone but this is ridiculous. Besides the fact that the first Gulf war was under Bush.
A small dictatorship like NK can be controlled by a handful of people, often relatives. The family model also works for mafias, up to a certain size. But grow your association of lawlessness beyond a point and you’ll find yourself in desperate need for the protection of the law.
Consider USA where there is a mismanagement problem with healthcare -- onerous regulations, rent-seeking, gatekeepers, state capitalism, crony capitalism, corrupt bureaucracies, anti-trust issues, and insufficient investment in training and development.
If healthcare is unnecessarily expensive by 10% -- then that's 2% of the American economy misallocated. Also, the lost human potential because of worse healthcare outcomes is another drain.
Now imagine if that was par for the course everywhere you look.
This is an interesting observation because it is the opposite of Alexis de Tocqueville‘s observation that democracy was well-suited to small states like Athens and Britain but large states like Russia needed autocracy.
This state of indecisiveness wasn't anticipated by anyone. Germany did even want to skip the sanction part since the war would be over in 3 days.
Now we have to actually deal with it; and the plans on both sides are made up as we go.
The fact that this has clearly failed to happen indicates that the war is not going as planned.
For comparison, it took the US three weeks total from launching their invasion of Iraq to taking over Baghdad, despite there being approximately 5x more distance to cover and Iraq fielding an army twice as large as Ukraine.
Maybe we (and the Russians) actually underestimated the Ukrainians a lot more than overestimated Russians...
[1] http://www.iswresearch.org
So it is both: Russians doing fat worse than expected and Ukrainians are doing much better than I feared they would do.
That is somewhat of a fiasco for someone who is supposed to have deployed order of magnitude more soldiers, tanks and airplanes than their opponent, and claimed they will win in few days.
EDIT: thanks for the correction, got the cities mixed up.
You are probably thinking of Kherson (a much smaller city, population 300k, in southern Ukraine).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai...
The only way to spin a false narrative is thorough censorship and control of the internet and public media, and we just don't have that in the west. We do have high levels of surveillance, and a tiny amount of editorialising on social media compared to Russia and China, but not state censorship and suppression capable of obstructing public discourse.
Easy: The war is still going on. There is a lot information that is indeed very unreliable, but undeniable Russia has not yet won the war. A thing that Putin himself said on Russian television could be easily done within two weeks. We are now way past that and there is no end in sight.
Now if we take that indicator of bad performance seriously we can wonder what got into the way of the Russians. And there are some suggestions like badly maintained vehicles, lack of logistics (fuel trucks), vehicles that are unable to drive offroad, bad morale, lack of airsupport and so on.
Now we can take all these theories and try the ones that fit the perceived reality most — not looking at individual instances but on trends — and the theories that fit that picture best win (for now).
The fact is, that Russian explainations don't square with what can be observed long term. Ukrainian explainations are propagandistic (and sometimes lies), but they fit what can be observed if you look onto the bigger arcs of development much better.
What makes you say they are unquestioning? There's a lot of evidence of Russian military incompetence, including that they are struggling against a much smaller, much less-funded and less-equipped military.
Other than in the US where russian Oil is like 3% of the used oil and russian gas is basically not used, in Europe no russian gas means cold houses and problems in the industry.
Similarly, if NATO starts politely performing military exercises near any of the other borders of Russia, Russia needs to be able to demonstrate that they have an army guarding said border.
It's more likely the russians are a) incompetent, or b) saving the bulk of the air force for a potential escalation of the current hostilities. One does not have to exclude the other.
The S-300 do seems to be working as Russian planes are forced to fly all the way over Ukraine to their targets at extremely small altitude.
- The Ukrainian ground forces are saturated with MANPADs after 8 years of continuous pumping (to the point of untrained personnel getting them), which has significantly accelerated at the end of the last year. So the Russian Air Force can not operate easily on low-mid altitude far from their ground forces.
- The remaining Ukrainian anti-air missile systems (like S-300, but there are also older ones) are heavily supported by NATO radar infrastructure in Poland, so it's risky for Russian planes to stay long on high altitudes.
