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Notes -
Zelensky and Trump's arm twisting competition
Ukraine is bombing Russian refineries. Good for them but maybe not so good for the price of diesel and thus for Trump. Trump has been very vocal about how Zelensky needs to stop using the targeting data that the US supplies them. Recently he's stepped up his threats, proclaiming a diesel deal with Russia just a couple months after the Lindsey Graham Memorial Sanctions Bill, and announcing an energy ceasefire that Russia doesn't seem to know about.
Republican congressfolk have been fairly supportive of the Iran conflict but Russia is much more polarizing. Zelensky seems confident we won't see a repeat of the early administration snafu - no need for groveling and thank yous - due to this pressure. On the other hand, another winter without sufficient air defense will prove extremely painful, though we said that last year too.
I don't get why Zelensky doesn't just go easy on the refineries for a few weeks to get some Trump brownie points. It can also get some moral high ground of like "we held the ceasefire but Russia kept attacking" for a renewed massive strike in November or December. I just don't see holding back on energy for a couple weeks making much of a difference for the war effort, the economic shocks will have a delayed effect on putin and the front line, and he has plenty of non-energy targets to hit like datacenters and warehouses.
On another note, I do like how Ukraine is gloves off - many of their attacks on bridges and powerplants and other economic targets would be screeched of as WAR CRIMES if Trump did it. (by the same people who simp for Zelensky of course) I'm sure if Trump really went scorched earth and maximally targeted these types of targets, Iran would actually be brought to its knees, but instead all we get is a bunch of cope strikes on insignificant targets.
The model that most people who are anti-Trump and pro-Ukraine have of Trump's policy is that he wants Ukraine to lose, and ideally to lose quickly*, but US domestic politics means he can't just sell Ukraine out the way Chamberlain and Daladier sold out Czechoslovakia or Nixon sold out South Vietnam.
If Zelensky shares this model, then Ukraine doesn't need Trump brownie points - he needs to retain the support of the marginal Russophobe Republican senator whose potential vote in an impeachment trial is his main leverage against Trump selling him out. And he can do that more easily by fighting hard and well and showing that Ukraine can still win with appropriate support than by making a militarily expensive show of support for a harebrained Trump admin scheme that is unlikely to actually move the pump price of diesel or the midterm vote. "Trump brownie points" only help Ukraine if there is a possibility that they move Trump to a stance of actually helping Ukraine win.
* There are multiple plausible motivations for this on Trump's part, with TDS sufferers focusing on the corrupt and/or treasonous ones, but given that MAGA Twitter is even more pro-Russian than Trump himself, they probably aren't necessary. Trump behaves in the same way regardless of whether Russia has paid him off, he honestly believes that a Russian victory is in the US national interest as understood from a MAGA perspective, or because he thinks a quick Russian victory is the best hope to avoid megadeaths due to a prolonged war.
Attacks on dual-use economic infrastructure like bridges and powerplants are war crimes if the damage to civilians is grossly disproportionate to any potential military advantage gained. This implies that punitive bombing of bridges and powerplants absent a ground war (where to a first approximation there is no direct military advantage and the damage to civilian morale is the whole point) is much more likely to be a war crime than bombing of bridges and powerplants alongside a ground war. If Trump bombed Iranian bridges and powerplants in order to soften them up for an invasion, then it would be (arguably) a criminal war of aggression but not a war crime. Leftists would still be screeching WAR CRIMES because they are stupid like that.
Considering the targets in Russia are hundreds of km behind the front line, they appear to be purely economic targets. The fact that a ground war is or isn't happening on the other side of the country isn't relevant.
But I do think this whole war crime nonsense is just crap and waging economic war is just a normal part of waging war though all of history. It's just another place where anti-americans can throw in a an isolated demand for rigor to impede progress.
I believe in the old school logic of ius in bello - that there are certain destructive practices that armies are likely resort to out of sadism/schadenfreude/righteous anger despite the lack of practical military benefit, and that banning them is a useful precommitmemt that will help us resist our own desire to act out our vices when the opportunity arises.
On that model, punitive bombing of civilian targets is the sort of practice you would want to ban. Bomber Harris said out of one side of his mouth that bombing civilian housing in German cities was part of an "industrial web" attack designed to make the newly-homeless workers less productive. Out of the other side of his mouth, he said a lot of great lines about winds and whirlwinds that implied his real motivation was simply to inflict pain on a deserving target. If we hadn't bombed German civilian housing, the war would have turned out the same way, except for fewer dead British aircrew and fewer dead German civilians.
