Ukraine will double down on attacking Russian oil refineries in response to a new policy of airstrikes by Moscow designed to force people to abandon Kyiv and other cities, but will not target civilians, President ​Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.

Ukraine’s intelligence services has obtained documents showing that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had issued a “new doctrine” of military attacks on a much broader range of civilian targets ahead of this winter, Zelenskiy said.

“We saw documents ‌and we know that they allow them to attack infrastructure, logistics, and especially to attack in the cities, in the villages, everywhere, roads, schools, hospitals,” Zelenskiy told Reuters in an interview. “To pressure people to leave the capital, leave different cities: this is the goal of the operation.”

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    19 hours ago

    “We saw documents ‌and we know that they allow them to attack infrastructure, logistics, and especially to attack in the cities, in the villages, everywhere, roads, schools, hospitals,” Zelenskiy told Reuters in an interview. “To pressure people to leave the capital, leave different cities: this is the goal of the operation.”

    As I’ve said before, that is probably not an efficient use of weapons on Russia’s part. They’re expending weapons that could be used against military targets or critical industry against civilian stuff.

    Consider World War II. A lot of people in the runup thought that use of air power against civilian targets would prove to be extremely effective against morale. It was not.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Douhet

    Giulio Douhet (30 May 1869 – 15 February 1930) was an Italian general and air power theorist.[1] He was a key proponent of strategic bombing in aerial warfare. He was a contemporary of the air warfare advocates Walther Wever, Billy Mitchell, and Hugh Trenchard.

    In his influential 1921 work The Command of the Air, Douhet argued that strategic bombing—particularly targeting civilian populations and infrastructure—could break a nation’s will to fight. He believed that by inflicting enough terror and destruction from the air, the morale of the civilian population would collapse, forcing the enemy government to capitulate.

    Douhet’s theories proved influential, although the effectiveness of his strategies remains debated.

    Axis strategic bombing in World War II was not incredibly effective:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz

    Bombing failed to demoralise the British into surrender or do much damage to the war economy; eight months of bombing never seriously hampered British war production, which continued to increase.[12][13] The greatest effect was to force the British to disperse the production of aircraft and spare parts.[14] British wartime studies concluded that most cities took 10 to 15 days to recover when hit severely, although some, such as Birmingham, took three months.[14]

    Our own strategic bombing campaign, out of the US, was not incredibly effective in Europe (including attempts to hit other critical goods, like ball bearings) until it focused on oil.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II

    The Oil Campaign of World War II was, however, extremely successful and made a very large contribution to the general collapse of Germany in 1945.

    We ran vastly more intensive bombing campaigns during the Korean War and Vietnam War than Russia (or Ukraine, for that matter) has the means to do in conventional terms. It did not cause a morale collapse and war termination.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea

    Stratemeyer sent orders to the Fifth Air Force and Bomber Command to “destroy every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village.”[13] On November 5, Stratemeyer gave the following order to the commanding general of the Fifth Air Force: “Aircraft under Fifth Air Force control will destroy all other targets including all buildings capable of affording shelter.” The same day, 22 B-29s attacked Kanggye, destroying 75% of the city.[14][15]

    The bombing campaign destroyed almost every substantial building in North Korea.[22][23] The war’s highest-ranking U.S. POW, U.S. Major General William F. Dean,[24] reported that the majority of North Korean cities and villages he saw were either rubble or snow-covered wasteland.[25][26] Dean Rusk, the U.S. State Department official who headed East Asian affairs, concluded that America had bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.”[27] North Korean factories, schools, hospitals, and government offices were forced to move underground.[28] In November 1950, the North Korean leadership instructed the population to build dugouts and mud huts and to dig tunnels, in order to solve the acute housing problem.[29]

    Hitting targets like that can cause misery and property damage, but generalized airstrikes to try to cause a collapse in morale is just not a very viable route to win wars.