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So there is one thing about both sides' media coverage of Russian-Ukranian war that bugged me for the last two years - accusations of deliberate targeting of civilian buildings, specifically non-military hospitals, schools, malls and houses. Am I wrong in thinking that regardless of evidence in specific cases probability of this happening is so low that we should expect to see almost zero cases of it?
I specifically talking about deliberate strikes because there are many alternative explanations revolving around mistakes, negligence, and faulty weapons. Of course all blame for this still lays on the initiator of the war but I think claims of deliberate hits are generally explained by these reasons.
Specific targeting of civilians is not new to wars, it was done quite often for loot and plunder in the old times and with mass proliferation of planes and missiles it, and Douhet's doctrine were at its height in WW2. Strategic bombing(e.g. targeting general use infrastructure and in some case industry somewhat related to the war) never went out of fashion and was used in almost all wars where the participants had a large enough air fleet since. But terror bombing(e.g. striking civilian targets for the purpose of lowering the enemy morale) is generally not used because time and time again it was proved ineffective and even damaging to its goal. I can't recall any country that engaged in the open terror bombing campaigns from, again, WW2,
and if you decide to go this route you should be open about it. Main effect is on morale, it should be supported by propaganda and fiery speeches of inevitable death in case of continued defiance.I was quite obviously wrong about this(Thanks @ymeskhout for the correction). There is a modern tendency of doing things almost in the open and then fervently denying that you did them, that Russia follows often(recently with Prigozhin's untimely demise). What I wanted to communicate is that terror bombing needs to be open, or almost open because this doctrine by necessity requires large parts or even majority of your air force to have a desired effect. . I'm interested in the process that happens before such strike as imagined by people who disagree with me. Does Russian/Ukrainian command has a secret policy of terror bombings but to keep it secret limits it to some fraction of its forces? What do they or some random rogue commander hope to gain from it? How do they justify wasting precious ammunition on targets that aren't relevant to the war effort?I don't think that on any side of the barricades there exist some human-hating berserks that can answer "blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne!" to all of these questions and even if they did exist we would expect them to not have any power from the evidence we see.
You will generally be wrong if you ignore evidence, yes.
To be fair to you, you're probably not old enough, or had any particular reason to have been paying attention, especially since 'terror bombing campaign' in the WW2 model implied air fleets, while most civilian-targetting bombardment campaigns are by artillery.
There's no need to. A terror campaign doesn't work on the basis of the perpetrator boasting about it. Fear campaigns are also often incendental to other goals- a secondary or even tertiary purpose.
I'm not sure what your actual position is, so I can't say whether I disagree with it or not. It seems you're denying documented things because it doesn't make sense to you and so you're projecting 'sensible' substitute explanations.
The Russians didn't have a secret policy of terror bombing. They just denied it was a policy of terror bombing. That's not a secret campaign, but it is completely consistent with how the Russians approach information warfare, which really does amount to outrageously lie and deny the outrageous things done in order to muddle the information space.
Optimistically, a destruction of the will of the opposition to continue fighting, which not only includes the Ukrainians themselves but the will of the Europeans to continue supporting Ukraine's resistance in the face of massive humanitarian suffering, thus compelling a capitulation.
Pessimistically, to destroy the long-term viability of the Ukrainian state in the contested territories regardless of the outcome of the war, thus rendering Eastern Ukraine unable to be a productive part of an 'independent' but 'non-aligned' Ukraine that Russia was trying to compel.
Pragmatically, not getting punished for disobeying orders to continue firing.
Practically, because they burned through their better stocks early and got progressively worse as they used less accurate ammo.
By believing it's not a waste, and that the Ukrainian nation is the target of the war.
Russia intended to launch a war of national destruction. It didn't expect to have to fight to hard to do it, but the target lists for anyone thought to be pro-Western/anti-Russian were always part of the plan.
Ok, then where is there any evidence of some genocide that happened in Kherson that was controlled by Russian forces for almost a year and was generally pro-ukranian city with absolute majority of Ukranians? If you expect Russia to want kill any pro-Western person in Ukraine and see average as pro-western(so strike on soviet bloc is strike against the enemy) we should see tens of thousands of deaths in Kherson as it happened in history where one side of the war had national eradication as the goal.
