> Testing is even more callous and meaningless hypothesis: why waste drones on civilians when there are plenty of military targets?
> Why not test in Russia dropping paintball grenades?
This article has numerous points that have difficulty standing up to a healthy application of common sense.
Why would Russia attack its own citizens when there’s free targets next door in Ukraine instead? Can we reasonably expect any ordinary citizen to be able to identify the nationality behind a missile or a drone? They could be from any EU country.
The governor of Pennsylvania was recently lambasted for spending so much of his time signing bombs and signing missiles in photo-ops instead of focusing on improving Pennsylvania and helping the zombies on Kensington Ave. I wonder if any of these munitions had his signature on them, jokingly.
If the goal, as Noam Chomsky would say, to manufacture consent for war: there are better articles for that than this.
It’s also somewhat too late to be pushing out articles like this when a change in the U.S. leadership will occur in less than 2 months on Jan 20th, 2025. Can you even deploy significant numbers of military-aged men on the ground over the Christmas Holidays, especially when we have no formal declaration of war through congress?
Russians recived such a welcome that they decided to set up a network of 26 torture centers in and around Kherson. International investigators are still working on putting together details of what happened there and locating all the people who went missing:
"Україна понад усе" ("Ukraine above all" in English or "Ukraine über alles" in German)
Except it doesn't have the connotation of the latter among Ukrainians at all. It's more like their version of Vive la France. It has its own history, and the similarity in phrasing is entirely coincidental.
Except the corresponding article[0] in Ukrainian Wikipedia as the proof that it is a "Ukrainian patriotic slogan" gives the link to the news page that shows a photo of a mob with torches and lists slogans like "Ukraine above all", "Glory to nation, death to enemies", "Bandera, Shukhevich -- heroes of Ukraine"[1].
What's genuinely dishonest is your (obviously intentional) insinuation that a single anecdote about how some local yahoos used the slogan is reflective of how the broader society uses and interprets the slogan. As if the pervasive use of traditional Russian patriotic symbols (such as its coat of arms, or the black-yellow-white flag) by the country's various neo-Nazi and ultranationalist groups should be seen as indicative of how the Russian populace as a whole sees those symbols.
The implication you're making here is simply false, and you know it.
Enough to stage a grand welcome. Where is it? Where are the kids dancing, grannies crying with joy, people waving flags and kissing soldiers? Like when Ukraine liberated Kherson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I6abh9C5Fg
(If you pay attention, you'll see a dog similar to Blondi for a brief moment in the video. A great opportunity to pull another batch of Nazi associations out of the thinnest air.)
By that bizarre standard, Russians "welcomed" the German invaders in 1941 when they failed to destroy many important bridges, and the French similarly "welcomed" the German invaders when they failed to blow up the Meuse River crossings in time.
I don't think you'll find many subscribers to this argument, as it is nothing more than contrarianism for contrarianism's sake; a childish refusal to accept reality. Go home.
"In November 2023, Gilbert W. Merkx, a professor at Duke University, along with the United States' Marine Corps University, published an article in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies placed on the Project Muse database, that stated Russia had captured Kherson with "little resistance". <...>
There were questions concerning how Kherson was captured so easily. Orysia Lutsevych, a member of the Chatham House, a British-based think tank stated that "Russia had its agents infiltrated into the Ukrainian security forces". On 1 April 2022, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed the head of the Security Service of Ukraine's Kherson regional branch and a general as traitors. Zelenskyy described their actions as that of "anti-heroes", and that he "...had trouble determining where their Fatherland is". An aide to a general was arrested for handing over maps of minefields to Russian forces and helping coordinate Russian airstrikes in the region." [0]
> There were questions concerning how Kherson was captured so easily.
There are also questions how Germans advanced so quickly in 1941. In a few months, they had advanced 600+ km in all three major directions, and captured over 3 million Russians as prisoners of war. And likewise, top Russian officers were reprimanded for their failures and many were executed.
Here's a prominent example:
Dmitry Grigoryevich Pavlov (Russian: Дми́трий Григо́рьевич Па́влов; 4 November [O.S. 23 October] 1897 – 22 July 1941) was a Soviet general who commanded the key Soviet Western Front during the initial stage of the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in June 1941. After his forces were heavily defeated within the first few days of the campaign, he was relieved of his command, arrested, charged with military incompetence, and executed.
Death penalties were also passed down for other commanders of the Western Front, including the Chief of Staff, Major General Vladimir Klimovskikh; the chief of the communications corps, Major General A. T. Grigoriev; the Chief of Artillery, Lieutenant General of Artillery A. Klich; and Air Force Deputy Chief of the Western Front (who, after the suicide of Major General Aviation I.I. Kopets, was, nominally at least, Chief of the Air Force of the Western Front), Major General Aviation A. I. Tayursky. Also, the commander of the 14th Mechanized Corps, Major General Stepan Oborin, was arrested on 8 July and shot. The commander of the 4th Army, Major General Aleksandr Korobkov, was dismissed on 8 July, arrested the next day, and shot on 22 July.
