Posted on 07/29/2022 4:54:35 AM PDT by FarCenter
Kramatorsk (Ukraine) (AFP) – The daily strikes on residential areas in eastern Ukraine have raised sensitive questions about military personnel deploying in civilian areas, as well as the activities of local informants.
AFP has visited many villages and towns in the Donetsk region, which Russian troops are trying to capture, where civilian areas with no apparent military significance are regularly being attacked.
In Pokrovsk, 85 kilometres (53 miles) to the south of Kramatorsk, the main city in the Ukrainian-held part of the region, a strike destroyed or damaged a dozen homes on a single street last week.
There have been similar and often deadly strikes in Kostiantynivka, Toretsk and even in Kramatorsk, further from the front line.
For many local residents, there is no doubt about why these areas are being hit -- they say Ukrainian troops are deploying in abandoned homes and schools.
AFP cannot independently verify their claims.
Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organisation, has accused both Russian and Ukrainian forces of putting civilians at risk by setting up positions in residential areas.
The group named four cases in areas occupied by Russian forces and three on the Ukrainian side in a report this month.
"Russian and Ukrainian forces have put civilians in Ukraine at unnecessary risk by basing their forces in populated areas without removing residents to safer areas," the report said.
Asked about the issue by AFP, the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said: "It's a war. It is impossible to avoid the destruction of infrastructure or homes.
"Our primary task is to stop the enemy and that can lead to the destruction of infrastructure. It is impossible to fight this war any other way," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at france24.com ...
Its hide and seek on both sides in a conflict.
Good to see that the media is INCHING towards telling the truth about the Ukrainians, rather than covering up their war crimes.
But the media has a LONG WAY to go.
I am kind of struggling to see the moral equivalence here.
One side could be defending their country, their Oblast, their town or village, home. How else are they supposed to defend it?!
The riles about occupying forces using human shields apply to THE INVADERS not the invaded.
If you think there’s something morally reprehensible about Uke defensive support being inside the area they’re defending then you’re effectively saying that the entire human history of armed defenders and unarmed citizens being in the same place is wrong.
Soldiers and peasants inside a motte and bailey castle? Wrong! Circled wagons? Wrong! Home invasion? Don’t tool up if your family’s defenceless otherwise you invite open season.
I mean... It really is a truly retarded argument that only a Russian or anti American would entertain.
Defenders of an unarmed population are going to be near if not inside that unarmed group. On what remotely sane basis would any patriot ever object to that?
That is your ignorant opinion. Geneva conventions say that whatever side needs to avoid using civilian infrastructure or evacuate peaceful people beforehand if it is impossible.
If it is not done then the ‘defender’ is liable for whatever collateral damage.
The Russian side is abiding the rule, Ukrainians are intentionally shelterng in schools and hospitals and take civilians hostage for atrocity propaganda once they are hit by the Russians.
But we in the west are aghast when Russia tortures or abuses their military and easily overlook it when Ukraine does likewise - such as burning people at the stake or stripping, beating and tying them to poles for public display.
Equally they both are and do use human shields in Ukraine - likely mostly by the fringe fighters who have no moral boundaries and anything goes. From Azov to Chechnya's both and the lot of foreign fighters running around Ukraine.
They aren’t highlighting why some troops are based there, Russian soldiers roaming in to loot and pillage
It’s the Soviet Russians who are attacking and invading them, not the other way around.
The country belongs to Ukraine. It’s their house and yard and they are the ones being attacked and invaded, again, by their old Soviet neighbors hell bent on reliving their good ol’ days.
Corrupt it may be, but Ukrainian politics can be changed with an election and, with so much Western investment pouring in, I believe this will happen.
Yet another Soviet occupation could take decades to oust and even longer to recover from.
“Ukrainians are intentionally sheltering in schools and hospitals” - Irrelevant if the Ukes were using THEIR SCHOOLS and THEIR HOSPITALS, and weren’t forcing the Ukrainian civilians to stay put.
