> How do you know they targeted them?

Double-tap attacks are a tell-tale sign of this. If half an hour later another missile or a drone "accidentally" hits exactly the same spot to kill rescue workers, there's not much mystery left.

  > The death toll among civilians also does not look like they're being targeted, more like collateral damage. Typically when you see a headline like "another bloodthirsty attack of Russian orcs of Ukraine's civilians", you open the post to see that there's 4 dead + 15 injured. Like if they had a goal of killing civilians, they wouldn't do it by hundreds.

Modern drones and missiles are rather ineffective for killing lots of people. Most of them get shot down, and those that reach their targets have relatively small warheads. Nothing compared to old-school area bombing. A typical major air raid (500-800 planes) in WWII delivered 2000-4000 tons of bombs to a single city. A typical 200-drone strike in 2026 delivers potentially no more than 10 tons spread across the country, probably even less if we account for decoys. The largest strikes (drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles combined) had about 40 ton payload, of which 10 tons reached the intended target. In WWII terms, that's about 3 planes' worth of bombs.