What the commenter means is that when Russian/Soviet forces hold defensive positions in large cities, they're valiantly protecting them from "genocidal sieges".[0]
But when Ukrainian forces do the same, they're callously sacrificing the inhabitants by "using the city as a shield".
Ah, so the best solution will be for Russia to show leadership by getting out of Ukraine altogether. That way there's no need for anyone to hold defensive positions or for cities to be used as shields.
>if there is anything in this article besides atrocity propaganda?
Some of use dislike atrocities and feel reporting them is a good idea so they stop. By propaganda are you suggesting the FT is lying and the Russians aren't killing civilians with drones on purpose?
Well there are a lot of direct interviews with locals telling about being attacked by drones. Here's a mum of two who was cycling home and was followed and attacked by one
Where the thing maybe a bit propagandised is I looked at a Russian channel and it seems the policy is to stop all movement by basically attacking anything that moves rather than going after civilians in particular.
Although even so I feel trying to kill unarmed girls going around town on a bicycle is a bit out of order.
It's a bit reminiscent of the whole war - the Russians saying they had to invade Ukraine because their security was threatened which seems a bit of a stretch with Ukraine being basically a peaceful democracy looking to join the EU and Russia being a famously aggressive dictatorship with the worlds largest nuclear arsenal and tank reserves. I mean it's possible they feel threatened by peaceful democracies and unarmed girls on bicycles but I feel it doesn't fit very well with reality.
And "Nayirah" "saw" Iraqi soldiers murdering babies.
>I looked at a Russian channel
Which one?
>the thing maybe a bit propagandised
It wouldn't be the first time in Ukraine either. Far from the first time.
"He [the deputy chairman of the parliament regulatory committee] also accuses her [fired human rights chief Lyudmila Denisova] of having focused too much on media work, and on describing sexually motivated crimes in gratuitous detail as well as the raping of children in occupied territories. However, some of these accounts, he said, had not been verified, which had harmed Ukraine's reputation and distracted media attention from other, proven crimes and problems."[0]
If western media is telling us that something like the events from Brereton Report [1] (where Australian special forces were killing Afghani civilians) are happening in Kherson, there better be proofs.
Thanks, judging by this repost[0] the channel is Russian.
However, the text translates as
Residents of this area, which is marked with a red zone on the map, in these areas our crews will destroy *any transport* - this is one of our key goals.
Therefore, we warn everyone: ordinary civilians, be careful! Do not travel by personal transport in these areas, it can be extremely dangerous.
which is far from 'the policy is to stop all movement by basically attacking anything that moves'
Well - you can take it as read they'll probably try to kill others while they are at it. Did you read the bit where Tetyana Aksenchuk was injured trying to put fires out and then drones attacked the ambulances killing a diver. At least the Russians are quite imaginative with their slaughtering the innocents.
>drones attacked the ambulances killing a diver. At least the Russians are quite imaginative with their slaughtering the innocents.
Here is a post[0] about a paramedic and an ambulance driver murdered by Ukrainian drone near Sudzha, it gives their photos and names. Are you saying now that "Ukrainians are quite imaginative with their slaughtering the innocents"? Were these selfless people used for "target practice" or what?
Here is another report of Ukrainian attack on firefighting car and on ambulance[1].
You may have noticed that, as I said, there are names and photos. One can google a different source, some medical news site[0] or a medical channel in telegram[1] or news from the doctor's home region[2].
If you look at his comments they are basically all shilling for Russia apart from one on Rust. The most recent being "what took him so long" on Putin raising defence spending to a third of Russia's budget.
I'm not sure that's really what you are supposed to do on HN? Also you might think Russia could find something better to do that spending all their money and tens of thousands of their men on trying to kill the neighbours and steal their land. It's not even really profitable these days.
Actually it can be more profitable than you might think. It turns out the resources that Putin's forces are sitting on are both quite valuable and strategically significant:
Though the war was launched primarily for ideological reasons, it's safe to assume that the plunder aspect factored into whatever deranged cost-benefit analysis he made at the time.
Maybe but Russia is not exactly short on natural resources and does seem like it could do with more manpower which it's depleting both through war deaths and young people leaving.
Also the war is apparently costing ~500m-1bn per day and looks like dragging on into another Afghanistan like situation.