It MAY be a war crime, if and only if the civilians in those buildings were at minimal risk until the Uke soldiers showed up, and were put at further risk by their presence. If the Russians were going to attack those buildings WITH OR WITHOUT the Uke soldiers in them, then no crime was committed. As we know from Mariupol, faulty intel was fed to Russia, saying that Azov had been occupying the hospital exclusively for weeks. Russia bombed it without verification. Whether or not some Azov troops were in it, it was still an operational hospital and the civilians in it were there despite the soldiers not because of the soldiers - so with that one attack alone Russia broke three international rules of law.
“Geneva conventions say that whatever side needs to avoid using civilian infrastructure or evacuate peaceful people beforehand if it is impossible.”
Which the Ukrainians have done throughout. Whenever they’ve had extended warnings of a town or city coming under direct attack, they’ve done precisely that. This is how come well over 5 million Ukrainians who would’ve been in the direct line of fire, made it to safety. You can’t legislate for what happens if the Russians turn up in a town that’s already been cut off by fighting. You can’t legislate for Russia firing missiles as far as Vinnitsya either.
“The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against the dangers arising from military operations” - Who is conducting the Special Military Operation? Russia. Which army is the defense force? Ukraine’s.
If a troop of Ukrainian soldiers are in a village defending the Ukrainian villagers from outside attack, or arrive there en route from somewhere else, those civilians are neither a human shield for Ukraine to use, nor a legitimate target for Russia to hit.
Unarmed civilians are unlawfully targeted if the invaders deliberately fire at them instead of at the armed enemy. Unarmed civilians become human shields if they are forced into a position that puts them between the attackers and the defenders.
The rules of war are quite compatible with common sense. If an enemy horde rocks up in a town and there’s a defense force nearby the defense forces have a moral right to defend those people that isn’t predicated on them getting OUT of the area that needs defending.
The Russian side clearly is NOT abiding by the rules. Read Article 8 here: if that were a bingo card, we’d already have a full house on violations of #2 and at least be halfway there on #3. https://legal.un.org/icc/statute/99_corr/cstatute.htm
I think you are trying to make up a precedent under which hundreds of the US veterans are going to get hunted and prosecuted by non-Western countries using extended definition of war crime.
Who said you the Russians are going to attack civilian structures with or without civilians in them? Pay attention to the fact that most of the bridges in Ukraine are standing, water, electricity and even communications are working. Power and water plants are first to go when the US forces are involved.
There are numerous verified reports of Ukes using unevacuated residential areas and schools to fire on Russian forces and fired on civilians who tried to escape.
You can find statements of political leaders encouraging this behavior by claiming genetical deficiencies of Eastern Ukrainans.
You say false intelligence was fed to the Russians to force a strike on active hospital. Are you okay? Who are at fault if not the person instigating false intelligence?:)
The last stands at the factories by Nazi groups is very telling. In most cases they herd thousands of women and children with them.
Bottom line is that you are supporting particularly evil people and should be ashamed of it.
No. I am going by what's happening in the UK where we're investigating our own. Blair might've escaped prosecution, but lots of veterans from Iraq and Northern Ireland are being investigated. Extradition has been attempted... by America, in the case of an autistic boy who hacked the US military while looking for UFO evidence (he then contacted the military to tell them the system was open to hacking attempts, and instead of America just dealing with that quietly it had an almighty internationally advertised hissy fit telling everyone from Russia to China that the system was still as hackable as it was in the Matthew Broderick film "War Games".)
Who said you the Russians are going to attack civilian structures with or without civilians in them? Pay attention to...
There are numerous verified reports of Ukes using unevacuated residential areas and schools to fire on Russian forces and fired on civilians who tried to escape.
I think it's you who's not paying attention, or even being vaguely realistic. Under international law, Russia is an invading/occupying force and Ukraine is defending itself. Ever hear of "stand your ground"? the same principles apply. If the Russian forces have demonstrably flattened towns and villages behind them, as well as firing rockets at cities hundreds of miles from the action, there is absolutely no basis for assuming they won't do the same to towns and villages directly in front of them. There's no need to second-guess their motives. What they've already done is a far more important indicator than what they say they're going to do.