- The Kalibr missile is quite sufficient for striking stationary objects, so you don't need planes for those. It's hard to strike mobile forces, because they quickly get intelligence from NATO about planes in the area and thus able to hide in cities, thus making it hard for RAF to strike them (the Russian forces have enough firepower to level cities to the ground, but they have orders to minimize damage if possible).
- Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much, since operating a plane is far from being cheap.
that is pure Russian propaganda. Most of the videos of destroyed armor in cities is Russian armor - i.e. it is Russian armor hides in cities (yet it doesn't help them against Molotov cocktails and RPG and high-precision strikes https://youtu.be/D5WoCUqNWIs?t=13).
Russian airforce and artillery indiscriminately bomb and shell Ukrainian cities using unguided bombs and unguided missiles (from "Grad" and "Smerch" systems), and among the huge amount of videos of Ukrainian cities destruction by Russians there is no videos with Ukrainian armor inside destruction - ie. Russians attack residential areas without any Ukrainian hardware there.
On March 5 Ukrainians shot down such a Su-34 when it was bombing Chernigov and captured the pilot. The pilot confessed to the order of bombing the city (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkszHkNoQNo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWrxX_gpNjM). That pilot has been doing similar unguided bombing of Aleppo 6 years ago (https://www.unian.net/war/bombil-mirnyy-gorod-letchika-so-sb...) for which he was celebrated by Putin and Assad.
Russian bombing of cities is done to force Ukrainians out. That is ethnical cleansing, a part of the announced by Putin destruction of Ukrainian ethnical and national identity.
>Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much.
that just doesn't make sense, especially given how many Russian ground hardware is being lost to drone fire and to drone guided fire.
Grozny wasn't destroyed in one day. It took 2 wars to achieve that. There is still less than 3 weeks of Ukrainian war, and i'd say Russian destruction speed of Ukrainian cities beats the Chechen war - not surprisingly as Russia uses much more hardware for Ukraine cities destruction. If anything looks like Russia is going at it at the maximum speed it can with the available hardware (and giving the current war failure Putin would have brought the additional hardware if he could without leaving naked the rest of the country - there is a reason he is asking China for the hardware help).
>I will not comment on your blatant propaganda piece. There is enough of footage of Ukrainian armored forces hiding near high raise buildings, "territorial defenses" assembling in schools and hospitals, and artillery being stationed in school yards.
Still, what Russia can't show is footage of actual strike on city civilians with a valid military target in the strike zone while there are lot of footage of Russian strikes on city civilians without a valid military target in the strike zone.
Anyway, Ukrainians have got to defend their cities. By your and German Nazi logic the defenders of Stalingrad are guilty of destruction of Stalingrad.
well, it's not the worst location, since I guess schools are closed due to the conflict and thus empty of children
Note that the parent said not only drone fire, but also "drone guided fire". With help from drones artillery can be quite effective [1]. The more limited firepower of drones is used instead for more "surgical" tasks, like targeting artillery command posts [2], or supply behind the front line (seemingly, they are small enough that they are hard to target by Russian air defense)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icSJPqkzupI [2] https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/150316201107691929...
Obviously there never is a "clean" war where only military is being hit with surgical strikes. Armies always promise that (like the US did in its invasions), but usually don't deliver.
I also don't won't to take sides here, I merely point out that the information is rather one-sided.
I personally also can not verify for example of that children's hospital had military stuff going on or not.
The Ukrainian MoD does release estimates of Russian losses, and they're probably fluffed 2-3x but not more than that. I think part of their strategy of appearing like a modern Western country involves actually seeming truthful unlike Russia/China.
It also could be a general feature of war or people quarrelling that both parties have different versions of events. They could even both be right in a sense, even if from afar their positions seem to contradict each other.
Kurosawa's movie Rashomon comes to mind.
While technically true, it is evident that people in the west have some mental barriers on visiting RUnet.
> widely reported on in the west
That doesn't seem to be the case. Quite a lot gets omitted or even blatantly misrepresented. People even have trouble verifying sources, because they are afraid of "Russian propaganda", despite the fact that their news medium has just referenced this particular piece of "propaganda".
Among unbiased observers with a grasp of the situation it is clear that Russia could be doing much more damage to Ukrainian cities, and we can only speculate as to why that is. They could be trying to save munitions, they could be doing it for public relations purposes, they could be doing it because they want relatively intact cities if they eventually succeed in taking over Ukraine, or any number of other reasons.