Instead we see hundreds of cases and not of killings but detainment and torture - general brutality of the Russian state that it dishes out to it's citizens. In somewhat larger proportion because of vastly larger amount of potential violent dissidents but in the same category nonetheless. This piece for example tries to frame 320 victims in 9 months of occupation of a large as an evidence of genocide but it's quite poor if you can count. “The pattern that we are observing is consistent with a cynical and calculated plan to humiliate and terrorise millions of Ukrainian citizens in order to subjugate them to the diktat of the Kremlin.” says Wayne Jordash, managing partner and co-founder of Global Rights Compliance. On average Russia humiliated/terrorized 1.185 Kherson denizen a day, deciding to adopt this as baseline(as does the article) and correcting for the population, if on 24 February somehow Russians occupied all of Ukraine we would see 160.8 Ukrainians brutalized every day on average. If we accept that millions means at least two millions, to reach this number with rate Russia would need approximately 34 years. Not even mentioning the difference between war and peace time or that you expect to see the rate lowering with time because number of dangerous dissidents is quite limited, this is not looking like a genocide to me, more old and boring authoritarian state thing.
In this I agree with Macron - words do have meaning.
Sigh.
This is where I note that I did not use the word genocide, but national destruction, precisely to avoid this semantic debate.
Which is a shame, since it was as a courtesy and non-insinuation towards you, because the Russian war crimes both in execution and occupation do amount to criteria of genocide by the standards of international law, as codified by Article II of the Genocide Convention, which was established precisely to set such a criteria.
The current definition of Genocide is set out in Article II of the Genocide Convention: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
This is, indeed, arguably broad, which is why genocide charges will generally follow after statements denying the existence, humanity, or legitimacy of a group being targeted by the targetter. Which Putin helpfully provided with the Russian pre-war narrative buildup denying the existence of a Ukrainian nation, pre-emptive victory articles asserting common Russian identity, and the subsequent execution of the war.
Which has included, among other things- A- Easy check, bombardment of civilian population centers with indiscriminate fires when more precise measures exist as an alternative munition, and massacres of detained civilians B- Also easy check, given not only bombardment of refugee evacuation corridors but establishment of torture centers and target lists to go after Ukrainian nationalists C- Another easy check, as there was an entire winter campaign about targeting civilian power infrastructure to the neglect of military targetting with the only appreciable target of mass denial of power required for civilian services such as winter heating E- A matter of record at this point, as the forced evacuation and subsequent processing of Ukrainian children for adoption in Russia is precisely what this category covers
We... have seen tens of thousands of Ukrainian casualties in the war so far.
That the Russians did not establish Nazi-style concentration camps for industrialized slaughter during the midst of their first campaign season does not change that, nor is it a standard or prerequisite for genocide to categorically meet the definition of genocide.
Moreover, this would go back to you not understanding the logistics involved again. The Nazi concentration camps were so horrendous in large part because of how much industrial capacity and investment they took for that one purpose, which was outside the norm for genocidal campaigns. It was a massive function of logistics... which have been a noted weakness of the Russians over last year, even if it were their intended style, which is not the allegation or the requirement.
What's more important, however, is that you are rather unsubtly shifting the frame of debate to try and joust with strawman. The point was not that they were prepared to kill any pro-Western person in Ukraine. The point was that the plan- as in, the thing they had before they went in based on what they thought they knew- was built on what they thought the allocation of sentiment was like. Which goes to the critical mistake of Putin believing his own propaganda and believing that there was a pro-Russian majority eager to side with a Russian intervention against a despised Ukrainian government, and thus that pro-westerners were a minority to be suppressed and filtrated.
In other words- the Russians vastly underestimated the number of anti-Russian/pro-Westerners they'd be dealing with, because they were incompetent, and didn't prepare the logistics of scale needed despite the intent for what they were planning.
In this, you and Macron would be wrong, precisely because words do have meaning. The legal definition of genocide has been quite a bit broader than just 'Nazi-style concentration camps' for longer than you've been alive.
Macron, of course, has the excuse for motivated disinterest in the truth because he is a national leader who in late April 22 was still hoping to salvage some sort of cease fire and return to status quo ante rather than face the economic and political setbacks that would be more likely if he called Putin and Russia particularly unflattering but true things.
The Bucha massacre and then-ongoing bombardment of residential zones with occasional refugee columns kind of undermined his position, and that of the European 'peace' movement that was sharing in the pro-Russian denial mode of the early months precisely because acknowledging Russian crimes against humanity undermined appeals for immediate cease fires and peace talks.
I think it's worth noting that while the camps are the most well-publicized part of the Holocaust, a decent fraction of the deaths, especially early in the war were attributable to death squads with guns rounding up "undesirables."
There have definitely been recorded mass graves in places like Bucha that at least seem to resemble this sort of policy of wanton death.
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