There’s a surprising number of people around who seem to think there’s no actual war happening and it’s all just visual effects. It’s all oriented around how a shadowy elite is using it to bring in some great reset, and reveal themselves as lizard people or something.
I’ve thought about offering to show them personal evidence of dead family and friends in Ukraine, but I don’t think that will really change anything. There’s always some excuse or way for them to deny it.
There are a surprising number of conspiracy theorists out there, but also lots of people desensitized or overwhelmed in the Information Age.
The rubble and ruins of war across the Middle East, state brutality of all scales from China to the U.S., unprecedented destruction by weather events... all delivered to your screen in near real-time then 24/7 pundit-ized until the next event... non stop for over a decade.
If you grew up in this cesspool of information, you tune out. If you yearn for the ignorance of yesteryear, conspiracies are easier to digest than critically analyzing the deluge of info... and that doesn't take into account all of the people who are just out there mostly concerned everyday with food and shelter for themselves and family.
To your point... As I started to write this, a nearby group of senior citizens meeting for morning coffee (in East Bay, CA) started fawning over this "refrigerator magnet set that helps you construct your own conspiracy".
I’m not sure what *specific* weapons have been used on cities. Usually we see cruise missiles going into buildings, for example. Lots of video of tanks too.
I think of artillery as less precise, with the idea of using it to indiscriminately level a large area. It’s fired from 10-20 miles away, with a few rounds a minute.
Howitzers, for instance, will be important in eastern Ukrainian
Artillery has become very precise. The mechanics and effects are well defined and calculated. Artillery also isn't just big guns, it includes those trucks you see shooting huge volleys of (dumb) missiles off their bed.
Up to 3 roubds in 9 seconds, 10 - 13 roubds per minute continously. Depeding on the shells accuracy can be around 1 m per 48 km. Arguably, that's among the most advanced, and expensive systems. The accuracy comes from the shells, so in theory a lot of manually loaded artillery pieces should be able to achieve the accuracy.
I doubt they waste cruise missiles on their general city terror campaigns. It's mostly MLRS, artilery, bombing with unguided bombs from airplanes, and tank shelling, what Russia uses to terrorize cities. They don't need precision for this.
Cruise missiles are used for higher value targets.
Well, there clearly is a conflict going on in Ukraine. But I don’t think the media is on my side. They are with the powerful, which have every incentive to lie to me to justify the inflation, escalation of the conflict, etc.
It's common knowledge they are committing atrocities. if you dont' want to believe it then that's fine too I suppose, it is all over that russia has been committed countless atrocities and being reported by everyone other than Russian media and their allies https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/02/23/russia-dep...
I'm sorry, but this is not an evidence of "incinerating bodies". I certainly believe that they are committing atrocities, but there is no proof that they are using mobile crematoriums for incinerating bodies. I'm not a native English speaker, but if I got it right, even in article they cite Mr. Wallace "... we EXPECT to see ...”.
I'm pretty sure they're burying Ukrainians because they're invading Ukraine. If they want to avoid diseases they can stay home. There are photos of dead civilians in the streets.
"Fighting FOR Mariupol" is more accurately stated as "wantonly destroying the homes and infrastructure of a thriving Ukrainian city, whilst murdering and raping civilians, and stealing their property".
What's wrong with Kherson? It's occupied by Russia since the beginning of March. Is there any news about the outrages of the Russian army? Destroyed buildings and infrastructure? I'm really curious. Russian propaganda said that the city is preparing for a referendum and silent about the protests of civilians.
I've seen video of a lot of protests in the main square. They have been happening since the first occupation. I would describe the size of the crowds as being in the thousands. To be honest, it's not a city I have followed closely - but there was at least one protestor shot (not killed) by the Russian soldiers. A referendum at this time would not be considered very legitimate, given the circumstances.
I've seen the satellite images. I've seen the pictures. And I've seen the video with the disturbing audio. I wish Twitter didn't delete so many things. So I've seen two sets of contradictory evidence. So I guess, pick and choose your narrative? It's not that simple. I'm inclined to believe the videos taken by the Ukrainain soldiers and the pictures rather than the satellite imagery. After Assange, I have nearly zero trust in images produced by a state controlled entity.
That video has been debunked as fake btw, it's riddled with inconsistencies in blood presence, patterns, uniforms.
Furthermore, if Ukrainians are committing war crimes against the invading Russian army which basically has war crimes as their tactics and strategy, they're mostly morally justified. Hopefully they don't.
War crimes are war crimes, nothing justifies those ever. Stuff has to be really nasty to still be considered a crime during times actively killing other people is completely legal and the main activity, aka war.
> Furthermore, if Ukrainians are committing war crimes against the invading Russian army which basically has war crimes as their tactics and strategy, they're mostly morally justified. Hopefully they don't.
Yikes. Good thing you don't speak for anyone but yourself. Justifying war crimes from any side is so far beyond the pale, it's mind-blowing.
You should read again, I'm not justifying anything and i said "hopefully they don't", but if you don't see why a person seeing the carnage uttered by the invading barbarous Russian army might want to enact revenge including through illegal means like shooting POWs ( the guys who just went around looting, raping and murdering civilians) I don't know what to tell you.
For a precedent, the Soviet army treated German POWs and worse, civilians, atrociously. But they had just suffered through a bitter war of destruction where they themselves were treated similarly.
It's up to the commanders to keep things clean and not let the anger spillover. Of course the Soviets didn't care, and on the contrary encouraged atrocities. So far the Ukrainians seem to be taking the high road, and all the better for everyone.
This is nothing new, but especially in urban warfare all buildings become targets.
In Mariupol fighting is going on within the city so that's what happens. If you look at previous historical examples, the same result ensues. Stalingrad being a very famous one, Berlin as well, Beirut in Lebanon during the civil war, recently Aleppo in Syria. Before that you can find pictures of the American Civil War. Dresden and Tokyo were flattened during WWII without any actual ground fighting going on there, just large scale air bombings with incendiary bombs...
In conventional warfare since at least the 19th century, cities get flattened.
In the media, and judging by the reactions to this comment, people are driven emotionally in the moment for the purpose of manufacturing public opinion (i.e. war propaganda) but it's always useful to keep distances and keep some perspective. Especially since this is the first large-ish scale conventional warfare in some time, at least with this level of media coverage.
Yeah, probably both for "shock and awe" purposes and to reduce the risks of guerrilla ambush.
The thing is that they've done it really badly, so they've suffered all the propaganda penalties without convincingly getting the upper hand. And they've killed a lot of civilians too, obviously.
Given what the Russian military did to Grozny in the Second Chechen War and what they did to Aleppo during the recent Syrian civil war, it's hard to dismiss the reports of intentional depopulation of cities as an intentional Russian military tactic.
In isolation it would be fair to be sceptical of the intercepted conversations where commanders are calling in strikes on residential areas, but this is a recurring pattern with the Russian military.
It's important to distinguish here between the Russian military and the Russian people. Conflating the two feeds into the Putinist propaganda that Russia will be hated in the West no matter what it does.
Both. They do very badly in terms of logistics, but they still have a lot of munitions for the artillery, especially their unguided Grad units that basically destroy everything indiscriminately.
