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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

Russia doesn't have a big track military track record in recent years, but there's one thing that they have proven to do really well: leveling a city to the ground while slaughtering the civilians who didn't flee.

Having the Ukrainian legitimate government agree to surrender to save Kiev (or “just” Khariv) from such a fate isn't completely impossible to imagine. And giving infantry weapons isn't going to be enough to stop Putin from doing so if he wanted. I don't know how many FОАВ[1] the Russian air force has at its disposal, but Javelin aren't gonna help against that…

And after this hypothetical surrender from the Ukrainian government, setting up a bloody dictatorship with a special police arresting, torturing and executing whoever is suspected to belong to the insurgency, relying on pro-russian locals to provide intelligence is not an impossible feat unfortunately…

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_of_All_Bombs

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Fallujah and Mosul were pretty bad in terms of city levelling. We just don't like to remember them, or think about depleted uranium dust causing birth defects, or what happened to the refugees, or a million other things.

You can't just compare Fallujah and Grozny. Of course urban warfare is destructive to the city no matter what, but the US and Russian tactics are very different, and so is the destruction. Dropping tons of low precision thermobaric weapons on a city is a Russian thing, unmatched in its destruction. (The is no American equivalent to the TOS-1[1] for instance).

That being said, that doesn't mean I approve US invasion of Irak in any way (because I do not), it just feels you're comparing Pearl Harbor with Stalingrad… (Ok, not literally, because there is a two orders of magnitude difference between Pearl Harbor and Stalingrad, but you get the idea).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOS-1

> You can't just compare Fallujah and Grozny.

That's a fair statement. Depleted Uranium is a gift that keeps on giving.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-depleted-uranium-as-ma_b_3...

https://www.nuclear-risks.org/en/hibakusha-worldwide/falluja...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Iraqi_populat...

There not discussion that DU has terrible long term impact, of course it has. The US aren't “good guys” who don't hurt civilians, nobody is arguing that!

Yet, “in terms of city leveling” Fallujah and Grozny are not comparable. That's it.

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1994%E2%80... the Russian army started to destroy Grozny with heavy bombings only after the initial plan, which was to drive the tank columns straight to the presidential palace, badly failed.

Their stated objective in Ukraine is not to take Kyiv, let's hope it's true.

I was thinking about Syria, not Chechnya, since that's a more recent major conflict with city captures that the Russians have participated in.

That thing is only really useful against static, or near static high value targets. Against insurgents dispersed across the countryside with Javelins the weapon itself is effectively useless while the aircraft delivering it is still vulnerable.

I think the implication is it might be used against civilian population in a city.

> That thing is only really useful against static, or near static high value targets.

Exactly, like the the capital of your country for instance. Noting that I'm not talking about defeating an insurgency with it, just overthrow the legitimate government and put a pro-russian dictatorship in charge. Exterminating the insurgents would then be the job of the local dictator. Obviously it's not guaranteed, but torture, kidnapping, and assassination have proven an effective mean of counter-insurgency… In real life the bad guy sometimes win…

Im was addressing it's usefulness in the situation suggested. Yes it is useful in other situations, as I pointed out.

The thing is, once they do that, they'll cross another one of those imaginary lines.

And the sanctions Russia is under will be nothing like the ones that will be heaped on top.

Europe is highly sensitive about local conflicts, especially after what happened to Srebrenica. Grozny didn't really count since it was:

a) an internal war

b) at the end of Europe

If Putin flattens a major European city (for Europe any city above ~2m or so is major), the outrage in Europe will be huge. Even bigger than it is now.

We have not seen what the Germany Army is capable of since 80 years ago. Does Putin really want to find out what has changed since then?

The German Army isn't capable of much at the moment.

And even if it were, no NATO member will set foot in Ukraine while this war and the following insurgency are happening.

What will happen is, depending on how hard Putin pushes, the reaction will be just as strong. More attacks targeting civilians? More weapons sent to Ukraine. Harder sanctions, with actual teeth. I wouldn't be shocked if by next winter 60%+ of the gas supply for Western Europe will be covered from other vendors, more or less bankrupting Russia (a huge percentage of Russian exports are raw materials, primarily oil and gas).

