Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned that it was “inevitable” that “war” would come to Russia after authorities there were forced to temporarily close a busy Moscow airport following an overnight drone attack on the capital.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned that it was “inevitable” that “war” would come to Russia after authorities there were forced to temporarily close a busy Moscow airport following an overnight drone attack on the capital.
From what I’ve seen so far, I’m willing to give Ukraine the benefit of the doubt here. They were so far very much focussed on military targets. Even in this case they seem to be attacking office buildings night time when they’re presumably empty. This looks like an effort was made to minimize civilian casualties. And if we trust russia, we don’t know what the targets were, because they claim they intercepted all of the drones.
Russia is attacking apartment blocks during night and shopping centres daytime for over a year now. They are aiming to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible it seems.
So much for facts. Now what military purpose could these drone attacks have? To me it seems like one expected outcome is to force russia to move some of its air defence back to Moscow. So far russia felt safe enough within its own borders to the point where they used their S300 systems in ground attack mode to terrorize Ukrainian cities. Due to the nature of these AA rockets, these were also hard to intercept. So the only defence from these might be to force russia to actually start using them for their intended purpose. It seems that in some way Ukraine already tried this approach when they attacked military bases deep in the russian territory, but in those cases russia just moved strategic bombers further away and continues to lob missiles from there. Also military base is much smaller than Moscow and likely already had some AA defence present there.
Yeah, I think the benefit of the doubt on the target is in order, but this still does not changes much in terms of what people find justifiable in the political discourse.
I also think that saying that attacking civilian targets has military value by forcing the relocation of defense is a slippery slope, to be honest. This seems to be automatically would justify any civilian attack during a war, don’t you think? Like if for a second you wear the shoes of a Russian military, attacking civilians in Lviv becomes reasonable, not a war crime, to spread the air defense of Ukraine thin. It seems tautological to me, at least.
I don’t think there’s much evidence that Ukraine targeted civilians. Previously they managed to hit office building where presumably the infamous unit 74455 (aka Sandworm unit that was behind many cyber attacks on Ukraine including the multiple power grid attacks) had its offices. So I wouldn’t assume they are hitting civilian targets. They are hitting goverment offices that are closely tied to military or are directly part of russian military. And even then the attacks are done at a time when personnel is not present.
So to me it looks like they might be hitting targets that are military in nature if maybe less important overall with the added bonus of forcing russia’s hand in terms if AA equipment use.
I agree that hitting civilian targets to force russia to relocate AA hardware would be very slippery slope and in my opinion unacceptable, but I don’t see Ukraine doing this. And honestly I don’t think it would be good strategy anyways, russia is perfectly fine with sacrificing their citizens, they would at best do some minimal effort if not outright just ignore it. So actually hitting military apparatus instead is much smarter choice for Ukraine.
No no, I was not claiming that this happened (many attacks on civilians), I was more discussion on the general principle of doing so and what the reaction is from people.
Even in this case, it seems that the building might not have been the target, which is fair enough, but I think it’s still interesting to observe the reaction of people commenting these facts. There are a few examples already in this thread, and the idea is “everything is a fair target because Ukraine has the moral high-ground”. This allows to move the conversation from the very few attacks that Ukraine did on Russian soil to the more abstract discussion of “what do we think it’s acceptable”.
I agree with you (including the fact that Russia seems perfectly content of having its population die), and I would add that potential attacks on civilian targets could even backfire by making Ukraine lose some of the support from the West which in turns means less weapons.
Yeah, it would be unwise thing to do for sure. (on top of being immoral) I believe there’s some serious effort by Ukrainian government to actually prevent this.
When you think about it, it’s not like Ukraine is some uniform body, there is a lot of groups with lot of interests. Quite frankly also a lot of broken people that just saw one too many of their relatives dying under russian rocket barrage…
So it’s almost a miracle that there isn’t some sort of nasty bomb attack IRA style somewhere in russia on weekly basis. And if something like that eventually happens, it would hardly be surprising. For me that’s one of the contexts for Zelensky’s quote in the article. You just can’t shell civilians on daily basis for a year and expect to not reap some revenge. It might not be government doing this, just a bunch of people that had enough. And as much as you’d like to stay on the moral high ground, I wouldn’t blame these people one bit.
I really hope it does not happen for Ukraine’s sake, but at the same time I would understand if it did.
And I would definitely not expect them to make balanced judgement calls with morale and humanity in mind, of course.
Yeah, I think those are two very distinct concepts in fact. I have this kind of conversations on a weekly basis, where I end up usually disagreeing at some point with my fiancee (who is Ukrainian) about certain topics. I do understand of course that the hatred is real and justified. These analysis are of course a privilege for people who can do them with a certain level of detachment.
That’s a very good way to put it.