Bomber Harris can plausibly claim ignorance - it wasn't obvious in 1942 that you couldn't win a war using air attacks on civilian morale. His successors can't. But people keep doing it - see Brett Devereux on the long and undistinguished history of strategic air power.
I thought it was broadly accepted that you can win a war doing civilian strikes. Wasn’t that the point of Sherman’s March to the Sea. A partial reason for nuking Japan. Mongol war theory.
Post 1950-Western doctrine doesn’t seem to work but that’s because we’ve had limits on how savage we could be.
The US did incinerate North Korea's cities, burned down most of the standing structures. That and the destruction of the ground campaign basically knocked North Korea out of the war and so the Chinese did nearly all the fighting. Destruction does work to an extent.
But it certainly didn't endear North Koreans to America. Warfare isn't just about pure destruction but achieving various goals and avoiding bad end states. A North Korea traumatized and hyper-militarized turned out to be a thorn in America's side. Better to end the war earlier rather than go too far into North Korea and bring in China.
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The March to the Sea was part of a larger strategy of cutting the South into isolated pieces and destroying Southern logistical/warmaking capacity. They didn't march through Georgia randomly torching houses or killing civilians and the overall strategy was not to threaten annihilation. Somewhat separately, Sherman aimed to demonstrate to Southern civilian (especially elites) that the CSA government was impotent to stop US forces from going wherever they wanted, but that wasn't really critical to the operation and the mechanism of action wasn't inflicting brutality on Southern civilians.
At the limit this is true (if you can actually credibly threaten genuine annihilation, your opponent will become a lot more responsive, though even that is problematic), but the Soviets were no more successful in Afghanistan, for example, despite being far more savage than US/coalition forces. The naive faith in the power of brutality is not well-evidenced. We have countless examples of calculated (and not-so-calculated) savagery backfiring.
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Non-combatants of a belligerent really like the pretense that only its soldiers will die.
Break that illusion and they'll double down, just like a Palestinian. And at that point your solution to the existence of that people has to be final; generally this would consist of nuclear annihilation, but the problem other nations have with that is that 'making clear that you will genocide your enemies' may cause them to pre-emptively strike you with the same weapons.
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These attacks were only one part of a larger military victory
That feels to me like the same thing as saying they are useful. In the case of Mongols it allowed them to control far more territory because if any one group stepped out of line they were slaughtered. If every group stepped out of line at the same time then the Mongols probably can’t win.
If you’re able to do mass civilian damage then you probably do have the means of winning in that sector. It seems most of the examples are more to pacify the population. If your less locally powerful then your probably only have enough bombs to choose between factories or civilians and the factory is likely better.
Yes, killing your enemies is good actually. But that doesn't mean a particular attack is a good use of resources, and it doesn't say anything about whether that attach is necessary or sufficiant to acheive victory.
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Certainly I don't mean all war crimes are nonsense but the prohibition on economic targets is.
Residential areas are certainly the lowest roi when it comes to targets but were very common in ww2 unfortunately.
You and nato agree on the matter.
https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/events/transcripts/1999/05/25/press-conference
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We did bomb a bunch of Iranian bridges but bombing power plants wasn’t done because it was understood that that would cause the Iranians to bomb Gulf power plants which they didn’t have enough interceptors to stop, and which would starve or kill via heat huge numbers of people.
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He is going easy on them, he's mad Putin is not going easy on the power plants in return and wants Trump to take his side. And Trump doesn't care as long as no attacks on the refineries are happening.
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There is no conspiracy against Trump. He is just a retard who makes retarded decisions based on retarded information and retarded mental models.
If Trump blows up a bridge or a powerplant because some foreign leader "insulted" him by not cowing to some retarded demand for some trade deal or because he didn't like the fact that the existing diplomatic solution was negotiated under Obama, then yes, that would be a war crime.
If Trump was fighting an existential defensive war and completely within all rules of war bombed enemy infrastructure to degrade their war fighting ability then no, nobody would "screech" about these actions.
Be polite.
As a significant fraction of your comments appear to be picking fights, one day ban.