> I wouldn't be shocked if by next winter 60%+ of the gas supply for Western Europe will be covered from other vendors, more or less bankrupting Russia

you will be shocked to discover that Russia is going to fuel China's economy instead [1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-28/gazprom-p...

Possible, but risky for China to do that. A dollar buying Chinese made goods, is a dollar China has to buy Russian oil products, is a dollar Russia has to pay soldiers and build more weapons to bomb whoever they're bombing. I'm in favor of global free trade, but not without limits. The U.N. Charter is more important. The non-violent multilateral institution of resolving disputes is too important. Anyone outside that arrangement is calling to past demons. And for what? What does China gain by being seen as funding Russia's war effort?

The Chinese are not kind masters.

CCP is at least sane and thinks long-term. They don't want nuclear war, at least. I'd honestly feel relieved if Xi were pulling Putin's puppet strings at this point.

> If Putin flattens a major European city, the outrage in Europe will be huge.

Ukraine is not in NATO. And I'm afraid if NATO and EU have to choose between a direct military confrontation of nuclear-capable powers and a genocide of 40-million-and-dwidling Ukrainian population, they'd choose the latter as long as Putin keeps this contained in Ukraine.

Would it turn Russia into Greater North Korea? Absolutely. Would it cause outrage and grave concern? You bet. Would it make NATO to move in and stop it? Unlikely at the moment.

In 2022 outrage does not influence policies. You have it reversed.

In the US? Probably not.

But in Europe that outrage will also be from a place of fear: maybe Russia will do it to you, too. So it will be longer lasting and a more intense and probably a truer feeling. Not fake outrage.

Russia has claimed that the mission is to liberate Ukraine from Nazis, which is why you see videos of unarmed civilians not being immediately run over by trucks.

If the mission changes to kill as many civilians as possible, the army is going to have an even worse morale problem and the international community will come up with a creative solution like giving part of Poland to Ukraine, giving Ukrainian citizenship to anyone within that part of Poland and then launching attacks with all the military resources that just happen to now be in Ukraine.

> Russia has claimed that the mission is to liberate Ukraine from Nazis, which is why you see videos of unarmed civilians not being immediately run over by trucks.

> If the mission changes to kill as many civilians as possible, the army is going to have an even worse morale problem

I agree. This is indeed one of the biggest challenge the Russian army will face if they decide to do so.

> the international community will come up with a creative solution like giving part of Poland to Ukraine, giving Ukrainian citizenship to anyone within that part of Poland and then launching attacks with all the military resources that just happen to now be in Ukraine.

This is hilarious, I love it. Never gonna happen, but I love the creativity here. This is “thinking out of the box”.

The more realistic "creative use of borders" I anticipate is citing historic claims of (mostly) Poland to carve off a big chunk of Ukraine in the West into a new state, and put it under explicit or implied ("just try and see what happens") NATO protection. I don't expect that unless Russia starts having a lot more success, though, and both they and Ukraine start to signal that they might accept a partition of the country to end hostilities.

[EDIT] Further caveat that it'd have to be before substantial Russian ground forces reach that part of the country. This is still a low-likelihood scenario, but certainly far more likely than declaring part of Poland to be in Ukraine (?!)

>why you see videos of unarmed civilians not being immediately run over by trucks.

starting to see videos of explosives being lobbed at unarmed people. These do not seem like crowd-control munitions: https://twitter.com/aldin_ww/status/1499059624250646538

On a more historic note, it took the Soviets a couple of days before they ran over people with tanks during the January Events in Vilnius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania)#Tim... note how they also claimed it was acting against a "nationalist" (equivalent to "nazi" in the USSR) government.

Just sign a paper that Poland rocket is now Ukrainian rocket and then shoot it over border. Ukraine will not protest if a Ukrainian rocket will hit an enemy target on territory of Ukraine. Nobody can easily check who operates a rocket or drone.

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