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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Well, there are images of destroyed villages around Belgorod. Either the Russian army is doubly incompetent and can't even exploit the results of its own false flag operations, or the villages were hit by Ukrainian fire.

In case that they were hit by Ukrainians I would assume that they were at least trying to hit military targets (stationing army, convoy, ammo depo or something).

In small part because I do not expect them to target civilians for moral reasons - but mostly because I expect them to not target civilians for strategy reasons and because they are unlikely to be running out of military targets.

Well, I doubt either army deliberately targets pure civilians, but both are very cavalier about collateral damage.

Ukrainians have shot serious amounts of artillery deployed anti-personnel mines on Donetsk.

Military usefulness; nil. Maybe delays logistics for a couple of hours. Not sure if anyone lost a foot either. The only prominent victim so far might be Russian 'influencer' who was there for unclear reasons.

They just did it anyway. Most western media reported that either Russians mined their own separatists urban areas in a false flag attack, or that it's 'fake news'.

I do not expect them to target civilians for moral reasons

These are not 'civilians' but separatists or terrorists. The entire area was initially called an anti-terrorist operation zone..

They have been hitting it with various seemingly terror attacks since 2014.

There's zero military utility in a strike aircraft shooting unguided missiles into a city center. These aircraft have no advanced targetting beyond a allistic computer, so pretty much no chance of homing in on any military target. It's just pure spite, basically.

Both sides there have very little in the way of 'warm feelings' towards each other.

Military usefulness; nil. Maybe delays logistics for a couple of hours.

How to tell someone is not not a military analyst without them telling they are not a military analyst.

The mines are trivially easy to clear out from roads and paved areas.

Their utility lies in making advancing through vegetation tricky. Was Donetsk a vegetated area Russia had to advance through ? No.

There's videos of them deployed correctly during the UA's summer retreat in DPR.