The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
[Russian Invasion of Ukraine] Mr. Zelenskyy Goes to Europe
Inquisitor77
2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
This thread is for discussion of the illegal and immoral Russian invasion of Ukraine, the latest large-scale action of a broader conflict that started in 2014 with Russia's "annexation" of Crimea.
Here is the previous OP for this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/245884/impotent-russias-attacks-on-civil-targets-in-the-ukraine-war
Courtesy of War Mapper, here is the latest map of the conflict as of 17 November 2022:
The past few months have seen forward momentum for Ukraine. First with the successful Kharkiv offensive in September, and more recently with the 11 November liberation of Kherson, which saw Russian forces choosing to withdraw from the city and flee to the left bank of the Dneiper River rather than stay and fight.
The most recent major event was the unfortunate deaths of two Polish citizens due to what appears to be an errant anti-air missile fired by Ukraine as part of its attempts to defend itself against hundreds of missiles fired by Russia at civilian centers and infrastructure. As of late, Russia appears to be pursuing a strategy of making Ukraine as inhospitable as possible prior to the onset of winter, which is in line with its long record of committing war crimes and genocide during its invasion. Ukraine appears to be pursuing a strategy of winning the actual war and kicking Russia out.
As a final parting gift, see below for an interview with a Ukrainian in Kherson after the city's liberation:
===============================
Global Thermonuclear War:
Please note that while discussion of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation are inevitable, there does exist a G-ddamn Separate Thread for that topic.
Azov Nazis: Previous mod declarations have included not discussing the Azov Regiment in the context of it supposedly being a Neo-Nazi group, and a general call for decorum against personal attacks.
Fuck Putin: Acceptable topics include saying, "Fuck Putin!" and all permutations thereof, including just repeating the phrase "FuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutin" ad infinitum (no promises you won't get banned for spam being too awesome, though).
Crazy P is Awesome: If you Awesome a post by CrazyP, it is assumed you are Awesome-ing the fact that CrazyP is alive and well, not that you are Awesome-ing the contents of his post. (CrazyP is a Russian forumer who currently resides in a place that is not Russia.)
News & Information: While the fog of war always exists and it is very difficult to verify all reports, there does exist a standard of credibility. Major, established news outlets such as The New York Times or Reuters are generally accepted sources. Independent journalists, open source intelligence analysts, and official government sources should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Blog posts from J. Random Dickbag should be avoided or placed in the correct speculative context. All news should be prefaced with the source and, where appropriate, caveated as unreliable or speculation. Niche or less well-known sources should have corresponding descriptions of their reliability and sourcing.
Please remember that many forumers visit this thread precisely because it typically eschews random internet speculation and propaganda talking points.
Gore and NSFW/NSFL Content: In addition, all content which shows gore, horrific injuries, corpses, mass graves, and similar themes must always be spoilered and tagged appropriately. Failure to do so in the past has resulted in moderator intervention. Inflicting trauma on other forumers is not cool. Please remember that this place is still considered PG-13.
Here is the previous OP for this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/245884/impotent-russias-attacks-on-civil-targets-in-the-ukraine-war
Courtesy of War Mapper, here is the latest map of the conflict as of 17 November 2022:
The past few months have seen forward momentum for Ukraine. First with the successful Kharkiv offensive in September, and more recently with the 11 November liberation of Kherson, which saw Russian forces choosing to withdraw from the city and flee to the left bank of the Dneiper River rather than stay and fight.
The most recent major event was the unfortunate deaths of two Polish citizens due to what appears to be an errant anti-air missile fired by Ukraine as part of its attempts to defend itself against hundreds of missiles fired by Russia at civilian centers and infrastructure. As of late, Russia appears to be pursuing a strategy of making Ukraine as inhospitable as possible prior to the onset of winter, which is in line with its long record of committing war crimes and genocide during its invasion. Ukraine appears to be pursuing a strategy of winning the actual war and kicking Russia out.
As a final parting gift, see below for an interview with a Ukrainian in Kherson after the city's liberation:
Because now we have no electricity in the city, no water, no central supply heating, no mobile connection, no internet connection. But we have no Russians, and I am extremely happy of that! We can survive anything...but we are free!
===============================
Global Thermonuclear War:
Please note that while discussion of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation are inevitable, there does exist a G-ddamn Separate Thread for that topic.
Azov Nazis: Previous mod declarations have included not discussing the Azov Regiment in the context of it supposedly being a Neo-Nazi group, and a general call for decorum against personal attacks.
Fuck Putin: Acceptable topics include saying, "Fuck Putin!" and all permutations thereof, including just repeating the phrase "FuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutin" ad infinitum (no promises you won't get banned for spam being too awesome, though).