Slightly northwest center? I’ve done a lot of driving all over Ukraine, it “feels” central to me. But that’s not really the point I was making. It’s quite a bit further from Russia than Mariupol, and much closer to the center of the country.
Why would Russia/DNR voluntarily level a city they want to incorporate into their breakaway republic? That's just falling into the "they're all orcs" propaganda trap.
The use of artillery etc ramped up as the Russians realized they wouldn't take the city any other way, but if the Ukranian army / Azov had vacated Russia would have happily taken the city without a shot fired.
Russia invading is already a war crime, but we don't need to pretend that they're behaving any differently to the way we did in Iraq.
> Why would Russia/DNR voluntarily level a city they want to incorporate into their breakaway republic?
DNR, isn't the main or controlling actor doing it, and “incorporate into a breakaway republic” isn’t Russia’s primary, much less sole, goal with their operation.
> Russia invading is already a war crime
Technically, no, it's a crime against peace, a separate category of breach of international law.
In fact, they had an option of not leveling it. They also have option to not bomb hospitals too and they don't take those options.
"Why" is speculation. Possibly because strategic impossible of city is in land and not in existing citizens who don't welcomed them anyway. Possibly to create pressure on Ukraine President. Possibly because this is what Russian army do routinely and don't need super concrete reason to do - this is not first time they leveled the city. They did not needed to do so in Syria nor in Chechnia.
Genocides don't necessary happen because aggressor had no choice. Starting with assumption that they had no choice is judt yet another fallacy.
If you start from the assumption that the war wasn't necessary then you are correct to point out that leveling residential areas also wasn't necessary.
However, we wouldn't have re-occupied cities in Iraq that resisted without leveling them and Russia wouldn't have conquered Mariupol without leveling the parts of the city that contained entrenched defenders.
That's the awful thing about urban warfare. Luckily we're not at genocide yet, though.
Even if was was necessary, leveling residential areas of major city was not. But, that war was not necessary in the first place.
Both war and the destruction of city were optional and deliberate.
> However, we wouldn't have re-occupied cities in Iraq that resisted without leveling them and Russia wouldn't have conquered Mariupol without leveling the parts of the city that contained entrenched defenders.
Both are crimes and mass murders of civilians. Neither was necessary.
> That's the awful thing about urban warfare. Luckily we're not at genocide yet, though.
Who is that "we"? USA in Iraq did not committed genocide. Russia in Ukraine is committing one now.
What Russia is doing is evil. But if you call it genocide you do a cruel dis-service to the millions killed in Rwanda, the holocaust and even Ukraine during the holodomor.
Not at all. That’s terror tactics when you cannot achieve your goal otherwise. It’s also completely counter productive in a country or region you plan or want to annex. Fallujah, Raqqa, and even Mosul were organised operations, during which neighbourhoods were isolated, reduced, and then taken street after street more or less methodically. Nobody ever sat there just bombing indiscriminately. The closest example you could find is Aleppo.
Taking Fallujah: ~2000 insurgents killed, ~1000 captured, ~800 dead civilians, ~10000 buildings destroyed out of ~50000. Even without taking the 90% destruction rate at face value, Mariupol is already much, much worse (at least 4 times the number of civilian casualties, double the number of dead Ukrainians soldiers, and more than half the buildings destroyed). And the numbers will likely grow more and more as mass graves are recovered.
Fallujah sounds like terror tactics to me. It was defended by a poorly armed militia far smaller than the western trained and armed forces in Ukraine and America still had to destroy 20% of the city. Years later 200,000 of the 350,000 residents still hadn't returned, birth defects from depleted uranium had sky rocketed and people were still suffering white phosphorus burns.
And Raqqa was far worse.
The difference is propaganda. When we destroy a city it's methodical and proportionate. When our enemies do it it's genocide and terror tactics.
They're leveling cities near the areas that they invaded in 2014 which don't require extensive logistics. They're losing in the rest of the country because the Ukrainian military is pretty effective, the Russians are logistically incompetent and can barely maintain air superiority (due largely to the West providing highly effective AA weapons), and Ukraine is a huge country with a very determined populace.
Levelling cities in the rest of Ukraine wouldn't be hard either, if Russia chose to do so. Carpet bombing, cruise missiles, ICBMs, etc. would all do it, kill a lot of civilians, and are within Russia's military capacity.
Killing soldiers in bunkers, dug-in in trenches, and underground? Not so much.
Sort of. A lot of it depends on precision and altitude. I think a high-altitude bomber, carpet-bombing, with a fighter escort, would be pretty safe from Russia's perspective.
Stingers can hit up to 3.8km. Starstreak is 5km. Etc. For comparison, a B2 flies at 15km.
Ukraine does have some defences there -- an S300 will shoot down targets that high, and fighters will go that high -- but it's a much harder problem. That's why Ukraine is asking fighter jets, S300/Patriot-style systems, and a no-fly zone.
If Russia starts carpet bombing before Ukraine get those, it's game over for Ukraine. That doesn't mean Russia won the war -- the military will keep fighting -- just that Ukrainan population will have lost:
- The country will be rubble.
- Massive civilian causalities
- Economy on par with Iraq during ISIS or Afghanistan today
Because it's a bad idea to do so. If Russia were to commit true genocide -- kill 40 million people in Ukraine by levelling the country -- it would serve no military purpose. On the other hand:
- Putin would go down in history as worse than Hitler
- Thousands of people -- including, for example, Russians with relatives in Ukraine -- would want to kill Putin. Russia would have a terrorist and fifth column problem unprecedented in the history of the world.
- Russia would go from "outcast" to "North Korea level outcast." China and India would almost certainly turn against it
- It just might be far enough to draw NATO / EU into the war. That's a war Russia is guaranteed to lose. If nukes fly, everyone loses. If they don't, Russia loses.
... and so on.
How would it advance Russia's interests? The above far outweighs the benefits (oil, Crimea, and a bit of a buffer zone).
"Russians are logistically incompetent and can barely maintain air superiority"
This is categorically false, look at the insane 1200 airstrikes that were launched in the last week.
"Russia claims to have hit more than 1,200 targets in Ukraine with missiles, artillery and airstrikes overnight as it launched a long-awaited new offensive in the Donbas region."
Also, no one doubts that the Russians are flying air missions, but "air superiority" means something far more than that.
Like pointed out elsewhere, "1,200 strikes" includes artillery, missiles and airstrikes so most of those were clearly not delivered via planes.
In any case, where are they striking? Nearly all of their air sorties are near DPR / Mariupol / Kharkiv, just across the border from Russia. They had deep air access when they were pushing to establish Antonov Airport as a forward base/landing site but when they failed to capture the airport, it seems like all of their plans fell apart.
It's been incredible watching the sheer number of downed Russian aircraft.. OSINT folks like Oryx have IDed a substantial number of these but the Ukraine MOD shows over 300 combined aircraft losses, over 800 tanks, 2000 APCs, etc etc etc. This is not a successful military operation:
There are multiple fronts to this war; each one distinctly different in its outcomes. It’s not especially clever to blithely conflate them and then accuse your own confused interpretation of being propaganda.