The one thing you can be sure about, is that anyone who claims to know with certainty what is happening in the war zone, or what the "true" motivation of Russia is at the current time, can be safely disregarded as someone who is either confused or pushing an agenda.
There aren't "actors" nor "both sides" in that war. There is Russian Fascist regime which is conducting genocidal war in Ukraine to erase Ukrainian ethnic and national identity. And there is Ukrainian people fighting for their survival. The propaganda comes only from Russia, as compare to Russian propaganda (say publishing 10-20x smaller Russian losses than they really are among other obvious lies) the inconsistencies in Ukrainian information (say publishing 1.5x larger Russian losses than they really are) are just that - inconsistencies natural for a country being invaded and bombed by overwhelming military force.
>This is just objective reality and the nature of war
That is your reality. The reality of Russian propaganda. "We lie and they must be lying too". A reality of the people who couldn't understand how normal civilized people think and behave.
>Among unbiased observers with a grasp of the situation it is clear that Russia could be doing much more damage to Ukrainian cities
nice. I see that new propaganda spin getting peddled by several pro-Russian "propagandons" like you. Whole world - "You, Russians, are committing grievous war crimes by the indiscriminate bombing of civilians". And the new Russian response - "Russia could be doing much more damage to Ukrainian cities. Be grateful that it isn't", and that is a lie too as Russia seems to be running at the maximum of the available hardware.
Stringing together lists of bad words like fascism, genocide is not an argument. Neither is calling people propagandists. If this is the level of discussion you want r/worldnews is the place to be nowadays.
Current Russian regime is fascist according to the definition, and this is how it called everyday in Ukraine and Baltic countries.
>Neither is calling people propagandists.
Low moral peddling of pure Russian propaganda makes a person not just propagandist, it makes that person a "propagandon" - used in Russian combination of "propagandist" and an offensive for "condom". The guy has no shame with his "we could be bombing civilians more". The people like him is the base of Russian public support of that genocide, and thus they are actually willing participants in it. There is no "level of discussion" here. They are killing people right now. If anything HN should probably like the rest of the world block Russia.
>If this is the level of discussion you want r/worldnews is the place to be nowadays.
try it yourself as your post contains mostly empty incorrect charges without any factual/references/etc support.
This is a place for having genuine discussions. If you don’t want that… the rest of the internet is currently a Russian bash-fest. So you’re welcome to partake, but remember that those that splash around in mud get dirty.
600 civilians and 1200 soldiers killed doesn’t satisfy anybody’s definition of genocide. Especially since the average HN user doesn’t know under which conditions those deaths happened. This might yet turn into a genocide, but that seems unlikely.
Finally, Russia is an authoritarian state. It is not totalitarian, although it could become so as a consequence of this war.
you'd be right if it were a typical "culture war". Unfortunately a "culture war" stops being just a "culture" one and the discussion doesn't exist anymore when one side starts to actually kill people based on their ideological viewpoint they had expressed in the "culture war". Since the moment killing starts advancing the supporting viewpoint is materially supporting the killing.
>600 civilians and 1200 soldiers killed doesn’t satisfy anybody’s definition of genocide.
Only in Mariupol 2200 people have already been killed.
Anyway, I already shown that the situation satisfies UN definition of genocide https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678544 . As well as other people shown it too, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30645290 .
As you insist on your personal number based definition - i'll repeat the request, just for argument sake, for you to please state the numbers required according to your definition.
No. Those are just confirmed. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says:
> OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, especially in Government-controlled territory and especially in recent days, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Izium (Kharkiv region), and Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region) where there are allegations of hundreds of civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics.
https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/ukraine-civilian-casual...
All signs so far indicate that it’s a war of conquest with the aim on putting space between Russia and NATO and potentially controlling additional natural resources.
You seem to have failed to check the genocide definition https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml . Let me copy it here :
" Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
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; "
Putin explicitly announced that the main goal of that war is his final solution to "Ukrainian question" - anybody not displaced is either to be converted/subjugated by stripping off their ethical and national identity or to be killed for resistance. That is exactly by the book of the Hitler's solution for Slavic people on USSR territories back then.
