I’ve thought about offering to show them personal evidence of dead family and friends in Ukraine, but I don’t think that will really change anything. There’s always some excuse or way for them to deny it.
The rubble and ruins of war across the Middle East, state brutality of all scales from China to the U.S., unprecedented destruction by weather events... all delivered to your screen in near real-time then 24/7 pundit-ized until the next event... non stop for over a decade.
If you grew up in this cesspool of information, you tune out. If you yearn for the ignorance of yesteryear, conspiracies are easier to digest than critically analyzing the deluge of info... and that doesn't take into account all of the people who are just out there mostly concerned everyday with food and shelter for themselves and family.
To your point... As I started to write this, a nearby group of senior citizens meeting for morning coffee (in East Bay, CA) started fawning over this "refrigerator magnet set that helps you construct your own conspiracy".
I think of artillery as less precise, with the idea of using it to indiscriminately level a large area. It’s fired from 10-20 miles away, with a few rounds a minute.
Howitzers, for instance, will be important in eastern Ukrainian
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/30...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerhaubitze_2000
Up to 3 roubds in 9 seconds, 10 - 13 roubds per minute continously. Depeding on the shells accuracy can be around 1 m per 48 km. Arguably, that's among the most advanced, and expensive systems. The accuracy comes from the shells, so in theory a lot of manually loaded artillery pieces should be able to achieve the accuracy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
At 70k USD per round not nrcessarily cheap so.
That's not terribly expensive either when the accuracy can save civilian lives or the lives of soldiers using it.
Even conventional unguided howitzer artillery is more than accurate enough to be effective against things as small as vehicles.
Cruise missiles are used for higher value targets.
Not saying that this particular report is not believable, just that "the media already said so" is not an argument in 2022.
In isolation it would be fair to be sceptical of the intercepted conversations where commanders are calling in strikes on residential areas, but this is a recurring pattern with the Russian military.
It's important to distinguish here between the Russian military and the Russian people. Conflating the two feeds into the Putinist propaganda that Russia will be hated in the West no matter what it does.
Yes, also aircraft dropped bombs, missiles, rockets, mortars, direct fire from tanks, etc.
Satellite images from before the Russian army left the town of Bucha.
Hello from Kyiv.
There’s a video on Reddit of Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russian POWs in legs, with AKs.
The soldiers were from a local guard, and the POWs from an artillery unit that had been bombarding their small city.
I think it’s on /r/combatfootage, or /r/UkraineWarVideoReport, if you want to look it up.
Furthermore, if Ukrainians are committing war crimes against the invading Russian army which basically has war crimes as their tactics and strategy, they're mostly morally justified. Hopefully they don't.
Yikes. Good thing you don't speak for anyone but yourself. Justifying war crimes from any side is so far beyond the pale, it's mind-blowing.
For a precedent, the Soviet army treated German POWs and worse, civilians, atrociously. But they had just suffered through a bitter war of destruction where they themselves were treated similarly.
It's up to the commanders to keep things clean and not let the anger spillover. Of course the Soviets didn't care, and on the contrary encouraged atrocities. So far the Ukrainians seem to be taking the high road, and all the better for everyone.
The thing is that they've done it really badly, so they've suffered all the propaganda penalties without convincingly getting the upper hand. And they've killed a lot of civilians too, obviously.
That is the operating rules, because Russia isn't competent to do anything else, but even they can attach an apartment block.
What on earth did you think they were using it for?
Absolutely baffling that someone could not be aware of this.
Are you actually living under a rock?
In Mariupol fighting is going on within the city so that's what happens. If you look at previous historical examples, the same result ensues. Stalingrad being a very famous one, Berlin as well, Beirut in Lebanon during the civil war, recently Aleppo in Syria. Before that you can find pictures of the American Civil War. Dresden and Tokyo were flattened during WWII without any actual ground fighting going on there, just large scale air bombings with incendiary bombs...
In conventional warfare since at least the 19th century, cities get flattened.
In the media, and judging by the reactions to this comment, people are driven emotionally in the moment for the purpose of manufacturing public opinion (i.e. war propaganda) but it's always useful to keep distances and keep some perspective. Especially since this is the first large-ish scale conventional warfare in some time, at least with this level of media coverage.
Are they using artillery on cities?