It's a soundbite to spurt the idea that pro-Ukrainian position or any conclusion that Ukrainians have successes on the battlefield is simply a "propaganda".
Russia doing the killing is what was proven to be false… in front of the UN.
Are you that ill-informed? If so, I recommend more news intake from deeper sources. Or don’t accuse people of bullshitting because you watched a special on CNN.
I'm not inclined to trust the "we have no plan to invade Ukraine!" people on this without compelling evidence, and Russia certainly hasn't hit that threshold.
And for some reason Russian propaganda prefers you to believe that their biggest warship in Black Sea sunk before of Russian incompetence and not a chance it was some Ukrainian missile. Let's see how many weeks until Putin admits most of the soldiers died on the ship.
> Let's see how many weeks until Putin admits most of the soldiers died on the ship.
From the photos that've come out, this seems unlikely, unless they were all ordered below decks to fight the fire. It stayed afloat, listing but upright, for hours, with the life rafts deployed in calm seas and nearby supporting vessels. I don't doubt people died in the strike and the fire, but loss of entire crew seems unlikely.
I said most not all died. Makes no sense why Russian propaganda did not said something like "a few soldiers died from the smoke" at least that would give them a bit more flexibility on the lies they can spin when families post on social media their goodbyes or they anger for their mysterious disaperence.
yes, it is possible you are right, from what I read this ship usually has 500+ people , Russia did not want to specify how many were on board, and this days they showed the survivors in some kind of festivity and they were around 100 people. You could explain that maybe some were in hospital, or there were just 100 on board or maybe Putin send them into a special operation.
Anyway, for sure some died , there is evidence and I am waiting Putin video and his clever phrasing admitting it.
The propaganda is that Kyiv was merely a diversion and that the real war is about to start now. The reality is that Russia tried really hard to take Kyiv and several other cities and failed due to a combination of their own incompetence and absolutely inspired Ukrainian defense, so instead they resorted to just bombing cities into dust.
The many civilian casualties, and munitions quite obviously targeted at civilians, have been widely reported.
How can Russians live with themselves. One of my neighbours is from Mariupol, this is truly devastating for him and hundreds of thousands of others. Truly, barbarian tactics.
Not just Mariupol - I just finished speaking with my neighbour (fixer for international media org) who interviewed a young girl not far from Kyiv. The sister and mother of the girl were beaten and raped until they died, by Russian soldiers. The girl was forced to watch. She then lived in her apartment several days, with the corpses, until she felt safe to escape. Most Russians support this war. I'll leave it to you to find any reliable sources that disagree with that statement.
Russia is a very, very, sick nation.This is why Ukraine will never surrender. Can you imagine surrendering, and your "reward" is to live under the Russian regime?
Ukrainians will indeed fight to the last Ukrainian standing, you tend to do that when you have barbarian Russians raping and murdering your populace and you would prefer not to live under their purely evil dictatorship.
(that really doesn't require any encouragement from the UK, or the US)
(I note your account was created in response to the Russian invasion - your motives are very transparently pro-Kremlin)
After the meeting in Istanbul, everyone in Russia and Ukraine had hope for an early peace (even the stock market speaks about it), the next day Ukrainian air forces attacked Russia (Belgorod) for the first time. This is was a clear sign, that UK and US has no goal to complete this was as soon as possible. The real goal is to get stuck Russia in this swamp for as long as possible. The model of Soviet-Afghan war.
My motives are not pro-Kremlin, but indeed I live in Russia and consume pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian propaganda. However, I can also read popular Ukrainian Telegram channels (> 1 mln.) and I see the mockery of corpses of Russian soldiers in every second video. Ukrainians are happy to savor photos of disfigured bodies. I quite often see videos of Ukrainian women and men with bare bottoms tied to poles because they are supposedly looters, and if there are such videos, then it's scary to imagine how many did not get on the video.
I see how the Ukrainian government contributes to the process of dehumanization of Ukrainian people. And I know why this is being done.
"the Ukrainian government contributes to the process of dehumanization of Ukrainian people."
Given the murders and rapes your countrymen are doing non-stop, this is a purely sick thing to say. I'm glad it's here for all to see - it's a worryingly common Russian attitude, that somehow the Ukrainian government are the dehumanisers, the "Nazi's"...
...and the poor Russians soldiers are the victims.
Did I say that Russian soldiers are the victims? No. I know they killed civilians. I know that many of them are looters.
I strongly against this war. I want it to stop it right now.
The purpose of my message is to show that most people only read pro-Ukraine propaganda and they don't want to figure out what were the reasons for this war.
They don't want to know that the National Guard of Ukraine has a real neo-nazi battalion, which in 2019, 40 US senators recognized as terrorist. Most people don't want to know that there was a war in the east of Ukraine for 8 years and now it's final stage. They don't want to think about Odessa massacre in 2014 when pro-Ukranian activists burned their opponents alive. Air attack on Luhansk in 2014?
I understand that it is easier to construct a chain of thoughts where the Russians are to blame for everything. But not everything is so unipolar. I recommend to watch George Friedman's talk, a man who can hardly be called pro-Russian, but who predicted this conflict: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLu_yyz3tc
More Kremlin talking points from the account created when the war began. No surprise.
Russians invaded Ukraine, and are raping and murdering civilians - not one or two, countless. Rapes. Executions. Beatings. Murder. Theft. Destruction. Deciding which country is to blame for these barbaric atrocities is very easy for most people.
Russian people will be paying for this for a very, very, long time.
It's quite simple - cancel culture. From both sides. I am afraid to write under my main account, as it will be easy to track me down and I may have problems because of my position in Russia and rest of the world.
> After the meeting in Istanbul, everyone in Russia and Ukraine had hope for an early peace (even the stock market speaks about it), the next day Ukrainian air forces attacked Russia (Belgorod) for the first time.
Oh no! Now Russia will have to invade them! Oh, wait...
Those Russians who are on your side are very sorry for your tragedy, but don't feel responsible for being born into a dictatorship. And those who aren't, are vocally unashamed for other reasons.
This is why Ukrainians fight so hard, and will never surrender: their parents grew up under Russian oppression, they've been living in freedom for 30 years, and they do not want their children to grow up under similar oppression as their parents.
Not to mention that Russian state media has basically declared every Ukrainian who isn't actively helping Russia, to be "Nazis", and they should all be killed or put to slave labour. That's an outright call to massive genocide. Ukrainians have no option but to fight.
I know Russians exactly as you have described - they have abandoned their home and family, unable to partake in such a sick society for any longer. Yes, they're the sane Russians.
Ask sane russians two simple questions - "When did WWII started?" and "Who won the WWII?". Most likely you'll hear "1941" and "Soviets" as a response. It's important to understand that russians live in imperialistic narration and propaganda for centuries. Their most renowned poet, Pushkin, is not very different from modern russian TV-propagandists in their ardent support of wars. Even the "sane russians" see the world through the lens of alternative history and set of beliefes incompatible with democratic governance. So while they're minority, they still carry the same memes and cultural DNA that enabled Stalin and Putin. It is a very sick nation.
