Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The participants of the Geneva Conventions were well aware that in war, harming innocent civilians and their property is often hard to avoid. So when they delineated what should henceforth count as a war crime, they were careful to weigh collateral damage against the expected military benefit of an attack. So killing civilians isn't automatically a war crime, but pointlessly killing civilians is.

Saying Russia is "deliberately targeting the civilian population" is implicitly a war crime accusation, but it could very well be that the Russian officer who made the targeting decision was actually trying to hit a ball-bearing factory and accuracy just wasn't good enough. Though for FPV drones that can be retargeted in real time, such an argument is harder to make. In any case, whether or not something is a war crime depends on the state of mind of the decision makers, not just the outcome.

>whether or not something is a war crime depends on the state of mind of the decision makers

The state of mind of Ukrainian decision-makers is there: "a psychological effect on Russian society and, likely, on continued support for the war". It somewhat puzzles me why they want to create widespread public support in Russia for escalation.

Obviously they expect that people will be less likely to support a war that affects them negatively. Like, are you going to personally volunteer to take revenge for your Wildberries orders being more expensive and arriving late? In any case, the more important psychological effect will be on logistics officers facing a shrinking budget and rising prices, who might ration supplies to the front in response.

>Like, are you going to personally volunteer to take revenge for your Wildberries orders being more expensive and arriving late?

It's odd that you don't consider revenge for workers who were murdered by Ukrainian drones. And people who lived through "democratic 90s" don't care about Wildberries orders being late.

People are volunteering in many ways. For example, by donating money to buy stuff for soldiers when military procurement fails them.

>logistics officers facing a shrinking budget and rising prices, who might ration supplies to the front in response.

Of course not. Civilian warehouses, especially in Siberia, have nothing to do with supplying the front.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com