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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.
My understanding of this was that some of it was just "this shit happens in war" (just go look at Fallujah), and some of it was due to a Ukrainian habit of using schools and hospitals etc as military bases. I've seen photos of Ukrainian troops in school gyms and the like, and I find it perfectly believable that Russian commanders would say "fuck them kids, fire the missile" when they notice a school being used to host troops.
You can’t compare Fallujah to Russian wars. The American wars led to only a very brief population loss and small. And for lack of a better word people were back to fucking and making babies a month later. Which isn’t Syria, Chechny, or Ukraine that faced years or permement population. People making kids aren’t people suffering war.
The razing of Mosul alone seems to have a median estimate of around 10k civilian deaths, with the entire Iraq war estimated at around 300k in 10 years - and let's not get started on Vietnam. Wikipedia stats on Afghanistan seem to amount to 3k in three months of American bombing, up to some guessing 20k in a year, which is a very close rate to the 18k in 1.5 years being bandied around for Ukraine.
You are talking direct deaths which I haven’t seen data on but won’t disagree with. I’m talking indirect deaths (either starvation dying or births that didn’t happen).
If you look at population charts for Iraq you get this.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066952/population-iraq-historical/
You can’t look at a population chart and ever known a war happened. That’s not true for Russian invasion. This very clearly indicates Russian wars harm civilians in ways that US wars have close to zero effect. There is an ethnic cleansing that happens in Russian wars.
Surely the only things that you could detect from such a chart are births that didn't happen and generations that had an unusually high death rate (presumably military deaths, which you'd expect to be concentrated in draftable males). Neither is an indicator of ethnic cleansing, and in the case of Ukraine it is not even clear how Russia would be in a position to do that or how you would detect it (since they didn't manage to actually capture any predominantly Ukrainian part of Ukraine).
What would you consider sufficient evidence that US wars are no less harmful to civilians than Russian wars?
You would damage civilian infrastructure, run more brutal bombing campaigns and basically do things that turn people into refugees and depopulate the area. You would do things that make people not have the resources to raise a family.
You are basically just arguing that Russia isn’t running death camps. But they would make the Jews all leave the area and depopulate the area of Jews. Which America hasn’t done in their recent wars. It’s ethnic cleansing because the hypothetical Jews no longer exists in the region.
You haven't answered the question about what you would consider sufficient evidence. If you can't conceive of any evidence that would change your mind, what you have is an article of faith rather than rational belief.
Meanwhile, RIA Novosti is reporting that about 46% of students in the annexed part of Zaporozhiya region (Melitopol etc.) have indicated that they want to be taught in Ukrainian rather than Russian in the coming school year (apparently they were given a choice). Commenters and Russian milbloggers seem to be absolutely up in arms about this, and I don't see any reasonable grounds to assume it's made up (it doesn't even seem to be reported for a global audience in English?). Does that sound like a successful depopulation campaign to you?
(For reference, 2004 polls indicated that the entire region, including the unannexed parts further north that light up as less russophone on Wikipedia's map, had about 52% Ukrainian speakers. On the balance the map makes it seem like their numbers might have actually increased.)
Sufficient evidence would be to see a Ukranian population chart that looks the same as pre-war.
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