You don’t believe defense of DNR from valid Nazi treat is valid? You understand Azov are Nazis right? There are 70k Ukrainians led by Nazis in front of DNR, defeating them is completely valid cause for war.
How would you classify the attacks on cities such as Mariupol if not all out attacks?
>Humanitarian corridors established? Yep
How many times has Russia attacked civilians on those corridors? How many have they mined? How many have they refused to create in the first place?
>Shut down their electricity, utilities, internet? Nope
Given the dependence the Russian military has on such systems for CnC, general communications, and such it is to their advantage to keep them up and active. Attacking power plants wouldn't do much either given the Ukraine grid is now tied to the EU wide grid as of March 16, 2022 if I remember the date correctly.
>Your claims are childish and ignorant.
It appears that I have a deeper understanding of the subject than you do, at least to me.
Perhaps you don't realise, but even the Kremlin is admitting they have over-cooked the whole "Azov are all Nazi's" lie... you need to keep up with the disinfo, bro.
Ok but Azov are "estimated to be 900 members in 2022."(Wikipedia). How do you justify wrecking a country of 40 million because like 0.01% are bad people?
I'm not sure there were many problems in DNR until Putin deliberately created them after 2014. It was a pleasant and popular holiday destination prior to that I believe.
Is there? It’s not like we’re in any position to find out until the armies roll into Russia to find the destruction camps. Or the war settles down and Ukraine can do a full inventory and find tens of thousands of people missing or dead.
If Russia has really been cremating remains in Mariupol, people may remain missing forever.
Is there? Denying people's right to exist, war on bullshit excuses ( they aren't a real country), brutal methods up to and including genocide ( like kidnapping and resettling children). They're not that far off.
Don't get me wrong, Putin is a horrible horrible person. But there's a big difference between starting a war that resulted in 80+ million deaths (including the orchestration of ~10 million civilian deaths in camps) and Putin. Russia is committing war crimes and should be held accountable, but it's disingenuous to conflate Putin and the (arguably) worst person in human history
> Russia is committing war crimes and should be held accountable, but it's disingenuous to conflate Putin and the (arguably) worst person in human history
If we were to take his nuclear threats to Ukraine seriously, he has all the potential to be one.
Not really. The existence of nuclear weapons makes the game theory of WWII largely irrelevant. People who have continually compared the situation to Hitler’s invasion of Poland are in large part Americans who are unable to draw on other historical events for better comparisons, and are seeking to virtue signal.
In that scenario, "I have nukes" becomes a joker you can pull out to achieve anything less bad than a global nuclear war. Peel off a bit of a neighbour? OK, less bad than nuclear war. What about a "minor" NATO country? What about, "pay me money or else"? And so on.
So either you accept that (no thank you from me) or you accept that sometimes you must set limits, even if the other side threatens nuclear war.
In that respect it's the same, just different scale. Allies could have said "no" to Hitler earlier, at risk of a devastating war, but chose to say "ah, go ahead" for fear of it. And got that war served up to them anyway.
The irony is that WWII could possibly be over in a few weeks, if Hitler's ambitions were stemmed earlier. In September 1939, it is unlikely he could fight on two fronts, and against the British and the French - the actual superpowers of the day.
The nuclear-ICBM powers have largely converged on a Nash equilibrium for these questions, they're not new. And they are informed by nuclear weapons in a way the pre-nuclear era could not be. If nuclear weapons existed before 1939, the entire way the conflict with Hitler would have played out would have been different. Arguably, if the pre-requisites to the Ukraine conflict had analogs then, Hitler would have stopped expanding, on his own. Potentially he even could have been ousted internally if he looked like he was willing to plunge the world into a nuclear conflict, just like the odds of Putin being assassinated or coup'ed seem higher during escalation compared to a timeline where he couldn't wield nuclear weapons.
The stasis, at least for now, is one of mutual defense pacts backed up by nuclear weapons leads to very hard boundaries given MAD. Ironically, the pitfall that led to WWI turned out to be a stabilizing force (at least for now) under MAD. Everything outside of those hard deterrence boundaries, if we're being honest, is fair game for proxy wars. Ukraine isn't in the boundaries. People who are arguing that we should start shifting those boundaries (ie, changing the 'rules' by directly engaging despite them being non-NATO) are playing with fire. As soon as the rules are broken, the fundamental premise of deterrence goes out the window, and all bets are off as to where it takes us. This is also why it's incredibly dangerous to admit countries into NATO with disputed, actively fought over territory like Ukraine, since we'd be exposing a new level of risk whereby there's a conflict between conventional rules of escalation running up against nuclear alliance deterrence.
> Arguably, if the pre-requisites to the Ukraine conflict had analogs then, Hitler would have stopped expanding, on his own.
I’m not sure. Rationally, Putin shouldn’t have started the war; he was told Russia will get sanctioned to oblivion, which it did and is genuinely hurting Russia, and he should have known his forces aren’t up to scratch. Due to some kind of delusion he pressed ahead. Hitler may have done so too. For example, hoping that the western powers won’t risk MAD over a bit of Central Europe, much as they didn’t care much for Western Czechoslovakia.
Of course sanctions aren’t MAD; but then nothing is, and no analogy is very close.
> People who are arguing that we should start shifting those boundaries (ie, changing the 'rules' by directly engaging despite them being non-NATO)
That's not a rule, and has never been suggested to be a rule until invoked as an excuse for inaction in this particular crisis, and is, in fact, contrary to the public claims and past actions of NATO as a regional security organization with a mutual defense commitment and not a pure mutual defense organization.
It has been a rule: the US and USSR went to insane lengths to maintain plausible deniability of direct military-to-military engagement. The Soviets flying jets over Korea spoke in Korean on the radio and flew Korean jets! The scenario I am arguing against is the one proposed in some circles that nuclear armed NATO members ought to shoot down Russian jets over Ukraine.
> The Soviets flying jets over Korea spoke in Korean on the radio and flew Korean jets!
They spoke in Korean sometimes (but especially under stress, spoke Russian), and flew Soviet jets based in China and nominally assigned to Air Defense, not Frontal Aviation.
They weren't maintaining plausible deniability, but a transparent fig leaf. We knew they were Soviet pilots, and they knew we knew they were Soviet pilots.
And the Soviet anti-aircraft crews shooting down American jets in Vietnam didn't even have a transparent fig-leaf of not being Soviet troops.
In the 1950s, when it was bothered with? To provide a face saving way to back down without changing the official narrative in the absence of MAD constraining escalation of geographically-constrained conventional combat. Nuclear arsenals we're tiny at the time of Korea.
Global annihilation is a much greater risk of failing to check Russian aggression now than it is of checking it; the details may be different, but the same reason not checking Hitler at Poland would have made things worse (and that not doing so at the Sudetenland did make things worse) applies.
Sure, the potential cost of getting it wrong is even higher, but the same answer is wrong for the same reasons.
“Letting Ukraine do all the (overt, at least) fighting but flooding them with arms and intel will be sufficient to check Russia” is, OTOH, somewhere between Sudetenland and Poland as a response, and it's a very high stakes gamble.
