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Does the idea that disarmament, mutually agreed restraint and maintenance of norms are positive-sum not pop up in those discussions at all? At the very least, it doesn't seem like anyone (in your story, or what I see from Russian telegrammers or otherwise) is trying to seriously expand the game tree one step further and reason about how the balance changes if the other side also starts unabashedly executing POWs or whatever other ways of killing more $enemy are proposed down the line. I thought a standard European history education should have put some emphasis on how the various conventions of warfare emerged from Europe's historical experience in their absence (even if you want to have the edgy 14 year old's cynicism and say that it's just that the elites were spooked that the normlessness may come back to haunt them), but perhaps the connection from "Tired Professional Gentleman-Soldiers in colourful uniforms none of whom really wanted to be there anyway" to "the loathsome enemy right now barbarously rejecting the obvious truth of our narrative" is too much to draw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum has indicated that it works poorly with Russia.
These sorts of international agreements seem to be in a different class from basic rules-of-warfare/human-rights conventions, and anyhow once you go there (as the subthread below yours aptly demonstrates) you just get stuck in a very deep hole of both sides having equal and opposite stories of treaty violations by the other, and why their own violations as alleged by the other side don't actually count. Meanwhile, even in WWII, at least on the Western front both sides (and especially the morally and militarily victorious one!) upheld a pretense of respecting the rights of PoWs, and neither the Ameribrits nor the Soviets followed a principle of "our goal should be to maximise the number of dead Germans". Are you saying they should have?
Back on the object level of the issue at hand, for all it's worth, reports of Russians abusing or executing PoWs so far - especially after the chaos of the first few days - are very thin on the ground, despite what I assume must have been a very large number of people looking very hard for evidence. It stands to reason that they are certainly not killing and torturing as many PoWs as they could. The person quoted by OP seems to suggest that Ukrainians should kill and torture as many Russian PoWs as they could. If they did this, why would Russians not do the same to their Ukrainian PoWs? I can see why the intermediate state where Ukrainians go wild but Russians haven't yet would appeal to him, but at the inevitable new equilibrium where both of them do it, would his side actually be better off than before?
I think the main reason you haven't heard about it is that Russia's torture of both POWs and civilians is so routine and well-known that it isn't considered very newsworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_torture_chambers_in_Ukraine
https://thehill.com/policy/international/3543197-inside-russias-war-camps-ukrainian-pows-detail-torture-abuse/
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/russia-ukraine-war-un-report-details-accounts-of-rape-torture-and-executions.html
I find it hard to imagine that this wouldn't be carried by our media with much greater continuing intensity if the evidence situation were actually good enough. More importantly, though, it seems that there are some obvious test cases where PoWs like the top brass of Azov or the handful of international volunteers that were captured came back in one piece as part of a prisoner swap, where disposing of those people would have been a natural choice that would have been very advantageous to Russia if optics of PoW treatment were not a concern (as the Azov leaders and those who would see themselves in their position are valuable to Ukraine by virtue of ideology, combat experience and motivation, and conversely anything from just not releasing them to the full ISIS treatment would have improved Russian morale).
Did you miss what happened at Elenovka? Or do you find Russian version plausible, that it was a Ukrainian strike on their own people because "they started to talk about crimes of Zelensky"? By the way, UN had to disband the group tasked with investigating what happened there because Russia denied the investigators access.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/politics/un-disbands-fact-finding-mission-into-olenivka-prison-attack-in-ukraine/2780833
Just curious, you’re so passionate about the war that you set up a Google ping for themotte when anything critical of Ukraine pops up. (Nothing wrong with that, why not give your POV.) You mentioned last time you are living in Ukraine. Have you considered fighting in the war? I know Ukraine is drafting every young man they can find; I think their recent bill allows recruiters to enter homes to find young men. Or do you have a desk job with the Ukrainian military that permits you to engage in forums from time to time?
It's false. I read this forum sometimes, but I don't find American culture war that interesting so I rarely post.
I did. But I have a dependant, and some of my relatives including my father are fighting, so if something happens to us, no one would be able to take care of my underage sister. Plus I don't have military experience, my father has. Also I have relatively lucrative job in IT, and I donate most of my salary to AFU. Make of that what you will.
It's false as well.
And that is comical. Interesting that people who laugh at conspiracies involving "Russian bots" fall to the same temptation of accusing anyone of being a "glowie", or an "Ukrobot".
To be fair, the people who are referred to as "Ukrobots" do exist. I doubt they'd consider obscure heretic forums to be worth astroturfing, though, as opposed to Russian Telegram channels.
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