@Anonymous #E22F
My goodness. Though I keep in mind the fog of war and fake propaganda from both ends of this, Some of this imagery is rather harrowing, to say the least. Though I am not sure I can reach for terms like genocide, it certainly seems like some bad stuff went down. This shouldn’t be surprising on some scale. I mean, if Russia openly on their own state media was talking about volunteers from Syria than no doubt they were having problems and probably throwing various auxiliaries for cannon fonder. I am surprised to see evidence of lots of purposeful civilian deaths around Kiev/Kyiv as that place I expected the Russians to be more careful and disciplined–they had been. They weren’t bombing the city like Kharkiv or outright leveling it like Mariupol. My thoughts were that there would be relatively few intentional killing of civilians in most areas outside of the Donbass, where Russia had send in the Chechens and the Ukrainians have the majority of their further right and less disciplined irregulars. These rows of bodies on the streets, people tied up apparently shot dead,
and possible war rapes. Make me
really worried about what some of the other fronts in this war most be like…
@UrbanMysticDee
Agreed.
@UrbanMysticDee
Agreed x10. World War III is not worth whatever imagery we are being assailed with on social media even if it is true, or partly true.
@Dex Stewart
I think the Russians didn’t expect the fight they got. I am uncertain on them thinking they would just win without a fight but I can totally believe the Russians didn’t expect to fight a fully mobilized adversary. If you look at Ukraine’s past performance large parts of their army were totally inept, gave up, and often had a lot of sympathizers within their ranks (if I recall, a good chuck of Ukraine’s Marines just outright defected to Russia in 2014). Even if the Ukrainians had clearly improved, I think the Russians were still counting on large chunks of the Ukrainian Army to give up or become paralyzed and disorganized when command and control was knocked out, which never happened.