Yes, those Russians in jail right now for protesting against putin should be ashamed /s
Edit: the statement is about “should be,” but the replies talk about whether they do/did feel ashamed. But *should* they? Those people who ended up in jail were acting heroically by jeopardizing their careers and freedom. I think those specific Russians deserve to feel good about themselves
If you - as a hypothetical person living in Russia - literally aren't aware of the atrocities happening on the ground (because of the information you're able to consume) then it seems pretty unfair to call them stupid.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I don’t understand why limit it only to Russians.
At this same moment USA, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are involved directly in illegal aggression against multiple sovereign states, fully supported by many other NATO members. They were responsible for much more death yearly than Russia in this war, yet nobody seems to care.
Is it because USA do it to spread democracy? Then what about Turkey? They used word for word exactly the same justification to invade Kurds in Syria.
Where’s the outrage about other wars.
Either condemn all wars, or stop pretending you care about people affected by wars.
You will not convince anyone sensible that the morals and discipline of US troops and officers are anywhere close to the morals and discipline (or the lack thereof) of their Russian counterparts with this whataboutism.
If this is the worst example you can find for the US, then considering the recorded conversations of Russian officers ordering the troops to kill all civilians in various places and such, I guess Russia very easily "wins" this.
No, some of the worst examples would include extermination of million of native Americans, the biggest genocide in human history. This I’d just a random example.
But yeah, Russian army killing anyone suddenly makes US army winning humanitarian contest.
> Either condemn all wars, or stop pretending you care about people affected by wars.
What a weird thing to say. Humans are hypocrites.
We can absolutely not care one whit about the Kurds (or only in the abstract anyway), and then get extremely upset when people that look like us, in a society that mostly functions like ours, get attacked by a country that really should know better
And frankly, until they started this shit, I didn’t feel particularly bad about Russia any more. They shot themselves in the foot so hard…
What you just said makes it clear that humans are not only hypocrites, but also racists.
Can we do better as a humanity? Should we just accept that we are all racist assholes and stop pretending we are better than that, or try to become better than that?
I think that what is going o here is that you don't care about anyone. Because one look at map and brief knowledge of history would make you guess some things. In all involved places. For you, all me mentionedd places are just abstractions. None of them are real, really real full of real people.
You would prefer Ukrainian border to be locked so that they can't escape at all anywhere. And you don't seem to want to care countries next to Syria to treat refugees better, it is just about sticking it to countries next to Ukraine which you know nothing about.
How come Arabs are more likely to fight ISIS and help Arabs over going over to Ukraine or help Arab refugees. Better no one helps anyone ever, not even when threatened by same aggressor again and not even if they are literally the next country over the border.
> Either condemn all wars, or stop pretending you care about people affected by wars.
This is not a realistic stance. We are all humans, and it's obvious that some global tragedies affect us more than others (for whatever reason). Just because somebody is vocal about the Russo-Ukrainian war but less so about other wars doesn't mean they don't care. It just means that they are personally and emotionally more impacted by this.
Furthermore, people do what they can. Should I either donate all my money to all causes or not donate at all? Should I either not do any action that has a negative effect on the environment or live in a forest alone without electricity?
Maybe I’m an idealist, but I think that, if we are not equally vocal about all wars, we are not against all wars. There are no good and bad wars. We should be most vocal about wars we can actually stop and prevent. We don’t have moral right to ask Russians to risk their lives and protest against their government to stop the war in Ukraine, if we don’t do the same regarding wars our government leads, supports and sponsors.
We complaining about Russia and Russians and Iraqians complaining about USA will not stop any war. We need a strong international peace movement. It kinda worked in the case of Vietnam.
What's happening is large scale conventional warfare. Nothing special or new, it's just the same old horror so to speak.
What's different is that it is widely publicised pretty much live and that it hasn't happened in some time (although in the Syrian civil war Aleppo was similarly flattened). The invasion of Iraq is a bit different in that the gap between Iraqi and US capabilities was so great that the US did not really need to go all the way on that occasion (and of course they didn't want to show you, anyway).
Large scale conventional warfare does not necessary involves shooting all men over 18 in an area or systematic rapes the way Russia army does. Not ever one of those wars turn into genocide.
Are you saying that these things are somehow not happening in Mariupol? We already know that Mariupol has been a subject of population abductions at the very least.
We don't even know that. All we know is that a large number of people in Mariupol were evacuated to Russia instead of through the frontlines to Ukraine. I can think of a lot of quite reasonable explanations for that.
The could have let them leave Mariupol over a few days. Instead they carted them off to concentration camps, that doesn't seem like a reasonable explanation/action to me.
These are areas they'd been trying to get civilians to leave for weeks. Humanitarian corridors kept collapsing. We don't know why, but is it at least plausible that Azov forces (who have a record of massacring civilians in Mariupol) were working to prevent it. (Eg how the hell did hundreds of civilians end up trapped in the azovstal steel plant?)
It is also plausible that some residents would prefer to go east to west. Not every resident of Eastern Ukraine supports the government. And we don't hear about it much, but reprisals and extra judicial killings of "collaborators" are happening.
Finally there is self interest. It's by no means certain that refugees who go west will be able to return to Mariupol after the war.
This will all get me voted down because it doesn't suit the narrative. I don't like the Russian invasion and I want it to fail but I also wish we were interested in the truth more than "winning the information war".
The russians could have let people leave Mariupol. I don't believe (and nothing you say would convinc me otherwise) that Putin doesn't have that much control over his own generals/top level officers. He's certainly picked a sad bunch but they can easily not launch artillery assaults at bus convoys leaving the city. They might have crappy comms but it's not that bad.
It's not a strawman, it's a good point. Can you please point out records to me that there were orders (for American soldiers) in WW2 from the top down to take areas and rape, torture, and finally murder civilians in a systematic way like Putin is currently ordering to be done in Ukraine? I'm sure that it happened in some cases on a local scale from feet on the ground, but not top down like Russian top brass is ordering to happen in Ukraine.
Yes, it looks like tactics are pretty much aligned with what was going on during WWI and WWII.
On the other other hand, I think the West has not really been involved in this type of warfare since WWII/Korea, so we don't really have a point of comparison with Western tactics.
But if you just looked the Putin in the eye. You'd found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. You would have had a very good dialogue. You'd be able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.
Putin didn't sprung up from nothing. He was nurtured and cared for by all western leaders. He's that disease you did nothing for for so long. And now you're complaining? That is like a cop blaming the victim for what a criminal did to them.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” Bush said in remarks he later regretted. “. . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
Putin is entirely self made. He's the one attacking innocent countries and ordering the murder, rape, and torture of Ukrainians. He's a real POS. The western leaders didn't do that, his hate and ego are completely self made.
There seems a bit of opposition going on in Russia now in terms of "Fire at a weapons research facility in Tver was followed hours later by reports of a blaze at key chemical plant in Kineshma" and "Reports of water gates having been blown causing severe flooding near Krasnodar Russia." I guess if there are 15 year jail terms for peaceful opposition then blowing stuff up gets you more bang for the buck.