It's like in Mars Attacks! where Martians keep shouting "We come in peace!" while shooting at anything that moves... yes there are some morons who do carry on acting as if the extermination is entirely down to a horrible American diplomatic gaffe that can be resolved through bonhomie and being nice to the aliens. Yes they still think the "we come in peace" message is honest, despite mounting evidence all around them that the Martians are simply in it purely for the shits and giggles and the dove incident was just their hilarious way to get the victim to blame himself. You know what happens to those deluded masochists? They all get spanked.
There'll always be civilians who cannot or will not leave a town facing imminent ground troop combat, and it is entirely right that a defensive force that has a duty to protect those civilians does so in the most effective way possible. In Mariupol, Azov did put the civilians in shelters, and wrote messages all round the buildings making it abundantly clear they were civilian shelters, and had forces near if not in those buildings to fight Russians hand to hand if necessary. In most cases, the civilians were BEHIND or UNDER the fighters, not put in between Azov and the Russian forces.
The ONLY bit of your statement that is at all relevant is the bit I've highlighted in bold - if defenders start forcing civilians into the line of fire or start shooting at the civilians, it is THEY who are in the wrong and you're absolutely right, they have committed a war crime - but that still doesn't mean the invading force has the moral upper hand and ISN'T capable of committing war crimes too.
You can find statements of political leaders encouraging this behavior by claiming genetical deficiencies of Eastern Ukrainans.
So what? You can just as easily find Russian Duma members saying the exact same thing in the other direction - that the "khokols" are an inferior race to the pure Russian. Difference is, in Ukraine the ethnonationalists accounted for less than 5% of all elected politicians and were an isolated minority within the national guard before the invasion. In Russia, ethnonationalism is promoted by state propagandists, and is rife across their national discourse, so while the Uke version is a fringe thing, in Russia it's state-sponsored just like Aryan ethnonationalism was sponsored by the Nazi regime.
The pro-Putin, pro-Novorussiya, pro-war, pro-Russkyi Mir RUSSIAN intellectual/political/media elites are industrialising ethnonationalism. Ukraine may be too, but it wouldn't be doing it if Russia wasn't invading them.
You say false intelligence was fed to the Russians to force a strike on active hospital. Are you okay? Who are at fault if not the person instigating false intelligence?:)
FFS. Russian intelligence comes from the Kadyrovites (who're doing what Kadyrov wants them to do just as much as what Putin wants), and from the DPR fighters. The head honcho of the DPR militia even admitted he made up a lot of the shit he fed the Kremlin. THEY told Russia the hospital had been out of service for weeks, all patients and medics had been removed by Azov, and the ONLY people in the hospital were Azov. Russia didn't do any verification; it acted on their intel.
If you want to know WHY the intelligence was so badly wrong, the people who should answer that are the commanders in the Kadyrov and Wagner forces, who LIED. If you really think Azov have a channel of disinformation that told the Kremlin that Mariupol Hospital was a legitimate target, then (a) why didn't the Russian forces say "Hang on a minute, we KNOW the hospital is still in active use!" when the orders came through and (b) why didn't it occur to the military to seek confirmation of their own troop locations before firing and THAT WAY find out.
The last stands at the factories by Nazi groups is very telling. In most cases they herd thousands of women and children with them.
Yes. Their families, and people who couldn't flee. You fail to mention, those civilians were at the far bottom of a shelter so robust the Russians couldn't even nuke it. Between the civilians and the entry points, there were hospital areas. Between the hospital areas and the entry points, THAT'S where the defenders were. Under international law, a violation of the conventions of war only took place if those people were kept prisoner against their will. Some say they wanted to leave and could've left safely but weren't allowed to, others said they tried to leave but the Russians were shooting at everything that moved so they were forced back into the shelter not by Azov fighters but by the appearance of a Russian "no quarter". The whole thing needs a very thorough investigation.
Bottom line is that you are supporting particularly evil people and should be ashamed of it.