Trump isn't a poster on this forum lol what are you on about.
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A retard who makes retarded decisions does not become the most consequential President in 50 years.
Tell that to the Germans. Or Argentinians. And their guy was Austrian to add insult to injury. Trump may be consequential in many ways. Doesn't mean that future historians won't judge him harshly if the processed he accelerated turn out to be detrimental to the USA.
Trump will be remembered for single-handedly inaugurating a new era of American politics, expanding American power (including over Greenland, Venezuela, Iran / the Middle East, etc.), a fundamental shift in the Western Hemisphere / Munroe Doctrine, a fundamental shift in the power of the Presidency and the Executive branch, inaugurating a new American military-industrial build-out that includes presiding over SpaceX / AI / Golden Dome, initiating the largest crackdown on immigration in a Western country in 50 years and possibly heralding the beginning of Remigration, and, ultimately, will enter historical memory as a great hero of America and the West. It's too late now, this stuff is all baked in, whatever you're reading in the newspaper is going to be forgotten. Trump's impact on the English Language alone will be the most consequential contribution since Shakespeare. History is not going to remember even things that feel very consequential to you. Who won the 1942 midterm elections? How does the war in Nicaragua affect public perception of President Taft?
Hitler is a good comparison for these purposes. If you were talking to someone and they said, "Hitler was just a retard who made retarded decisions based on retarded mental models," does that tell you more about Hitler, or about your friend? History is quite unfavorable to Hitler, but it's not as unfavorable as that. If someone tried passing this off as a serious opinion about Hitler in a serious historical discussion, you would roll your eyes. It's a waste of everyone's time.
Note that when I call Trump "a hero to the West," you don't have to actually like Trump, you don't have to accept Trump uncritically. But history is a lot bigger than whatever people are talking about today. It's far likelier in fact that future history will judge you (us) more harshly than it will judge Trump.
Almost any big decision Hitler took after the fall of France was retarded and backfired quite well.
I like Trump. He is amazing at identifying problems and terrible at actually solving them. He lacks the willpower, consistency and persistence to use any of the crises he has started to something fruitful for the usa.
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International law of armed conflicts (LoAC) does not expand the list of permitted targets to belligerent being victims of aggression, compared to aggressors themselves. If belligerents crafting a narrative that makes them the victim, would be allowed to override prohibition of attacks on certain targets, such prohibitions would be more difficult to enforce and thus less discouraging.
If merely targeting a maternity ward is illegal, prohibition against it is stronger, than if it must also be proven belligerent targeting it was not the aggressor for it to be illegal.
Yes, but a bridge or a power plant isn't a maternity ward. Targeting enemy infrastructure is lawful to the extent that it is necessary for accomplishing military goals and is proportional to the value of those goals as long as the war itself is lawful.
If you bomb a country just because you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, strikes against any target is a war crime.
Aggressive war is a crime under international law (indeed, according to the Nuremburg prosecutors it is the "supreme international crime"), but it isn't a war crime in the technical legal sense. The technical meaning of "war crime" only extends to waging a war in a criminal fashion (for example by attacking hospitals). And @gradation is correct that ius in bello is the same for aggressors and defenders, at least under the OG Hague and Geneva conventions. (There are some modern protocols to the Geneva conventions which the US has not signed which would give irregular resistance movements more leeway than invaders get).
Criminal wars not being war crimes is admittedly a particularly silly quibble.
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What about using a maternity ward as a spillover ward for trauma surgery?
War crime. You are not allowed to attack purely medical staff/facilities.
Now if you are like Hamas and figure out this one weird trick to hide your C&C and munitions depots under or inside hospital - it is fair game.
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Bombing a trauma center for wounded soldiers is almost certainly an economic net positive for the bombed nation and mostly just serves to terrorise.
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Ukraine is fighting an existential, defensive war. The country is being actively invaded and occupied. He gets more leeway than someone fighting an unpopular war halfway around the globe, and he refrained from attacking Russia directly for a long time.
Defensive yes, existential - they made it one. Russian demands while onerous - mostly veto over Ukraine security were not unbearable.
Zelensky didn't refrain from anything. He just lacked the capacity. And still lacks - the fabled Flamingos are underperforming for example. The moment they could strike russia - they did. Or invade. They pulled every long strike they could do. They started attacking the Crimean bridge years before Russia decided to start Kiev bridges (which also could be matter of capacity, russian munitions became precise last year). The two sides have been going all in since the beginning.