The level of destruction is bad for the Russians on so many levels. The humanitarian cost, the damage to Russia's reputation internationally, but also tactically. You think it's hard clearing large buildings? Try clearing a pile of rubble. Endless nooks and crannies for defenders to hide in.
And they should know this, they're the ones that were on the defending side in Stalingrad and so many other places. That's the stuff nightmares are made of.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadAre they using artillery on cities?
I’ve thought about offering to show them personal evidence of dead family and friends in Ukraine, but I don’t think that will really change anything. There’s always some excuse or way for them to deny it.
The rubble and ruins of war across the Middle East, state brutality of all scales from China to the U.S., unprecedented destruction by weather events... all delivered to your screen in near real-time then 24/7 pundit-ized until the next event... non stop for over a decade.
If you grew up in this cesspool of information, you tune out. If you yearn for the ignorance of yesteryear, conspiracies are easier to digest than critically analyzing the deluge of info... and that doesn't take into account all of the people who are just out there mostly concerned everyday with food and shelter for themselves and family.
To your point... As I started to write this, a nearby group of senior citizens meeting for morning coffee (in East Bay, CA) started fawning over this "refrigerator magnet set that helps you construct your own conspiracy".
I think of artillery as less precise, with the idea of using it to indiscriminately level a large area. It’s fired from 10-20 miles away, with a few rounds a minute.
Howitzers, for instance, will be important in eastern Ukrainian
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/30...
Even conventional unguided howitzer artillery is more than accurate enough to be effective against things as small as vehicles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BM-21_Grad
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerhaubitze_2000
Up to 3 roubds in 9 seconds, 10 - 13 roubds per minute continously. Depeding on the shells accuracy can be around 1 m per 48 km. Arguably, that's among the most advanced, and expensive systems. The accuracy comes from the shells, so in theory a lot of manually loaded artillery pieces should be able to achieve the accuracy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
At 70k USD per round not nrcessarily cheap so.
That's not terribly expensive either when the accuracy can save civilian lives or the lives of soldiers using it.
Cruise missiles are used for higher value targets.
Not saying that this particular report is not believable, just that "the media already said so" is not an argument in 2022.
Are you actually living under a rock?
Hello from Kyiv.
Satellite images from before the Russian army left the town of Bucha.
There’s a video on Reddit of Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russian POWs in legs, with AKs.
The soldiers were from a local guard, and the POWs from an artillery unit that had been bombarding their small city.
I think it’s on /r/combatfootage, or /r/UkraineWarVideoReport, if you want to look it up.
Furthermore, if Ukrainians are committing war crimes against the invading Russian army which basically has war crimes as their tactics and strategy, they're mostly morally justified. Hopefully they don't.
Yikes. Good thing you don't speak for anyone but yourself. Justifying war crimes from any side is so far beyond the pale, it's mind-blowing.
For a precedent, the Soviet army treated German POWs and worse, civilians, atrociously. But they had just suffered through a bitter war of destruction where they themselves were treated similarly.
It's up to the commanders to keep things clean and not let the anger spillover. Of course the Soviets didn't care, and on the contrary encouraged atrocities. So far the Ukrainians seem to be taking the high road, and all the better for everyone.
In Mariupol fighting is going on within the city so that's what happens. If you look at previous historical examples, the same result ensues. Stalingrad being a very famous one, Berlin as well, Beirut in Lebanon during the civil war, recently Aleppo in Syria. Before that you can find pictures of the American Civil War. Dresden and Tokyo were flattened during WWII without any actual ground fighting going on there, just large scale air bombings with incendiary bombs...
In conventional warfare since at least the 19th century, cities get flattened.
In the media, and judging by the reactions to this comment, people are driven emotionally in the moment for the purpose of manufacturing public opinion (i.e. war propaganda) but it's always useful to keep distances and keep some perspective. Especially since this is the first large-ish scale conventional warfare in some time, at least with this level of media coverage.
Yes, also aircraft dropped bombs, missiles, rockets, mortars, direct fire from tanks, etc.
The thing is that they've done it really badly, so they've suffered all the propaganda penalties without convincingly getting the upper hand. And they've killed a lot of civilians too, obviously.
What on earth did you think they were using it for?
Absolutely baffling that someone could not be aware of this.
In isolation it would be fair to be sceptical of the intercepted conversations where commanders are calling in strikes on residential areas, but this is a recurring pattern with the Russian military.
It's important to distinguish here between the Russian military and the Russian people. Conflating the two feeds into the Putinist propaganda that Russia will be hated in the West no matter what it does.
That is the operating rules, because Russia isn't competent to do anything else, but even they can attach an apartment block.
https://twitter.com/Lyla_lilas/status/1514205275363987459
There is thousands of years of military history from all sides employing the same things. War sucks.
(I don't think it'll work as well here. 40x the population, Western support, better Ukrainian equipment.)
That the Russians found a puppet to install afterwards isn't surprising.
The use of artillery etc ramped up as the Russians realized they wouldn't take the city any other way, but if the Ukranian army / Azov had vacated Russia would have happily taken the city without a shot fired.
Russia invading is already a war crime, but we don't need to pretend that they're behaving any differently to the way we did in Iraq.
DNR, isn't the main or controlling actor doing it, and “incorporate into a breakaway republic” isn’t Russia’s primary, much less sole, goal with their operation.
> Russia invading is already a war crime
Technically, no, it's a crime against peace, a separate category of breach of international law.
"Why" is speculation. Possibly because strategic impossible of city is in land and not in existing citizens who don't welcomed them anyway. Possibly to create pressure on Ukraine President. Possibly because this is what Russian army do routinely and don't need super concrete reason to do - this is not first time they leveled the city. They did not needed to do so in Syria nor in Chechnia.
Genocides don't necessary happen because aggressor had no choice. Starting with assumption that they had no choice is judt yet another fallacy.
However, we wouldn't have re-occupied cities in Iraq that resisted without leveling them and Russia wouldn't have conquered Mariupol without leveling the parts of the city that contained entrenched defenders.
That's the awful thing about urban warfare. Luckily we're not at genocide yet, though.
Both war and the destruction of city were optional and deliberate.
> However, we wouldn't have re-occupied cities in Iraq that resisted without leveling them and Russia wouldn't have conquered Mariupol without leveling the parts of the city that contained entrenched defenders.
Both are crimes and mass murders of civilians. Neither was necessary.
> That's the awful thing about urban warfare. Luckily we're not at genocide yet, though.
Who is that "we"? USA in Iraq did not committed genocide. Russia in Ukraine is committing one now.
Taking Fallujah: ~2000 insurgents killed, ~1000 captured, ~800 dead civilians, ~10000 buildings destroyed out of ~50000. Even without taking the 90% destruction rate at face value, Mariupol is already much, much worse (at least 4 times the number of civilian casualties, double the number of dead Ukrainians soldiers, and more than half the buildings destroyed). And the numbers will likely grow more and more as mass graves are recovered.
And Raqqa was far worse.
The difference is propaganda. When we destroy a city it's methodical and proportionate. When our enemies do it it's genocide and terror tactics.
But urban warfare is always awful.
Killing soldiers in bunkers, dug-in in trenches, and underground? Not so much.