Flinging accusation of being "pro-Russian" at people who acknowledge the fog of war and the indisputable fact that there is propaganda coming out from all sides of this war doesn't bolster your position.
>The propaganda comes only from Russia
The Ghost of Kiev begs to differ.
It is you who are creating additional fog of war by raising unfounded doubts about reasonable sources of information and by attempting thus to decrease the doubt about the sources of total disinformation like the official Russian propaganda. It isn't an academical debate. That fog of war is one of the tools employed by Russia in their genocidal war in Ukraine and by building it up you're directly participating in it.
>The Ghost of Kiev begs to differ.
That is all you could come up with ?! Looks to me like a profound lack of compassion and lack of basic humanity on your side. Somehow you're able to suggest that it is 2 comparable things:
- outright denying of, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and thus providing material support for, committing of the war crimes of the massive bombing of cities
- people being bombed in their city inventing a legend that it is the same plane with the same pilot who saves them again and again by shooting down the bombing planes.
On Feb 24 Putin started a new war, not related to the Donbass war. The main goal of the new war was explicitly proclaimed by Putin as "Ukraine doesn't exist. Ukrainians don't exist. Anybody resisting to that is to be killed."
Looking at comment history, so is most of what the account posts.
How do you square that with the mass destruction of Ukrainian cities, including by aircraft bombing? It seems to be a ridiculous assumption long debunked.
> Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much, since operating a plane is far from being cheap
Nope, Ukrainian drones continue to inflict heavy damage - either directly or indirectly with targeting, just this past day there were direct strikes on a railway bridge, command post deep in Russian held territory, and an indirect one with artillery on Russian troops in a forest. Check out Oryx the blog or twitter account, they verify posts and retract errors if any are detected. Furthermore, Ukraine still operated fighters as of what, 2-3 says ago at the latest? Russia does not have air supremacy, only local air superiority.
One way to square it is that the perception of what is "minimal" is vastly different in their minds. Mind you, they decided to attack a well armed sovereign country that was definitely not welcoming them, and they have a total control of their media, so they don't really care about achieving surgical precision. That doesn't mean they must then choose to level cities to the ground. It's not a binary choice.
You can compare this "mass destruction" with the Grozny's state after the second Chechen war or, if you want a more recent example, with Mosul and Hudaydah.
The biggest difference is that the cities are much bigger, so it takes more time to completely level them.
Constant aerial bombardment and complete immediate domination would massively increase the civilian casualty count and its clear from Crimea, Odessa, and other cities in the Donbas region, that Russians have a large Ukrainian support base that are anti-banderite and consider Zelensky's cooperation with Nazi groups a betrayal.
Btw, applying Occam's razor here does not automatically make one a Putin supporter regardless of what some western media outlets might claim. Sad that many smart people voluntarily or involuntarily turn their brains off when jingoism is back in vogue.
For someone not interested in harming civilians, they're doing an amazing job at it.
> Btw, applying Occam's razor here does not automatically make one a Putin supporter
Certainly not, but applying Occam's Razor to such a trivially debunked argument might?
Please do post your sources for civilian casualty counts so we can better understand this gradient.
My understanding is conflicts in population centers of similar size and density elsewhere in the world (parts of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the civilian casualty counts are much higher than we are seeing in Ukraine.
Also this 'post your sources' for stuff that you know is going to be impossible to do accurately is not in good faith, either someone posts their sources and you will attack them or they won't, either case 'you win'. But it doesn't contribute at all.
This is wrong, there is a casualty count timeline over the course of each of the listed conflicts. They are not exact but the range is worth comparing.
>Also this 'post your sources' for stuff that you know is going to be impossible to do accurately is not in good faith.
It's not impossible, they made a claim and I want to see the sources that led them to the conclusion. This is pretty normal in fact based discourse.
Oh that would work so well for World War II. Really, this is meaningless.
> It's not impossible, they made a claim and I want to see the sources that led them to the conclusion. This is pretty normal in fact based discourse.
It's pretty normal for things where such sources are available, such as discussions about scientific subjects or other things that are easy to quantify in an exact manner. When talking about a war in progress it is just a way to throw shade.