Crazy P is Awesome: If you Awesome a post by CrazyP, it is assumed you are Awesome-ing the fact that CrazyP is alive and well, not that you are Awesome-ing the contents of his post. (CrazyP is a Russian forumer who currently resides in a place that is not Russia.)
News & Information: While the fog of war always exists and it is very difficult to verify all reports, there does exist a standard of credibility. Major, established news outlets such as The New York Times or Reuters are generally accepted sources. Independent journalists, open source intelligence analysts, and official government sources should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Blog posts from J. Random Dickbag should be avoided or placed in the correct speculative context. All news should be prefaced with the source and, where appropriate, caveated as unreliable or speculation. Niche or less well-known sources should have corresponding descriptions of their reliability and sourcing.
Please remember that many forumers visit this thread precisely because it typically eschews random internet speculation and propaganda talking points.
Gore and NSFW/NSFL Content: In addition, all content which shows gore, horrific injuries, corpses, mass graves, and similar themes must always be spoilered and tagged appropriately. Failure to do so in the past has resulted in moderator intervention. Inflicting trauma on other forumers is not cool. Please remember that this place is still considered PG-13.
A duck! on
+43
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
I did not retreat from Kherson i did naaaht. OHIMARS
Fuck you, terrorist.
I am shocked.
This is my shocked face.
Nah, Russia is responding to NATO still holding them liable.
Pretty dumb from a PR angle, from the shilling I've seen the Polish missile is the single biggest propaganda coup they've had in months (still not a big one overall but still). Reminding those on the fence why the missile was launched doesn't help.
I think they were referring to the missile that hit the passenger plane back in 2014, which Russians have just been convicted for. Kinda confusing right now, considering we have another missile thing going on right now.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
I stand by my judgement of current Russian ass-showing.
This is the MH17 conviction, from when Russia gave a bunch of terrorists a Buk SAM and they shot down a passenger jet like 8 years ago over Ukraine.
This isn't really related to the stray missile deaths in Poland the other day beyond general theater stuff.
Edit - ah seems confusion was already sorted.
Putin goes to a Fortune Teller, and asks ‘When will I die?’
The Fortune Teller responds, ‘You will die on a Ukrainian holiday’
‘Ah,’ replies Putin, ‘Which holiday will that be?’
The Fortune Teller answers, ‘Any day you die will become a Ukrainian holiday’
‘
WoW
Dear Satan.....
fuck Putin.
Ehhhhh, was the Dambusters raid on the 3 Ruhr hydro plants a terrorist attack? Energy and communications infrastructure were certainly considered legitimate war targets by NATO nations in campaigns gone past.
I think the difference is not so much a quantitative one as a qualitative one; NATO doctrine hold civilian casualties and collateral damage as a malus to be minimised, while Russian doctrine considers it to be at least as an important objective as the infrastructure damage done. When Russia hits a primary school instead of a command center it's not "Shit, we fucked that up" it's "Good, they'll learn to submit if they don't want their kids to die".
preliminary report about the Nordtream explosion. Investigators found remnants of explosives, confirming sabotage
I think those dam attacks and their significant civilian casualties were a part of eventually outlawing such attacks under international law.
The failure of strategic bombing to be truly effective probably made it easier to end the practice.
I think one of the most ineffective bombing attacks of WW2 took place in Ukraine…
TLDR: infrastructure is hard to destroy and can quickly be fixed.
Strategic bombing has been a controversial topic since the invention of strategic bombing. Only countries who get conquered have their leaders and top military on trial for such things (for example we're not going to see GWB on trial for the Second Iraq war, despite that every pretext for the war has been proven false).
Even if it goes to trial I don't see anyone being convicted for these infrastructure attacks given that nobody ended up being convicted in the trials following Operation Storm during the Yugoslavian war. If anyone ends up on trial I can see convictions for stuff like Bucha and the Mariupol theatre bombing etc, but these cruise missile attacks are probably going to be swept under the rug.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
It’s a good read (as usual).
The example give (the Dambusters raids) was not really "strategic bombing" (by which I take it you mean high-altitude area bombing of cities) - it was a very precisely directed (by WW II standards and honestly not terrible even now) attack on 3 very specific high-value targets.
The distinction I was attempting to draw was that the aim of that attack was not qualitatively the same as the missile the attacks. Both were attacks on energy infrastructure, which is a reasonable and legitimate target in a war special operation. But the Russian missile strikes have more in common with area bombing in that civilian suffering is at least one of the major goals of the operation, while the Dambuster raids were specifically aimed at crippling the military production of the industrial heartland.
tl;dr shooting at electricity substations isn't terrorism. Counting it as a win when you hit a hospital instead is.
I stand by my opening statement after the very good OP here.
To the topic at hand though...
