abrandt
19238
Hope there weren’t any mobilization-aged males living there. Presumably their “temporary accommodation centers” would be located on the frontlines in Ukraine.
CraigM
19239
One thing people have a hard time grasping, is how big some planes are. The SU-35 is about half the size of a 737-700.
It is a big plane. 50ft wide and 70ft long and 20ft tall. It has a wider and longer span than my house.
The only word Russian girls know is Yeysk.
Meanwhile, 1 million conscripts would mean slightly less than 2 million nuts getting frozen off this winter. Come the spring thaw, Ukraine will be even better fertilized than usual, though its wheat may taste of borscht.
No supplies again today, Yuri.
Grifman
19242
That’s exactly what it is - terror attacks out of frustration, with no impact on the strategic direction of the war. The Russians make half hearted attempts to attack Uk military infrastructure, probably because they are running out of precision missiles, and they aren’t all that accurate to begin with. So it’s much easier to use drones and older inaccurate ballistic missiles to target civilian populations to try and instill terror in the population. But it didn’t work for the Germans, and it’s not going to work for Russia.
Estonian intelligence services come out as cautiously anti-Russian:
rho21
19244
Are there any historical precedents where bombing civilians weakened a country’s resolve rather than hardening it?
Have you heard of WW2?
Of course there you can argue that nukes gave Japan an excuse to end the war they knew they were losing but didn’t have a political will to surrender. But you can call it losing a will to fight.
I don’t know if other losses, shortages, and war fatigue played a bigger role, but it’s possible the strategic bombing of German cities in WWII certainly didn’t harden their resolve. I mean, Dresden seems to have broken their resolve (maybe not entirely, but certainly to a degree.)
And yeah, Hiroshima and Nagasaki leap to mind.
Grifman
19247
There’s no evidence civilian bombing weakened any country’s resolve. At most, it induced sort of an apathy in civilian populations, but the various govts subjected to such bombing - Germany, the UK, Japan all continued to resist despite the bombing. In Germany and Japan, there was no civilian “vote” so whatever the civilian population might have wanted to be done didn’t matter. Theortically, the UK could have voted Churchill out of office to sue for peace but that didn’t happen. So, no, bombing (nukes excepted) did not lead to any weakening of resolve - all sides continued to fight, and in the case of the Germans/Japanese, oftentimes, fanatically.
rho21
19248
Yeah, I was wondering about mentioning the nukes. But I tend to regard them as facilitating the Emperor to surrender without loss of face. From what I understand they certainly didn’t cause a decrease in the belligerence of Japan’s military leadership.
I guess it’s harder to measure the effects on a populace controlled by an authoritarian government, as they aren’t the primary determinant of the country’s willingness to continue to fight.
I don’t know the morale effects of the Dresden firebombing, but I’m not convinced it helped significantly speed the end of the war. And the human cost was so vast. I’ve always thought of it as a vengeance attack justified as an attempt to break morale.
Houngan
19250
Looks like the drone war has arrived! Unfortunately offense got there before defense.
ShivaX
19251
The defense was invented a hundred years ago.
It’s just no one really thought we’d need the things anymore.
Most people agree that while the nukes were certainly a factor, the bigger factor was likely the USSR joining the war.
We’d be burning whole cities with death tolls higher in a single night than the nukes brought with conventional weapons.
No problem, just install radar-controlled Bofors every 200 yards around the cities. 60,000 of them should be enough.
Anyway, I don’t think Russia uses terror bombing to scare Ukrainians or anything. As most of this war, the reasons are internal. Russian patriots were really desperate because of Russian military looking impotent. They had to show their own citizens how cool they really are.
And an illustration of the accomplishments of Russian military might on Kyiv earlier today:
(Verified this – it’s apparently a very well-known wine cellar and store in Kyiv, and they were the ones to originally post the message on Facebook that she’d been killed with her husband and unborn baby in their apartment overnight.)
Djscman
19256
I spotted that parachute in the Twitter photo.
Not exactly The Great Santini flying that plane.
KevinC
19257
When we will classify Russia a state sponsor of terror? These are not military targets. It’s pure terrorism using weapons from a country we have labeled as such.
