Thanks, I hope that’s true.
I think it’s also possible that in the cellphone age, they’re simply avoiding the filming of a visceral, blatantly cruel atrocity.
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on Wednesday the chief of Russia’s space program, Dmitry Rogozin, issued two demands before acceding to the launch. One, he said, OneWeb must guarantee that its satellites will not be used for military purposes. And two, the UK government must give up its ownership of OneWeb.
These extraordinary demands would seem to be non-starters. OneWeb has already pitched national defense agencies, including the United Kingdom, on using OneWeb satellites to facilitate rich networks of data for enhanced decision-making during military activities. And it is virtually impossible to see the UK government agreeing to Russian demands about what it does, and does not, own.
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I think it shows that they are less than motivated to kill civilians they’ve been told are brothers. It takes quite a bit of propaganda or years of conflict to dehumanise your enemy, especially civilians. Earlier remarks about “There is no Ukraine", which some commenters understood as such, wasn’t about that at all. Those were about “Ukrainians are in reality brainwashed Russians“. To make your soldiers think that the other side isn’t worth living and can simply be gunned down, be the method Nazi ideology about Untermenschen or other extreme forms of racism is a different matter.
If they thought they were really facing WW2 style Wehrmacht soldiers or sympathisers, they’d indeed just shoot and roll on.
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That’d be a bad look on social media, no?
I hope you’re right, but then, members of the Russian military nevertheless are killing Ukrainians by the hundreds, or even the thousands by now.
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Well, that’s the official line, after all. Ukraine doesn’t exist, it’s a made up country on territory that was always Russia, its inhabitants are mostly deluded by bad Nazis and in need of liberation, reeducation, and – unspoken, but expected – reintegration into the motherland.
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It seems that a lot of the Ukrainian casualties are coming from artillery and missile strikes, and there’s a much lower psychological barrier when you cannot actually see the target. It’s one thing to fire at coordinates knowing that people are likely there and another thing entirely to point a gun at a person right in front of you and pull the trigger.
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Yes, obviously, thanks.
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It’s easier to kill from far away. That’s why we have artillery and drones. I rarely quote from movies in earnest, because they are obviously made up, illustrations of possible behaviour at best, but I will in this time. Scenes like this are possible, because lesser minded men than this fictional president have the power to delegate killing to subordinates, who just need to be able to push push a button. And convince themselves that that Libyan or Ukrainian janitor had it coming anyway and if they hit civilians, well, that was someone else’s fault, giving them bad intel. Or had been put there by the enemy. Much harder to do with a civilian who looks you in the eye and tells you that you are the bad guy.
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(NYT reprint)
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FYI: German arms deliveries to Ukraine handed over
4:05 p.m.: German arms deliveries for Ukraine have arrived in the war zone. Government circles in Berlin confirmed to SPIEGEL, that the delivery, 500 “Stingers” and 1,000 bazookas from Bundeswehr stocks, have been handed over to the Ukrainian army.
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That’s like, at least 15 trillion rubles going by the current exchange rate
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I wonder the effect of these on Russian troop morale. The Stinger is near-mythical for having allowed the Afghans to fight back against Russian airpower in Afghanistan. There’s a good argument to be made that they turned the tide, helping to defeat the Soviets. Whether they’re effective in this case or not, this ought to have some further psychological effect on the Russian military.
Commentary on the Stinger in the current war:
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The Stinger is fairly simple to fire and requires little training to be useful. Some training, but not an awful lot.
While it has mythical status, it is not undefeatable. It certainly would cause aircraft to have to change tactics and makes life miserable for helicopters to the point where the tactical changes would severely limit the usability of helicopters
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Looks like a Stingers already being put to good use.
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Comments at the Twitter link indicate that the video may be from Day 1 of the invasion.
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Worth noting. These civilian airlines are a major way Russia moves troops and equipment around. Using commercial flights to transport troops long distance is pretty standard these days, but the Russians also have a long history of using civilian freight to ship equipment.
And given the weird lack of Russian Airforce activity around Ukraine right now. It’s entirely possible they don’t have the ability to move things around if their airlines go tits up.
ETA: I don’t think I’ve really heard that mentioned with the talk of blocking Russians from other country’s airspace. A lot of the coverage seems to assume it’s about preventing Oligarchs moving around or whatever.
But this is a pretty core military logistics thing these days, and it’s probably more the goal.
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