I think the thing started a bit because Putin was reading 19th century books on invasions and similar during covid lockdown and imperial invasion used to kind of make sense back then - I'm a Brit and we had quite an empire. But now when the economy is dominated by tech I'm not sure it pays.
It's not that his country was short on resources. But it seems likely that he simply calculated that the cost of the invasion would be more than offset by the gain in resources.
No doubt the manpower (and financial) costs have been much higher than expected. But it seems that his country's tolerance thresholds on these dimensions have turned out to be significantly higher than he was expecting at the outset, also.
But now when the economy is dominated by tech I'm not sure it pays.
Right - for modern empires, which dominate primarily through their economic, technological and cultural prowess (and which have grown tired of slaughtering their own peoples in mass numbers for speculative geopolitical gain), it doesn't make sense at all.
But Putin knows his empire can't compete on any of those fronts. And since he has comparatively few restrictions on the number of his people's lives he can throw down the drain for the sake of his various projects - we can see how the 19th century model starts to seem all the more appealing to him.
41 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadThis article has numerous points that have difficulty standing up to a healthy application of common sense.
Why would Russia attack its own citizens when there’s free targets next door in Ukraine instead? Can we reasonably expect any ordinary citizen to be able to identify the nationality behind a missile or a drone? They could be from any EU country.
The governor of Pennsylvania was recently lambasted for spending so much of his time signing bombs and signing missiles in photo-ops instead of focusing on improving Pennsylvania and helping the zombies on Kensington Ave. I wonder if any of these munitions had his signature on them, jokingly.
If the goal, as Noam Chomsky would say, to manufacture consent for war: there are better articles for that than this.
It’s also somewhat too late to be pushing out articles like this when a change in the U.S. leadership will occur in less than 2 months on Jan 20th, 2025. Can you even deploy significant numbers of military-aged men on the ground over the Christmas Holidays, especially when we have no formal declaration of war through congress?
There is also the hypothesis that a newspaper is reporting news because it's happening. The FT isn't really known as a shiller of war propaganda.
>Why would Russia attack its own citizens when there’s free targets next door in Ukraine
Kherson is Ukraine
The only bit that seems wrong to me is 'target practice.' They are making too much effort for that. I'd say deliberate murder is closer.
Welcomed with "Go home!" chants, to be precise, and were shot at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrf0yLxViRo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=886GLfYIvpA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDJ-y_bw7Uk
Russians recived such a welcome that they decided to set up a network of 26 torture centers in and around Kherson. International investigators are still working on putting together details of what happened there and locating all the people who went missing:
https://news.sky.com/story/torture-24-hours-a-day-survivors-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/kherson-tortur...
Except it doesn't have the connotation of the latter among Ukrainians at all. It's more like their version of Vive la France. It has its own history, and the similarity in phrasing is entirely coincidental.
Another day, another drop of disinformation.
[0] https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Україна_понад_усе
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170206104859/http://24tv.ua/sl...
Corresponding to that community's decidedly marginal status in Ukrainian society.
That's just dishonest.
What's genuinely dishonest is your (obviously intentional) insinuation that a single anecdote about how some local yahoos used the slogan is reflective of how the broader society uses and interprets the slogan. As if the pervasive use of traditional Russian patriotic symbols (such as its coat of arms, or the black-yellow-white flag) by the country's various neo-Nazi and ultranationalist groups should be seen as indicative of how the Russian populace as a whole sees those symbols.
The implication you're making here is simply false, and you know it.
Enough to stage a grand welcome. Where is it? Where are the kids dancing, grannies crying with joy, people waving flags and kissing soldiers? Like when Ukraine liberated Kherson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I6abh9C5Fg
(If you pay attention, you'll see a dog similar to Blondi for a brief moment in the video. A great opportunity to pull another batch of Nazi associations out of the thinnest air.)
In the bridges between Crimea and Kherson that weren't blown up to stop Russians.
I don't think you'll find many subscribers to this argument, as it is nothing more than contrarianism for contrarianism's sake; a childish refusal to accept reality. Go home.
There were questions concerning how Kherson was captured so easily. Orysia Lutsevych, a member of the Chatham House, a British-based think tank stated that "Russia had its agents infiltrated into the Ukrainian security forces". On 1 April 2022, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed the head of the Security Service of Ukraine's Kherson regional branch and a general as traitors. Zelenskyy described their actions as that of "anti-heroes", and that he "...had trouble determining where their Fatherland is". An aide to a general was arrested for handing over maps of minefields to Russian forces and helping coordinate Russian airstrikes in the region." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kherson#Treachery_an...
There are also questions how Germans advanced so quickly in 1941. In a few months, they had advanced 600+ km in all three major directions, and captured over 3 million Russians as prisoners of war. And likewise, top Russian officers were reprimanded for their failures and many were executed.