Stingers can hit up to 3.8km. Starstreak is 5km. Etc. For comparison, a B2 flies at 15km.
Ukraine does have some defences there -- an S300 will shoot down targets that high, and fighters will go that high -- but it's a much harder problem. That's why Ukraine is asking fighter jets, S300/Patriot-style systems, and a no-fly zone.
If Russia starts carpet bombing before Ukraine get those, it's game over for Ukraine. That doesn't mean Russia won the war -- the military will keep fighting -- just that Ukrainan population will have lost:
- The country will be rubble.
- Massive civilian causalities
- Economy on par with Iraq during ISIS or Afghanistan today
- Need for post-WWII style reconstruction
... and so on.
- Putin would go down in history as worse than Hitler
- Thousands of people -- including, for example, Russians with relatives in Ukraine -- would want to kill Putin. Russia would have a terrorist and fifth column problem unprecedented in the history of the world.
- Russia would go from "outcast" to "North Korea level outcast." China and India would almost certainly turn against it
- It just might be far enough to draw NATO / EU into the war. That's a war Russia is guaranteed to lose. If nukes fly, everyone loses. If they don't, Russia loses.
... and so on.
How would it advance Russia's interests? The above far outweighs the benefits (oil, Crimea, and a bit of a buffer zone).
That'd be an insanely high number, yes. You misread things: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/zelensky-says-russian-inv...
"Russia claims to have hit more than 1,200 targets in Ukraine with missiles, artillery and airstrikes overnight as it launched a long-awaited new offensive in the Donbas region."
Also, no one doubts that the Russians are flying air missions, but "air superiority" means something far more than that.
In any case, where are they striking? Nearly all of their air sorties are near DPR / Mariupol / Kharkiv, just across the border from Russia. They had deep air access when they were pushing to establish Antonov Airport as a forward base/landing site but when they failed to capture the airport, it seems like all of their plans fell apart.
It's been incredible watching the sheer number of downed Russian aircraft.. OSINT folks like Oryx have IDed a substantial number of these but the Ukraine MOD shows over 300 combined aircraft losses, over 800 tanks, 2000 APCs, etc etc etc. This is not a successful military operation:
https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1517395823386050560
Fighting entrenched armies, especially ones using Fabian tactics, is hard.
A punching bag doesn't hit back.
I hope that helps. Even North Korea could probably launch an ICBM and level a US city. That doesn't mean they'd have a shot at winning a war.
There's compelling satellite (example: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/world/europe/bucha-ukrain...), video, and eyewitness testimony... against "nuh uh!" and the threat of a Russian veto of any UN investigation.
I'm not inclined to trust the "we have no plan to invade Ukraine!" people on this without compelling evidence, and Russia certainly hasn't hit that threshold.
And for some reason Russian propaganda prefers you to believe that their biggest warship in Black Sea sunk before of Russian incompetence and not a chance it was some Ukrainian missile. Let's see how many weeks until Putin admits most of the soldiers died on the ship.
From the photos that've come out, this seems unlikely, unless they were all ordered below decks to fight the fire. It stayed afloat, listing but upright, for hours, with the life rafts deployed in calm seas and nearby supporting vessels. I don't doubt people died in the strike and the fire, but loss of entire crew seems unlikely.
Anyway, for sure some died , there is evidence and I am waiting Putin video and his clever phrasing admitting it.
The many civilian casualties, and munitions quite obviously targeted at civilians, have been widely reported.
Not just Mariupol - I just finished speaking with my neighbour (fixer for international media org) who interviewed a young girl not far from Kyiv. The sister and mother of the girl were beaten and raped until they died, by Russian soldiers. The girl was forced to watch. She then lived in her apartment several days, with the corpses, until she felt safe to escape. Most Russians support this war. I'll leave it to you to find any reliable sources that disagree with that statement.
Russia is a very, very, sick nation.This is why Ukraine will never surrender. Can you imagine surrendering, and your "reward" is to live under the Russian regime?
BTW, I live in Kyiv, I'm not Ukrainian.
(that really doesn't require any encouragement from the UK, or the US)
(I note your account was created in response to the Russian invasion - your motives are very transparently pro-Kremlin)
My motives are not pro-Kremlin, but indeed I live in Russia and consume pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian propaganda. However, I can also read popular Ukrainian Telegram channels (> 1 mln.) and I see the mockery of corpses of Russian soldiers in every second video. Ukrainians are happy to savor photos of disfigured bodies. I quite often see videos of Ukrainian women and men with bare bottoms tied to poles because they are supposedly looters, and if there are such videos, then it's scary to imagine how many did not get on the video.
I see how the Ukrainian government contributes to the process of dehumanization of Ukrainian people. And I know why this is being done.
Given the murders and rapes your countrymen are doing non-stop, this is a purely sick thing to say. I'm glad it's here for all to see - it's a worryingly common Russian attitude, that somehow the Ukrainian government are the dehumanisers, the "Nazi's"...
...and the poor Russians soldiers are the victims.
I strongly against this war. I want it to stop it right now.
The purpose of my message is to show that most people only read pro-Ukraine propaganda and they don't want to figure out what were the reasons for this war.
They don't want to know that the National Guard of Ukraine has a real neo-nazi battalion, which in 2019, 40 US senators recognized as terrorist. Most people don't want to know that there was a war in the east of Ukraine for 8 years and now it's final stage. They don't want to think about Odessa massacre in 2014 when pro-Ukranian activists burned their opponents alive. Air attack on Luhansk in 2014?
I understand that it is easier to construct a chain of thoughts where the Russians are to blame for everything. But not everything is so unipolar. I recommend to watch George Friedman's talk, a man who can hardly be called pro-Russian, but who predicted this conflict: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLu_yyz3tc
Russians invaded Ukraine, and are raping and murdering civilians - not one or two, countless. Rapes. Executions. Beatings. Murder. Theft. Destruction. Deciding which country is to blame for these barbaric atrocities is very easy for most people.
Russian people will be paying for this for a very, very, long time.
Oh no! Now Russia will have to invade them! Oh, wait...
Not to mention that Russian state media has basically declared every Ukrainian who isn't actively helping Russia, to be "Nazis", and they should all be killed or put to slave labour. That's an outright call to massive genocide. Ukrainians have no option but to fight.
It’s because all the Russians that would not support it know how sick Russia is, and have already left it behind.
All the Russians I know are sane people, but all of them live outside Russia :/
How would you classify the attacks on cities such as Mariupol if not all out attacks?
>Humanitarian corridors established? Yep
How many times has Russia attacked civilians on those corridors? How many have they mined? How many have they refused to create in the first place?
>Shut down their electricity, utilities, internet? Nope
Given the dependence the Russian military has on such systems for CnC, general communications, and such it is to their advantage to keep them up and active. Attacking power plants wouldn't do much either given the Ukraine grid is now tied to the EU wide grid as of March 16, 2022 if I remember the date correctly.
>Your claims are childish and ignorant.
It appears that I have a deeper understanding of the subject than you do, at least to me.
Perhaps you don't realise, but even the Kremlin is admitting they have over-cooked the whole "Azov are all Nazi's" lie... you need to keep up with the disinfo, bro.