They are the same people. Only Ukrainian nationalists that think sincerely that there is even a shred of difference culturally or genetically between the Russians and Ukrainans. The two sides are equally smart, equally matched and equally indifferent towards the suffering of theirs or others' side populations.
Russian veto over Ukrainian security policy = Ukraine is a sitting duck when (not if - Putin has consistently said that Russia's long-term policy goal is the forcible incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian sphere of influence and the forcible Russification of the Ukrainian people) Russia restarts the conflict, hence existential. Even if you think I am wrong about Russian long-term goals and that Putin was grandstanding for a domestic audience, the Ukrainians don't, and have good reasons not to.
Assuming that the Ukrainians are correct in not wanting to be genocided and that the Russians want to genocide them, they are better off fighting against the odds now than making concessions that will force them to fight against even worse odds later.
The Russian idea that Ukrainian nationhood is fake and gay and that the Ukrainians are really Little Russians was submitted for adjudication to the God of Battles, who has already ruled against it. I agree that there is no genetic or cultural difference that would explain Ukrainian overperformance - it is some combination of better institutions and outside help.
Russia would be happy to have Ukraine as a client state, so the conflict would not restart. It would be pretty bad for Ukraine to be in that position but I don't think there would be any reason to pursue annexation or ethnic cleansing.
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I don't claim to be especially informed here but on the face of it, and from the beginning, it still seems to me like fighting the war is likely to result in vastly worse outcomes than simply accepting Russian rulership.
Seeing how the separatist republics DPR and LPR turned out probably gave the Ukrainian public sentiment on fighting a bit of a boost. I mean these were live experiments in modern day, Ukrainian Russian client states with every advantage: these were originally the nice resource-rich industrialized parts of Ukraine, they had pro-Russian, Russian-speaking populations (probably with a decently big contingent buying the line that Ukraine is a silly fake country and they are all temporarily embarrassed Russians and it's about time they rejoined the Fatherland), they had puppet governments totally dependent on Russia's largesse so Russia had plenty of leverage to run them however it wanted even if nominally independent. The Donetskians and Luhanskians would have had all sorts of reasons to feel optimistic about the whole thing, and Russia seemingly had every motivation to treat them good.
Instead as far as I can tell they got a pair of ridiculously miserable hellhole microstates run by tortuous adventurer warlords. Maybe, like, Congo manages to have it worse.
It's not obvious that client state Ukraine would turn out that bad, but IDK if it's obvious either that it would turn out any better. There was for sure no obvious reason for DPR and LPR to turn out that bad yet there they were. And if puppet Ukraina were to go about the same, that's a vastly worse outcome than whatever is going on in the war now.
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You go and find two people in a brawl who have already battered and bloodied each other, and tell the smaller one to just lie down and let the bigger one do as he sees fit it because it's rational.
Even literal dogs are rational enough to show their belly instead of fighting to the bitter end.
Dogs don't know what life as a Russian vassal state conquered after a gruelling war is like.
The Finns sued for peace two times between 1940 and 1944 in their conflict with the USSR. Did they make the wrong choice then?
I don't think the Finns back then and the Ukrainians right now are being offered similar deals.
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Depends on who lives to negotiate peace. Could be pretty sweet to the point where Russian natives regularly make grumbling sounds in the general direction of "who's supposed to be the vassal state here".
It's not a society I would like to live in, but on the metrics of their traditions being unmolested by the imperial center and their coffers being filled from the Tsar's treasury, they rank quite high.
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dogs have 1 life, nation and state can reborn from ash, fighting to the bitter end tell other parties that fighting you is not profitable so future invaders need to calculate with that all out fight, instead of assuming you will be pushover in a snap
If Putin knows how crazy and hard the Russo-Ukrainian war becomes, he likely choose a different target instead
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"To every man upon this earth
death will come soon or late.
And how can a man die better
than facing fearful odds
for the ashes of his fathers
and the temples of his gods?"
Surrounded by healthy children and grandchildren, I'd say. And the dudes being rounded up and forced into the meatgrinder at gunpoint don't seem to share your sentiment. The young women, fleeing, never to return. Whom exactly does this war serve, on the Ukrainian side? Because it sure doesn't seem to serve the people.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Are you happy now with all the choices that you've made?