Here's a prominent example:
Are you saying that Russians welcomed Germans?A shield against what?
But when Ukrainian forces do the same, they're callously sacrificing the inhabitants by "using the city as a shield".
Is everything clear now?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42294630
Some of use dislike atrocities and feel reporting them is a good idea so they stop. By propaganda are you suggesting the FT is lying and the Russians aren't killing civilians with drones on purpose?
There is also a bbc article on the same stuff https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c207gz7key6o
https://x.com/ZarinaZabrisky/status/1841820891245609111
Where the thing maybe a bit propagandised is I looked at a Russian channel and it seems the policy is to stop all movement by basically attacking anything that moves rather than going after civilians in particular.
Although even so I feel trying to kill unarmed girls going around town on a bicycle is a bit out of order.
It's a bit reminiscent of the whole war - the Russians saying they had to invade Ukraine because their security was threatened which seems a bit of a stretch with Ukraine being basically a peaceful democracy looking to join the EU and Russia being a famously aggressive dictatorship with the worlds largest nuclear arsenal and tank reserves. I mean it's possible they feel threatened by peaceful democracies and unarmed girls on bicycles but I feel it doesn't fit very well with reality.
And "Nayirah" "saw" Iraqi soldiers murdering babies.
>I looked at a Russian channel
Which one?
>the thing maybe a bit propagandised
It wouldn't be the first time in Ukraine either. Far from the first time.
"He [the deputy chairman of the parliament regulatory committee] also accuses her [fired human rights chief Lyudmila Denisova] of having focused too much on media work, and on describing sexually motivated crimes in gratuitous detail as well as the raping of children in occupied territories. However, some of these accounts, he said, had not been verified, which had harmed Ukraine's reputation and distracted media attention from other, proven crimes and problems."[0]
If western media is telling us that something like the events from Brereton Report [1] (where Australian special forces were killing Afghani civilians) are happening in Kherson, there better be proofs.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/why-ukraines-human-rights-chief-lyudmy...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brereton_Report
https://t.me/habr_bpla/183
However, the text translates as
which is far from 'the policy is to stop all movement by basically attacking anything that moves'[0] https://t.me/UAVDEV/7516
The text in Russian channel doesn't include pedestrians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50sQd5duZ48
I don't follow your logic here.
>Did you read the bit where Tetyana Aksenchuk
Again, "Nayirah" "saw" Iraqi soldiers murdering babies.
>drones attacked the ambulances killing a diver. At least the Russians are quite imaginative with their slaughtering the innocents.
Here is a post[0] about a paramedic and an ambulance driver murdered by Ukrainian drone near Sudzha, it gives their photos and names. Are you saying now that "Ukrainians are quite imaginative with their slaughtering the innocents"? Were these selfless people used for "target practice" or what?
Here is another report of Ukrainian attack on firefighting car and on ambulance[1].
[0] https://t.me/readovkanews/85353
[1] https://t.me/readovkanews/76283
Which means their assertions are about as reliable as what Nayirah "saw".
[0] https://medrussia.org/56335-stalo-izvestno-imya-vracha-vizhi...
[1] https://t.me/mediamedics/9636
[2] https://lipetskmedia.ru/news/society/lipchanka-edinstvennaya...
I'm not sure that's really what you are supposed to do on HN? Also you might think Russia could find something better to do that spending all their money and tens of thousands of their men on trying to kill the neighbours and steal their land. It's not even really profitable these days.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/natural-resources-ukraine-w...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/climate/ukraine-lithium.h... (https://archive.md/OkQ2a)
Though the war was launched primarily for ideological reasons, it's safe to assume that the plunder aspect factored into whatever deranged cost-benefit analysis he made at the time.
Also the war is apparently costing ~500m-1bn per day and looks like dragging on into another Afghanistan like situation.
I think the thing started a bit because Putin was reading 19th century books on invasions and similar during covid lockdown and imperial invasion used to kind of make sense back then - I'm a Brit and we had quite an empire. But now when the economy is dominated by tech I'm not sure it pays.
No doubt the manpower (and financial) costs have been much higher than expected. But it seems that his country's tolerance thresholds on these dimensions have turned out to be significantly higher than he was expecting at the outset, also.
But now when the economy is dominated by tech I'm not sure it pays.
Right - for modern empires, which dominate primarily through their economic, technological and cultural prowess (and which have grown tired of slaughtering their own peoples in mass numbers for speculative geopolitical gain), it doesn't make sense at all.
But Putin knows his empire can't compete on any of those fronts. And since he has comparatively few restrictions on the number of his people's lives he can throw down the drain for the sake of his various projects - we can see how the 19th century model starts to seem all the more appealing to him.