For example, NATO bombings of Yugoslavia are estimated to have caused ~500 civilian deaths according to Human Rights Watch (Yugoslav estimates are higher) in the whole 2+ months.
By comparison, Russian attacks have caused ~600 civilian deaths according to UN (Ukrainian estimates are higher) in 2 weeks so far.
Originally I wrote it does not look like a directed murder of Ukrainian civilians by Russian military, i.e. the cases were true casualties of attacks on military targets. I am less certain it remains so clear-cut in recent days though, my impression through the fog of war is that civilian infrastructure destruction and by extension casualties have become more acceptable as a means to put pressure on Ukrainian government. If true, this would be a turn for the worse for ordinary people on the ground.
It's not "applying Occam's razor" to insist that the reason Russia failed to take out the Ukrainian air force on day one and didn't start levelling cities in earnest until its ground based units were in range is due to Ukrainian enthusiasm for being invaded. The simplest possible explanation for Russia flying few air sorties doesn't involve Ukrainian attitudes towards the Azov battalion, it simply requires looking at their aircraft attrition rate.
> "they have orders to minimize damage if possible"
Right, at a guess you are in Russia and not in Ukraine.
On the other hand, clearly any such 'minimize damage' directive is not protecting smaller Ukrainian cities and towns.
You don't eat your bargaining chips.
Like I'm sure they have them somewhere, but not in large enough quantities to reliably cover fat, slow bombers on regular sorties. They took down at least 2 transports full of VDV, for example.
>Images of it ruined by Russian bombardment would be impossible to square with Russia's propaganda position.
You underestimate Russian propaganda and people brainwashed state there. Probably you're lucky to not speak Russian and thus not being familiar with their propaganda, for example with that big hit inside Russia (obviously not much success outside) of how Zelensky was using right hand to make a nuke to attack Russia while using left hand he was making chemical weapons also to attack Russia :) In case of Kiev unfortunately they would just declare that all those destroyed buildings were used as fighting positions, or may be even directly destroyed, by those Ukrainian "nazi and banderovtsy".
Sounds like quote directly from Orwell, tbh.
One doesn't even need to interact with "Russian propaganda" to watch Zelensky's Munich speech and make up one's own opinion.
Given
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=foverzar
that's pretty rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_missile_system
Edit: It looks like Greece ( a NATO member) also has S300 ( How did that happen !!?? ) and Turkey ( also NATO member) has the S400. Not sure if Turkey would allow close examination of their S400 capabilities, even as a NATO member.
It was a compromise after Cyprus got them, but choose not receive them after threats from Turkey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypriot_S-300_crisis)
Greece also has a number of other Russian SAM they bought after the 90s in the lull of the tensions with Russia.
Plus, if you choose the next-gen AA over the next-gen fighter, there is an implication as to what you'll be shooting at. And since NATO chose the next-gen fighters...
The systems operated by Greece and inherited by the Soviet Union in the cases of other Nato members are rather old with limited computational resources and limited software developed back in the 80s-90s.
In the case of the S-400 we are probably talking about millions of lines of code developed only years ago and potentially with an update schedule, there is absolutely no way to be sure there is no cutting edge malware that could either infiltrate the rest of the air-defense network, or just ship radar data back to Russia about the signatures of friendly f-35s, that's the real reason the US does not want to sell f-35s to Turkey.
It's one thing to pick up a return from an f-35 on your radar and another to be getting a return and also it's actual position along with IFF information. This data would be invaluable to the Russians and could actually undermine the f-35s stealth performance in a potential conflict in the future.
The Greek S-300s come from Cyprus (which AFAIK is not a NATO member). They were handed over as a way to resolve the crisis with Turkey about the system itself [1]
> Not sure if Turkey would allow close examination of their S400 capabilities, even as a NATO member.
These days Turkey is a NATO member more de jure than de facto, so who knows. Since the acquisition of S400 caused the expulsion of Turkey from the F-35 program, maybe that could be a bargaining chip to re-enter it in some form ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypriot_S-300_crisis
They already do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_missile_system#Evaluatio...:
> Evaluation-only operators
> United States – S-300P purchased from Belarus (1994). The system was devoid of electronics.[147] S300V was purchased in Russia officially in the 1990s[clarification needed] (complete set (except for 9S32 GRILL PAN multi-channel guidance radar)).[148]
Jokes aside, I suppose there is some kind of exempt for defenders, unless one can prove that civilians were held as hostages.