Bottom line is, you're supporting an evil REGIME as well as the evil people fighting for it. I'd say you should be ashamed of it, but you're way too shameless to bother to labor the point.
You - and a few other Useful Idiots on the pro-Putin side - seem hell-bent on seeing the 21st century of Hitler's nazi regime as the good guy literally no matter how far Russia goes in pursuit of its ethnonationalist, totalitarian, pro-genocide, pro-WMD, pro-torture, anti-democracy, anti-West Novorossiya WARS. Plural. If Russia invaded Alaska tomorrow, and nuked a city further down the west coast, you'd probably bend over backwards to find a moral argument to the effect of, they're still the good guys.
Thank you for retelling the Uke propaganda I already heard.
What is your evaluation of the recent incident where the Russians allegedly fired HIMARS on own jail to kill Ukrainian PoWs?
The problem with your propaganda is that it defies common sense.
It's inconclusive either way as far as I can tell. Reuters' summary seems fair:
"Russia said on Friday that Ukraine struck a prison in separatist-held territory with U.S.-made HIMARS rockets, killing 40 Ukrainian prisoners of war and wounding 75. Ukraine said Russia carried out the strike to falsely incriminate Kyiv. Reuters could not immediately verify the accounts of either side in the conflict."
Andrei Rudenko is a Kremlin-approved journalist (how you can be state-approved AND independent, I don't know!) who's videoed the scene. Example: (Source: Twitter)..
The problem with his videos (that I've seen) is that they are so heavily cut. When 2 hours of inspection is cut to a very short clip with obvious jump cuts, one has to ask what AREN'T they showing and why - if the full unedited footage is available, that'd be more useful.
Have you seen my profile page? I have this video bookmarked on it. It is a 1986 advert for a British newspaper. It demonstrates exactly why reliance on cut footage can create a false narrative - if there are other angles, and longer uncut footage, it's wise to see that before coming to a conclusion. The Guardian's 1986 'Points of view' advert (YouTube)
Static photos and other video clips are showing HIMARS fragments - e.g. this photo on Twitter and this clip with fragments placed on a bench for the video - but these artefacts are clearly showing items that have been moved in order to be photographed or videoed. That's exceptionally poor forensic practice where artefacts are photographed in situ, numbered, and are shown in the context of the overall wreckage.
Those pictures/videos could've been taken from that location on that day, or taken from elsewhere, or even photographed/videoed from somewhere else entirely. There's no way to know if they've been staged or doctored. For that reason these artefacts may be interesting, but they wouldn't hold up in any reasonable tribunal or court of law WITHOUT ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE OF PROVENANCE, because these artifacts patently have been manipulated, edited, and don't seem to fit in the "walkaround" footage from the scene.
To say that doctored evidence amounts to conclusive proof, would defy common sense, would it not? It may or may not be true, but either way it is CLEARLY Russian Propaganda.
So, there is Ukrainian propaganda that hasn't used doctored footage, and Russian propaganda that HAS used doctored footage.
So, in the absence of conclusive evidence in either direction, my evaluation considers Means, Motive, Opportunity, Reason, Risk, Reward.
What really defies common sense is, you'll happily take heavily cropped, doctored and obviously staged videos and photos from very tightly controlled angles as proof that the Russians are telling the truth even where that means you're relying on one person's account of an incident for the whole truth... but if presented with a dozen totally unrelated Uke CCTV feeds, webcams, smartphones and eyewitness accounts of an event you STILL think it's faked because there is literally no bar high enough when it comes to Ukes satisfying a burden of proof.
Just LOL. The motive is clear, they don’t want war criminals talking. Why HIMARS? Because they don’t care and know that the media is going to cover for them.
You won’t find any reasonable argument supporting the most idea that Russia did it.
Turns out the photos of the “evidence” have been reused from a prior Russian propaganda effort.
https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1553346547739410432
They really are lazy sods, the Russians. If you’re going to try and fake it, at least make it NOT obvious they’re the exact same recovered bits of kit on the exact same park bench...
Yep, if twitter says so, must be true:)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.