“But yeah, who would make a mess like this in their own back yard?”
Everybody thinks of war as precise. The Gulf War gave everyone the idea that war was a bunch of guys sitting at terminals directing Lazer bombs at targets as small as rain barrels. But the Russian military not only has conscripts, it also has convicts in it. Some of these people will have mental problems. You can drop them into a uniform and instruct them to follow orders, but what they do when there isn’t an officer standing in front of them is probably a deck of options where the options are all wild cards. Imagine you have a guy manning a howitzer who has a huge passive-aggressive problem. He gets a set of coordinates to fire on with specific instructions NOT to fire two degrees to the left of those coordinates. Nobody is going to tie a disaster down to him and here’s his chance to do something BIG that nobody can stop. You might say nobody in their right mind would do something like that, but convicts are not noted for making good decisions.
Even if everyone involved as the best of intentions for their side, once a war starts bad things will happen. There’s no stopping it.
Probably the best thing that could happen would be if Ukraine shut down all reactors. But that’s unlikely as the power outage would leave people freezing in the dark...aways a bad thing for politicians. Notice that the power appears to be on all over the country. Neither side wants people they will rule over after the war freezing in the dark.
Heh... I could see that.
Like Murphy says, if it looks weird it draws fire.