Perhaps, but how many of those does Russia actually have? Whenever I read reports of US Tomahawk inventory, I'm always surprised by how few they actually have in inventory (e.g. guessing they'd run out quickly in a hot war).
> Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down)
My understanding is that's not true. The airspace is contested, since neither Russia nor Ukraine have full control.
Ukraine still has planes and they're still flying them, according to this: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily....
And most of those are old. Really old in some cases. Like half got used in Iraq II and the other half are still around...
Stockpiles of newer and scarier stuff is probably less known, however.
[1] https://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/threads/russian-su-34-sho...
I verymuch support Ukrainians, their freedom, and their democratic government, but POW interviews are propaganda.
They are indeed hard to find in war, if that's what you mean, but there are good sources - intercepted communications, for example; anonymous interviews with current Russian soldiers; interviews with people they talk to; etc etc
> It’s a cellphone video from someone in the warzone, it’s raw footage from the source.
Raw footage is less credible. It lacks the fact-checking around it. The NY Times, for example, has put dozens of reporters in Ukraine to corroborate, fact-check, etc. - that's the value of actual journalists compared to some video on the Internet.
> they’re all saying the same shit.
I have seen that but it could be that Ukrainian messaging is consistent, and spreading messages that enemy morale is low is a very common, basic tactic. However, there seems to be other evidence of low morale.
However true it is, I'm glad Ukraine is doing it effectively!
Why would we believe that?
No army has ever lost a war because they overestimated the strength of the enemy army.
Shelling a city with Grad and artillery is far cheaper.
"The Mysterious Case of the Missing Russian Air Force"
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
and follow up under the same subject:
"Is the Russian Air Force actually incapable of complex operations?"
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/is-the-russian-air-...
"Russian and Chinese Combat Air Trends - [PDF]"
https://static.rusi.org/russian_and_chinese_combat_air_trend...
It looks like the Oligarchs stole most of the money that should go for effective logistics. The Russian Air Force probably cannot supply enough spare parts. Military jets need hours of maintenance for each hour of flight.
In other words, they were trying to avoid bad press and having the population immediately perceive them as being indiscriminate or blowing up their entire country etc. There would just be so many videos on TV and the internet of so many bombs and missiles.
Its actually kind of like the discussion about LIDAR on Teslas. People always come up with these supposed scientific reasons that they decided not to use it. But the biggest reason was, it doesn't look good, or fit in at all with the sleek design of Teslas. Teslas would go from the sexiest car to the dorkiest overnight.
Anyway, pretty rough analogy, but similarly, the Russians probably decided not to operate in the most effective way, deliberately, due to "optics".
The claims they are trying to minimize damage are misguided.
And even if the facts are 100% true, it doesn't mean automatically that they want terror. They might just be helpless about it (doesn't excuse it of course).
I mean how do you accidentally destroy maternity ward of a hospital? How likely is that to be an accident and opposed to deliberate terror bombing?
And then there's the kidnapping of Ukrainian officials and replacing them with collaborants. That is deliberate terror tactics as well. Watching them in action makes me thing their approach didn't really change since their Katyn days.
But I live in a place Russians visited in 1968 leaving in the 90's so you could say I'm biased.
The largest difference is scale (well, and perception in the media, though that is to be expected). The US may have bombed 1 or 2 hospitals in, say, Afghanistan, while the Russians seem to be on track for bombing 10 or more as this war drags on.
An army that uses un-ecrypted radio communicatuon and pins artillery targets on google maps labelled as 'farm' probably doesn't have the best targeting.
US has far better targetting, and they bomb two weddings or a funerals a year.
What we do know for sure two facts: the demoralised, corrupt and lying system goes all the day through soldiers, officers, generals, there is probably no accountability.
And that putin came to power by blowing up apartment blocks while his own people were asleep in them, so he is largely capable of anything
That's actually fairly easy without precision munitions or with bad targeting info. Stuff like that happens in war sometimes.