If you ever wondered what you would have done to stop Hitler, you're doing it now.
If Russia has really been cremating remains in Mariupol, people may remain missing forever.
If we were to take his nuclear threats to Ukraine seriously, he has all the potential to be one.
In that scenario, "I have nukes" becomes a joker you can pull out to achieve anything less bad than a global nuclear war. Peel off a bit of a neighbour? OK, less bad than nuclear war. What about a "minor" NATO country? What about, "pay me money or else"? And so on.
So either you accept that (no thank you from me) or you accept that sometimes you must set limits, even if the other side threatens nuclear war.
In that respect it's the same, just different scale. Allies could have said "no" to Hitler earlier, at risk of a devastating war, but chose to say "ah, go ahead" for fear of it. And got that war served up to them anyway.
The irony is that WWII could possibly be over in a few weeks, if Hitler's ambitions were stemmed earlier. In September 1939, it is unlikely he could fight on two fronts, and against the British and the French - the actual superpowers of the day.
The stasis, at least for now, is one of mutual defense pacts backed up by nuclear weapons leads to very hard boundaries given MAD. Ironically, the pitfall that led to WWI turned out to be a stabilizing force (at least for now) under MAD. Everything outside of those hard deterrence boundaries, if we're being honest, is fair game for proxy wars. Ukraine isn't in the boundaries. People who are arguing that we should start shifting those boundaries (ie, changing the 'rules' by directly engaging despite them being non-NATO) are playing with fire. As soon as the rules are broken, the fundamental premise of deterrence goes out the window, and all bets are off as to where it takes us. This is also why it's incredibly dangerous to admit countries into NATO with disputed, actively fought over territory like Ukraine, since we'd be exposing a new level of risk whereby there's a conflict between conventional rules of escalation running up against nuclear alliance deterrence.
I’m not sure. Rationally, Putin shouldn’t have started the war; he was told Russia will get sanctioned to oblivion, which it did and is genuinely hurting Russia, and he should have known his forces aren’t up to scratch. Due to some kind of delusion he pressed ahead. Hitler may have done so too. For example, hoping that the western powers won’t risk MAD over a bit of Central Europe, much as they didn’t care much for Western Czechoslovakia.
Of course sanctions aren’t MAD; but then nothing is, and no analogy is very close.
That's not a rule, and has never been suggested to be a rule until invoked as an excuse for inaction in this particular crisis, and is, in fact, contrary to the public claims and past actions of NATO as a regional security organization with a mutual defense commitment and not a pure mutual defense organization.
They spoke in Korean sometimes (but especially under stress, spoke Russian), and flew Soviet jets based in China and nominally assigned to Air Defense, not Frontal Aviation.
They weren't maintaining plausible deniability, but a transparent fig leaf. We knew they were Soviet pilots, and they knew we knew they were Soviet pilots.
And the Soviet anti-aircraft crews shooting down American jets in Vietnam didn't even have a transparent fig-leaf of not being Soviet troops.
Sure, the potential cost of getting it wrong is even higher, but the same answer is wrong for the same reasons.
“Letting Ukraine do all the (overt, at least) fighting but flooding them with arms and intel will be sufficient to check Russia” is, OTOH, somewhere between Sudetenland and Poland as a response, and it's a very high stakes gamble.
Yes, those Russians in jail right now for protesting against putin should be ashamed /s
Edit: the statement is about “should be,” but the replies talk about whether they do/did feel ashamed. But *should* they? Those people who ended up in jail were acting heroically by jeopardizing their careers and freedom. I think those specific Russians deserve to feel good about themselves
The limit of shame is entwined with the information we consume.
If you were presented the War through the lens of "denazification", you might think the war was ethically justifiable.
At this same moment USA, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are involved directly in illegal aggression against multiple sovereign states, fully supported by many other NATO members. They were responsible for much more death yearly than Russia in this war, yet nobody seems to care.
Is it because USA do it to spread democracy? Then what about Turkey? They used word for word exactly the same justification to invade Kurds in Syria.
Where’s the outrage about other wars.
Either condemn all wars, or stop pretending you care about people affected by wars.
Nice example of moral and discipline of US troops. Just Google if you need more.
Murderers are murderers, regardless if they wear Russian, US or Taliban uniform.
But yeah, Russian army killing anyone suddenly makes US army winning humanitarian contest.
What a weird thing to say. Humans are hypocrites.
We can absolutely not care one whit about the Kurds (or only in the abstract anyway), and then get extremely upset when people that look like us, in a society that mostly functions like ours, get attacked by a country that really should know better
And frankly, until they started this shit, I didn’t feel particularly bad about Russia any more. They shot themselves in the foot so hard…
Can we do better as a humanity? Should we just accept that we are all racist assholes and stop pretending we are better than that, or try to become better than that?
You would prefer Ukrainian border to be locked so that they can't escape at all anywhere. And you don't seem to want to care countries next to Syria to treat refugees better, it is just about sticking it to countries next to Ukraine which you know nothing about.
How come Arabs are more likely to fight ISIS and help Arabs over going over to Ukraine or help Arab refugees. Better no one helps anyone ever, not even when threatened by same aggressor again and not even if they are literally the next country over the border.
ad hominem ad nauseum.
This is not a realistic stance. We are all humans, and it's obvious that some global tragedies affect us more than others (for whatever reason). Just because somebody is vocal about the Russo-Ukrainian war but less so about other wars doesn't mean they don't care. It just means that they are personally and emotionally more impacted by this.
Furthermore, people do what they can. Should I either donate all my money to all causes or not donate at all? Should I either not do any action that has a negative effect on the environment or live in a forest alone without electricity?
We complaining about Russia and Russians and Iraqians complaining about USA will not stop any war. We need a strong international peace movement. It kinda worked in the case of Vietnam.
What's different is that it is widely publicised pretty much live and that it hasn't happened in some time (although in the Syrian civil war Aleppo was similarly flattened). The invasion of Iraq is a bit different in that the gap between Iraqi and US capabilities was so great that the US did not really need to go all the way on that occasion (and of course they didn't want to show you, anyway).
It is also plausible that some residents would prefer to go east to west. Not every resident of Eastern Ukraine supports the government. And we don't hear about it much, but reprisals and extra judicial killings of "collaborators" are happening.
Finally there is self interest. It's by no means certain that refugees who go west will be able to return to Mariupol after the war.
This will all get me voted down because it doesn't suit the narrative. I don't like the Russian invasion and I want it to fail but I also wish we were interested in the truth more than "winning the information war".
I should know better than trying to discuss this sort of topic as it's obviously always impossible.
On the other other hand, I think the West has not really been involved in this type of warfare since WWII/Korea, so we don't really have a point of comparison with Western tactics.
Putin didn't sprung up from nothing. He was nurtured and cared for by all western leaders. He's that disease you did nothing for for so long. And now you're complaining? That is like a cop blaming the victim for what a criminal did to them.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” Bush said in remarks he later regretted. “. . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/bush-saw-put...
That polls sound for me like an Internet survey showed that 100% use the Internet.