Are there times in your life when you know you should have stayed?
Have you ever compromised and then realized that the price was too much to pay?
Winners and losers...
Which one will you be today?
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Maybe, maybe not. But people are not so dispassionate about their homes as that. At some point, yes, the damage from war gets to be so bad that people will accept foreign occupation rather than continue the war (otherwise wars would never end other than annihilation), but it takes time for the losses to get to be painful enough that people will accept losing their home to the foreign invaders.
How foreign? Ukraine is barely a country, and the people don't seem very enthusiastic about the fight. AFAICT this war is perpetuated by the government for the government at the expense of the people.
The ukrainian people want to fight, though.
Now, I broadly agree with the idea that the ukrainian government should avoid further loss of life to preserve Galicia, because that's the only 'ukrainian' part of ukraine(I make no illusions about my ethnoreligious prejudices). But the Ukrainian public wants to fight to the bitter end, and I respect them for it. It's not the government making them.
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A healthy majority of Ukrainians support the war from every polling I've seen. And foreign enough this war is really creating a national identity for Ukraine. When people start shooting missiles into your apartment blocks you stop viewing them as compatriots fairly quickly. ANd there is also an aspirational element look at Poland a democracy in the EU that's practically surpassing Western Europe at this point and look at Russian despotism under Putin.
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I’d take the deal the Ukrainians are being offered. The young get to 10x their income and a chunk of the boomers die off fighting it.
Ukraines war fighting ability seems to prove that being in the Russian sphere has greatly retarted economic development plus Polish are Slovaks and have already achieved close to prime Euorpe incomes.
If the war ended today then the fight would have been worth it. But who knows how it ends.
You'd die for being replaced by Indians and line go up? I can understand opting for it in times if peace, because you'll probably enjoy the benefits before the negatives kick in. But what's the point of walking into the meat grinder for it?
Indians don't want to go to Ukraine. They want to go to richer countries which aren't currently on fire and covered in snow at the same time(the US obviously the ideal, but Canada, Australia, the UK, even Russia all rank far above Ukraine). Indians don't want to live in an impoverished shithole which has been wrecked by war and in which the average citizen is incredibly racist.
They might prefer other countries, but they're not going to stay home if Ukraine is the only one on offer, and if Indians are too picky, there's always Africa.
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Listen I don’t support immigration at all. I don’t think Indians should leave India. I want them deported from America. I even want denaturalization in the west.
But you can find benefits for Ukraine in the war and hope they are smart enough to not become Ikrinia.
I believe in Ukraine for Ukrainians and maybe some Russian Slavs who want out of Russia since they are similar.
If it was just about them being smart enough, one could have hope, but it's about pressure, propaganda, bribes and incentives. The idea is/was the they'll align themselves with western Europe, if they do that they'll be flooded with (even more) NGOs, they'll have EU money dangled in front of them for implementing the progressive social agenda, and their politicians will be offered cozy positions in Brussels to pull strings back home. This isn't something you can resist, because it sets up a "you have to get lucky every time, they have to get lucky once" dynamic.
This gets down to you can never do anything in the west pessimism but at the end of the day there isn’t anything else to bet on but the west. And for your concerns Poland doesn’t seem to have done infinite immigration.
Trump has gutted a significant part of the NGO complex with getting rid of USAID. Europe is getting center right pressure now (I can’t use their labeling far-right).
You still need to work to make a better world. You can’t just do endless pessimism.
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I think Ukraine is a dead state regardless of whether the war ends today. The demographic damage is apocalyptic.
Eh, Galicia had replacement fertility before the war, and they're the properly 'Ukrainian' part of Ukraine. Nowhere near out of the question that they'd recover- after all, the children born immediately before the war are now turning four, and Ukraine might use some child soldiers in their late teens but it's not recruiting younger than that.
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Not much has changed on that from the war. Same issue all of western society is dealing with.
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Though, isn't everything Trump does a war crime? I think some UN commission or tribunal accused him of war crimes in Iran with the status quo a couple weeks ago.
It's one of those terms (like genocide) that's been diluted to the point of uselessness.
What? Iran invaded the US, Trump bombed their infrastructure and people still called him a war criminal?
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