What makes it clear that it is not just that is (1) the frequency of repetitions, and (2) the explanations.
In Mariupol, which was a maternity and children's hospital, not the maternity ward of a hospital, that was destroyed, Russia first claimed they didn't do it at all and that it was Ukrainian propaganda, and that they probably did it to themselves, the claimed they (Russia) did attack it intentionally but that it had not been used as a hospital for years and was an Azov Battalion base and the women and children shown as victims were crisis actors, then finally (last story I heard) claimed they didn't know what happened and were investigating the incident.
Ukrainian state is already in a state of total war, they don't lose anything by escalating. Their goal is to drag other countries into the war, or at the very least maximize external support. Exaggerations, taking stuff out of context, hyperbolizing isolated incidents, or even outright lies - all the tools of trade are normally shunned are now allowed. Level-headed assessment of ground-level truth is not on the agenda right now
Where is the line between "objectively assessing an enemy's weaknesses" and "blatant wishfull thinking" ?
While we're discussing how bad the russian air force is doing, cities are being bombed constantly, and the ukrainian governement is imploring for a no-fly zone that no one will enforce given it would mean engaging with, guess what, the air force. Oh, and starting a nuclear war at the same time.
Maybe it's an operationnal failure on Russian's side - but if so, they carved themselves a situation where they can't really _lose_, even if they can't win quickly.
Hopefully something will change the game - but I doubt "hoping for the other side to secretly be stupid" will cut it.
Yes but apparently not by the Air Force. Mostly by ground based missiles (and maybe some Ship based ones)
The No-Fly zone won't fix these and will come at a significant cost.
Angry FSB Guy (which may be entirely false) stated that the decision isn't Putin's alone to make and that Russians are not willing to die for Putin.
"..A senior U.S. defense official added Friday that the Ukrainians “are not using their fixed-wing fighter aircraft very much. They have about 56 fighter aircraft remaining on the ground, and that is the majority of their fleet.” Kyiv is only flying about five to 10 sorties a day compared to Russia’s roughly 200, the official continued. The Ukrainians “haven't proven that they need to do more than what they're doing. They've been very effective with the other tools that they have used, very creatively, and those are having a good effect on Russian airpower...”"
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily...
Beating the Russian Air Force in the air isn't the primary issue, we can do that. The bigger issue is that a no-fly-zone must be secured, i.e. bombing radar and SAM installations in Ukraine/Belarus/Russia.
> ... they carved themselves a situation where they can't really _lose_, ...
Quite the opposite, what does a Russian "win" look like here? A huge portion of the population doesn't want them there, a puppet government won't be internationally recognized, and the resulting insurgency would make Chechnya look quaint. Not to mention the humiliation that Russia has already suffered.
It's lunacy to think that Russia is gaining anything out of this. It's not even certain that Russia can beat Ukraine anymore, and it's already a pyrrhic victory if they do.
By a very naive reading, this maps [1] seems to scream: "Dombass has all the mines. It's the mines, stupid !" ; but I could not find any resource on the topic (neither to tell it's the real casus belli, nor if they're nothing else to grab there.)
[1] https://img.favpng.com/24/9/15/ukraine-natural-resource-map-...
I've always heard a lot of talk about that (even before the war), especially by Western leaders trying to puff up the effectiveness of their support, but is that resistance actually materializing in Russian-controlled areas?
IIRC, that's currently the expected best case outcome of this. The Ukrainians are fighting with everything they have, but the Russian Army is just plain bigger and better equipped, so they've only bee able to slow it down, not meet it and defeat it. I don't really see that changing unless the West stops tiptoeing around (at least) and offers more than halfhearted military support to Ukraine.
To be clear: the West's support is less halfharted than it was before the war, but it's still halfharted (e.g. the nonsense with the Polish jets, only supplying "weapons of a defensive character," etc.).
Arguably, the Arab Spring was the first in these wars, since failed harvests and grain prices are what kicked off a lot of unrest to begin with.
"War, war never changes"
Or maybe there will be a remake, but with white actors [2] ?
[1] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/how-the-inv...
[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/food-price-inflation-eastern...
Do you have a link to this? I'd be interested.
