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Comment by protomolecule | Hacker News Reader

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>if there is anything in this article besides atrocity propaganda?

Some of use dislike atrocities and feel reporting them is a good idea so they stop. By propaganda are you suggesting the FT is lying and the Russians aren't killing civilians with drones on purpose?

There is also a bbc article on the same stuff https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c207gz7key6o

> Kherson welcomed Russians in the Feb 2022

Welcomed with "Go home!" chants, to be precise, and were shot at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrf0yLxViRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=886GLfYIvpA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDJ-y_bw7Uk

Russians recived such a welcome that they decided to set up a network of 26 torture centers in and around Kherson. International investigators are still working on putting together details of what happened there and locating all the people who went missing:

https://news.sky.com/story/torture-24-hours-a-day-survivors-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/kherson-tortur...

One has to wonder why you are spending your time here offering counter-propaganda for the Russian military.

If you look at his comments they are basically all shilling for Russia apart from one on Rust. The most recent being "what took him so long" on Putin raising defence spending to a third of Russia's budget.

I'm not sure that's really what you are supposed to do on HN? Also you might think Russia could find something better to do that spending all their money and tens of thousands of their men on trying to kill the neighbours and steal their land. It's not even really profitable these days.

Actually it can be more profitable than you might think. It turns out the resources that Putin's forces are sitting on are both quite valuable and strategically significant:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/natural-resources-ukraine-w...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/climate/ukraine-lithium.h... (https://archive.md/OkQ2a)

Though the war was launched primarily for ideological reasons, it's safe to assume that the plunder aspect factored into whatever deranged cost-benefit analysis he made at the time.

Maybe but Russia is not exactly short on natural resources and does seem like it could do with more manpower which it's depleting both through war deaths and young people leaving.

Also the war is apparently costing ~500m-1bn per day and looks like dragging on into another Afghanistan like situation.

I think the thing started a bit because Putin was reading 19th century books on invasions and similar during covid lockdown and imperial invasion used to kind of make sense back then - I'm a Brit and we had quite an empire. But now when the economy is dominated by tech I'm not sure it pays.

It's not that his country was short on resources. But it seems likely that he simply calculated that the cost of the invasion would be more than offset by the gain in resources.

No doubt the manpower (and financial) costs have been much higher than expected. But it seems that his country's tolerance thresholds on these dimensions have turned out to be significantly higher than he was expecting at the outset, also.

But now when the economy is dominated by tech I'm not sure it pays.

Right - for modern empires, which dominate primarily through their economic, technological and cultural prowess (and which have grown tired of slaughtering their own peoples in mass numbers for speculative geopolitical gain), it doesn't make sense at all.

But Putin knows his empire can't compete on any of those fronts. And since he has comparatively few restrictions on the number of his people's lives he can throw down the drain for the sake of his various projects - we can see how the 19th century model starts to seem all the more appealing to him.

> Testing is even more callous and meaningless hypothesis: why waste drones on civilians when there are plenty of military targets? > Why not test in Russia dropping paintball grenades?

This article has numerous points that have difficulty standing up to a healthy application of common sense.

Why would Russia attack its own citizens when there’s free targets next door in Ukraine instead? Can we reasonably expect any ordinary citizen to be able to identify the nationality behind a missile or a drone? They could be from any EU country.

The governor of Pennsylvania was recently lambasted for spending so much of his time signing bombs and signing missiles in photo-ops instead of focusing on improving Pennsylvania and helping the zombies on Kensington Ave. I wonder if any of these munitions had his signature on them, jokingly.

If the goal, as Noam Chomsky would say, to manufacture consent for war: there are better articles for that than this.

It’s also somewhat too late to be pushing out articles like this when a change in the U.S. leadership will occur in less than 2 months on Jan 20th, 2025. Can you even deploy significant numbers of military-aged men on the ground over the Christmas Holidays, especially when we have no formal declaration of war through congress?

>somewhat too late to be pushing out articles like this when a change in the U.S. leadership will occur

There is also the hypothesis that a newspaper is reporting news because it's happening. The FT isn't really known as a shiller of war propaganda.

>Why would Russia attack its own citizens when there’s free targets next door in Ukraine

Kherson is Ukraine

The only bit that seems wrong to me is 'target practice.' They are making too much effort for that. I'd say deliberate murder is closer.

> and using the city as a shield

A shield against what?

What the commenter means is that when Russian/Soviet forces hold defensive positions in large cities, they're valiantly protecting them from "genocidal sieges".[0]

But when Ukrainian forces do the same, they're callously sacrificing the inhabitants by "using the city as a shield".

Is everything clear now?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42294630

Ah, so the best solution will be for Russia to show leadership by getting out of Ukraine altogether. That way there's no need for anyone to hold defensive positions or for cities to be used as shields.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com