Targeting infrastructure is considered totally valid. But there are rules (more like agreed standards about it). Blasting power plants, bridges, rail lines, all fair game. Blowing a dam or attacking a nuclear station is huge "don't do that" because of the collateral damage involved. There's also a massive difference between "we are going to blow this bridge to hell and back via Naval commandos because it's a troops and supplies bridge and fuck you" vs "we are going to drone strike this foot bridge used by pedestrians with a pedestrian on it in skinny jeans". There's a massive difference between crippling a countries ability to field and supply a functioning military and just picking targets that terrorize people or rack up the most damage and bodies.
And that's the difference between not just the NATO doctrine, but also US and Team Best Friends (for the most part) vs Russia and other assholes. You wouldn't see South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, or Mexico pull a stunt of carnage for carnage sake.
The other issue is it's probably not going to work to freeze these people to death. To start with, it's Ukraine not like they aren't a nation that isn't used to the cold. This is like trying to scare people out of Alaska by making it cold. The next is there is nothing stopping someone from doing the obvious solution of just shipping them tons of portable generators or wood burning stoves. I know that sounds silly but those things work. I co-own a winter place (this is more like cabin/cottage it is not a house by any stretch of the imagination) out in ass fuck Alaska and we don't have power. We heat it with a wood burning stove. Works perfectly well. You can shove wood in it or specific pellets and that sucker brings all the warms. You don't need "power" to keep warm, there are other ways to do it. Trying to freeze a people who are used to the cold to death is sort of silly.
Russia obviously does not know how to fight a war. They also don't seem to grasp functional terror tactics. They are a joke by now.
"Say you are North American without saying you're North American."
Firewood/Pellets cost more in Europe before 2022 and seems to be above twice the price now - there's just not the forests:population ratio (outside of Russia where a lot of Europes wood used to come from) to make this easy.
I do however agree that bombing infrastructure is not exactly terror bombing - they did terror bombing in Syria and have done it on multiple occasions in Ukraine (for example the carpet bombing of Azovstal) but not all of these strikes fall into that category.
e: of course they can't do high altitude carpet bombing like they did in Syria, because of Ukrainian air defenses. Otherwise they probably would be trying to flatten Kyiv with Backfire raids.
Either Russia went for a nuclear headshot and fucked it up / were sabotaged, or they're really scraping the bottom of the ammo barrel or they're getting extremely careless about what they're actually firing, thus hugely increasing the chance that some random town in Ukraine gets nuked when they didn't even mean to.
If NATO wasn't about to implement a "no missiles that even might hit a NATO nation" interdiction in at least Western Ukraine, I think this strengthens the case for one.
I think the state of the war more then anything is what makes it obviously nothing but terrorism. Nothing Russia is doing with these bombings actually helps their war effort. It doesn't really hurt the capacity of the Ukrainian armed forces. Nor does it seem intended to. It's intended to make them suffer to prove Russia can make them suffer and nothing more.
The timing of the major attacks demonstrate this if nothing else. Every time the Ukrainians gets a major visible win, Russia launches a bunch of nukes at civilian targets.
Exactly.
Putin probably ordered some number of cruise missiles be fired at some point in time, and this is what the crew had on hand that would fire. The crew may not have realized it had a dummy warhead. The crew may have realized but not had real warheads to swap in. The crew may have realized and just not given a fuck because all they care about is firing the thing, what happens beyond checking that box is someone else's problem.
Hell, for all we know they realized it but the crew that's left only knows how to fire the missiles and the guys who know how to service them got handed a rifle and sent to the front line weeks or months ago. Or they just had an impossible timeline that didn't let them swap out.
There are so many possible dysfunctions and the crazy thing is none of them are the least bit implausible with what we've seen of the Russian military so far this year.
Right, except, you know how much wood high grade pellets the US and Canada can ship? Hell we buy that shit in like 40 lb bags it lasts. It's 6 bucks for 40 pounds of the stuff. You get half off if you buy like two dozen of them. It's not like we can't get wood pellets to Ukraine and or anybody that needs them. You've seen the size of the US and Canuckistan right?
If heating fuels become issues it's not like the America's side of NATO doesn't produce mass amounts of fuel for cold area regions. America and Canada are not short on wood fuel pellets.
This will also impact the readiness of the planned repair hub in Slovenia.
We're one month away from tin cans that have "BOOM" painted on the side
...I don't think he's got enough bondo.
“Get these 250 million BTUs of pelletized wood fuel, stamped metal cookstoves, and kitchen matches distributed according to local population density throughout all of UAF-held Ukraine by Thanksgiving”
with that grin-shines-through-a-scowl that Ron Swanson does when he is secretly delighted by something and the Saudarkar “the EmperorCINC commands it; it is done.”
Your Ad Here! Reasonable Rates!