If he takes Kyiv and deposes the current government, getting a treaty that achieves that probably won't be that hard. I don't know enough about Ukrainian demographics to know if a puppet government could be stable without a huge Russian military presence. If the latter is needed then it would probably count as a failure.
And there's no reason to believe that the Ukrainian government will give up once kyiv is taken, it's not a video game. In fact, western Ukraine is so terrifically safe I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of government operations are being run from there already.
I agree. But they don't need to give up for a puppet government to be in place. They need to lose control of the military and communications infrastructure. If the government is far to the west or in exile, it's hard to see how they would maintain control.
And I also agree that a new government would need a substantial Russian military presence. It wasn't that long ago though that a substantial voting bloc supported pro-Russian parties. It's likely that Putin calculated that they'd only get problems with western Ukraine. That's likely been badly misjudged.
It'd be really interesting to get some polling data on those people. It's hard to imagine that they don't feel betrayed. After all, the russian speaking population has been subjected to the harshest and most violent portions of this conflict, albeit incidentally.
You don't find them sometimes because Russia is extremely untrustworthy. Demilitarization just means it will be easier to annex Ukraine later. Recognizing the Donbas republics is nonsense as Putin's men have already admitted they plan to annex them afterwards.
There's a reason why you hardly ever find a mention of Poland's attack on Germany in 1939[1]. It has something to do with the fact that it's not real.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Himmler
The other outcome is that Russia defeats Ukraine into unconditional surrender, and then demilitarizes it anyway.
Relative inexperience (not inability) in SEAD(Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) in the face of a robust Ukrainian air defense network.
A desire to preserve force and munitions in case of direct NATO involvement.
Additionally there is a third potential reason, I am no military expert by I assume the acquisition and engagement of targets in populated areas is hard from the air.
All these probably skews the risk/effectiveness balance toward a less aggressive air stance.
They may have a lot of aircraft sitting around, but may only have the fuel, munitions, and parts to keep a fraction of it working.
There was a lot of discussion for a while about the state of the tires in the Russian army, and how that often led to break downs or troops getting stuck. Likewise, something as simple or mundane as not having enough flairs or chaff, could be enough to keep much of the fleet grounded, doubly so in the face of a reasonably effective Ukrainian AA network. Multi-million dollar aircraft are temperamental beasts, and missing even a few parts, or not being confident in said parts, is essentially a recipe for casualties, and they can't just conscript more SU-35s
Everyone expected the much, much larger Russian Air Force to establish air superiority in Ukraine within days, even hours.
When an organization systematically failed to be able to perform even its basic activities for no obvious reason, organizational incompetence is almost certain.
That’s pretty much it in the short term, from what I can tell. They can only lose over the long term, by bleeding themselves dry to find their imperialist adventure in Ukraine just like the USSR did in Afghanistan. It is probably likely to happen. It’s cold comfort for the people being bombed, though.
A thought experiment:
- if Putin is not insane and wants to live and enjoy his lifestyle (but plays his role to frighten everyone)
- that means he is unlikely to use nukes
- which means it might be practical to establish a no-flight zone, etc
If you believe he is insane, however, the West has nothing else to do than to let him grab whatever he wants (Estonia, maybe?). This is a dead end for NATO.
nuclear weapon aside, 40million motivated Ukrainians with NATO weapons are much much much more powerful than 140million lost Russians with dysfunctional weapons
They could very well lose and are likely to, according to most experts. Even if they do take Kyiv before they run out of money, materiel, and political support - which is uncertain - they are very unlikely to sustain an occupation and defeat an insurgency. Invaders often lose to insurgencies - look at the US in the last 20 years.
In general modern military seems to be focused on delivering as much power as possible in a single unit, never bothering to ask if multiple lesser units could do a better job combined. And so we get destroyers and cruisers that look mighty, but can nevertheless be rendered inoperable, if not outright sunk, by a single torpedo.
> less payload capacity
Not much is needed with precision guided muntions (which the Russians don't seem to be using, if they have enough).
>Pentagon says some Russian jets are avoiding Ukraine's airspace during sorties to avoid being shot down
>The Pentagon believes Russia is flying about 200 sorties every day, although many never enter Ukrainian air space.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/pentagon-says-russian-jets-avoidin...
Can't say I blame them really.