Bucha definitely seems to be a war crime, but one should be careful about throwing that term around every time civilians get killed.
“Russia sure has been making a lot of mistakes lately:”
Based on estimates of Russian losses they are pretty much totally incompetent, so I don’t expect them to be good at picking targets either. USA has made quite a lot of “mistakes” during the war of terror (want me to make a partial list?), but, guess what, it suffered no consequences whatsoever.
It doesn’t help that Ukraine sometimes place their military next to civilian buildings either:
Tell you what; if and when Russia decides to be more careful about where they throw bullets and artillery and missiles and bombs then maybe we can revisit how careful we’ve been throwing around mean words.
“Corpses of executed people still line the Yabluska street in Bucha. Their hands are tied behind their backs with white ‘civilian’ rags, they were shot in the back of their heads. So you can imagine what kind of lawlessness they perpetrated here,” Bucha mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk told Reuters on Saturday.
Do countries need to hold some kind of international moral high ground before they deplore the tactics Russia is using? If that’s the prerequisite, then there will be no consequences ever for anything.
As I said: Bucha seems to be a war crime; a modern day My Lai. This wasn’t about Bucha but the missiles at Kramatorsk.
It does seem a bit hypocritical to say that it’s OK when we do it, but a crime that will be severely punished when you do the same thing. I’m all in favor of punishing the Russians involved, but if Biden wants to complain he should start by organising trials of war criminals at home and have USA join the ICC.
The way the propaganda is going, this seems to be heading towards a direct military intervention and possibly WW III with the big rockets flying, but then I suppose Earth will do better without so many humans around.
This requires a citation. Has anyone at all here made that argument? I read a lot here and I have not seen that. Because I don’t think it exists. If it does, please cite. If not, this is pure bothsideserism, and irrelevant to the discussion.
Imagine people leveling valid criticism against the United States while it was actively committing war crimes in Mai Lai or bombing weddings in Afghanistan.
Now imagine someone popping into each of those conversations just to say ”well what about that time [country X] did something terrible?”
I thought it was obvious that as I had already declared Bucha a war crime the other half of the sentence referred to the other accusations.
From the original article: “Kremlin affiliated media first proudly reported the massacre, claiming their missile hit an ammunition train that arrived yesterday evening.”
I replied to the statement “Do countries need to hold some kind of international moral high ground before they deplore the tactics Russia is using?”. Not if anyone on BB made statements like that but that people like Biden who voted in support of the invasion of Iraq now tries to take a moral high ground. In the end that is what matters when it comes to the draconian sanctions, arms support and possible military intervention, not what people on BB think.
I see. I feel confident that every nation on earth has some shit in their past that would constitute horrible war crimes. Therefore, to paraphrase Syndrome, “If everyone is horrible, then no one is.” Or, “Let (his country) which is without sin, cast the first stone.”
No, I don’t buy it. There is no purity standard for criticizing war crimes. These are. It is OK to call them out.
It is hypocritical. What if the problem isn’t that we are being too hard on the Russian murderers, though, but too soft on the American ones? Instead of shutting up because our countries have their own problems, maybe the answer is calling out all war crimes and imperialism? That’s what most people here try to do, you know.
I agree that the problem is that USA gets away with too much, and I’m not complaining about people here but about how the world is run. Biden is in a position where he doesn’t have to be soft on American war criminals.
Do people here support the idea that USA and the rest of the coalition of the willing should have been hit with sanctions as cripping as those imposed on Russia back in 2003? If it had worked it would certainly have set a strong example that not even the strongest was above the law.
It would have been nice, yeah. Especially since they could have easily been targeted at the war criminals actually responsible. Seeing Haliburton and Blackwater sanctioned out of existence would have been wonderful. I’m not happy the world missed its chance either.
Anyway, right now there are Ukrainian civilians getting butchered in what really looks like an attempt to eliminate them as a distinct people – genocide is the technical term – and if Biden wants to help stop that, that much is a good thing, no matter what other opportunities he is missing. It’s not fair to try to save some lives but not others, but the saving lives is not the half of that to complain about.
Chenille, you’re making it too easy on yourself. It wasn’t Blackwater or Haliburton that invaded Iraq, it was the US government. Blackwater and Haliburton were just subcontractors. I don’t know exactly what you could do to emulate confiscating the entire Russian currency reserve and stopping exports and imports of almost everything, but that’s the kind of measures we’re talking about. Empty shelves and empty wallets for common Americans.
Is there anyone pure enough to call out the Russian genocide of the Ukrainian people, or should we just navel-gaze and stew in our own guilt while it goes on? Seriously, it seems as though you would advocate for ignoring the suffering over there on the basis of “we’re no angels.” I reject that argument out of hand.
