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.”
“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.
Can we just get one single rocket to take out Putin and call it a day? Like surely such an action is more than justified by now.
He spends most of his time in a bunker. Kind of hard to hit him with a missile like that.
Russian military has prioritised air defenses around Moscow and Lake Ladoga. Aka the two places Putin is likely to be. I don’t believe it’s for lack of trying.
Oh, he wouldn’t be the only name on the list.
Problem is locating the true him. He uses a lot of Doppelgängers. And the real him prolly hides in some deep bunker underground.
Good. But hit Moscow while you’re at it. They need to feel unsafe. A good knock to Putin’s popularity.
They do every so often, see Perun’s analysis of Ukrainian strategic air campaign.
Oil is ~$90/bbl and this guy is destroying refineries with my money.
Ohh no, why won’t anybody think about the poor imperialist
We have three children in the house and my partner just lost her job.
But of course the country being attacked is at fault. Not the country doing the attacking, nor the other country attacking a country that’s holding a certain strait hostage for leverage
We can’t afford life rn, so paying for a foreign war is a bill I don’t want or need. I’m not placing blame, nor do I really care about fault.
Definitely won’t be with deceitful people like you
Are you American? The US (edit has almost completely) stopped sending military aid anyway. This is Europe (who faces Russian aggression) and allies like Canada also seeing the rise of authoritarianism in its neighbours. These are dividends for our own defense. Oil prices won’t mean much if the great power autocrats have their way and expand trump-style neocolonial imperialism across the globe (like venezuala). Fighting dictatorships now saves you much worse later.
Right true. 300m passed by congress LAST YEAR that trump has no choice to approve. True. But that is a drop in the bucket, and the only military support given since trumps second term. This year Canada gave nearly a billion in military aid compared to the US 300m, and Europe gave almost 75 billion. It is Europe finding ukraine, not the US.
Edit in all your posts you refuse to blame trump for ballooning your national debt and starting an illegal war that severely impacted actual oil flows. Instead you gripe about proportional pennies to Ukraine. If your economic woes are hurting you, get angry at your government ffs
Maybe you should think about that when supporting tankie bullshit.
Idk what “tankie” is, sounds like a perjorative. Not sure how funding a foreign war helps me pay for the household or what point you’re trying to make in general. Sounds kinda like a “fuck you” in disguise.
No disguise. Have a nice day.
Such ire, there cannot be peace anywhere with this attitude. May the world spare you its fury.
I’m not the person you responded to. A “tankie” according to Wikipedia is an authoritarian communist or someone who supports them. I don’t think the person who called you a tankie was accurate or even understood what the word means. It’s a red flag when people use that term In any case, it seems absurd to whine about gas prices in the context of the horror Ukraine is experiencing.
it seems absurd to whine about gas prices in the context of the horror Ukraine is experiencing.
So you’re saying that because there is war on the other side of the world, my personal hardships don’t matter?
Unless you’re in Russia, this is not going to have a significant negative effect on you. Trump’s war in Iran is the primary driver of worldwide oil prices right now.
If you are in Russia, it’s not your tax dollars.
Your money?
You gotta work to pay taxes, and most of you tankie shits, sit in your mom’s basement hoping the day comes that you become the leader of your authoritarian regime… it’s why you defend ruzzia and the ccp like good little lapdogs.
We have three children in the house and my partner just lost her job.
I do hope that you find relief soon, direct your anger at your government who has enabled exploitation. Not at the government trying to defend against fascist nationalist expansion
Maybe I am being misundestood, I’m not defending VP’s war on UA. What I am saying is that I cannot afford to pay for it because the rent is due and the children are hungry.
You are! Because you attacked the right of Ukraine to raise the funds needed to strike the aggressor: russia. Besides the US gives very little aid anyway. If you are not European then you have zero right to criticize where their aid goes.
IMO UA can do whatever it wants and raise funds however it pleases, doesn’t matter me. Since the aid is “very little aid anyway,” I rather feed our hungry, house our poor, and educate our youth.
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Or. Hear me out. Properly support Ukraine so that they can finally push putler back, so that the food Ukraine produces can finally be available for everyone. Also your government should be able to do both, by closing exploitative loopholes.
The fuck does that have to do with Ukraine being invaded by ruzzia? Ruzzia never supplied the US with Diesel, and trump is the cause for the prices rising. Not Ukraine blowing up refineries in ruzzia, they’ve been doing that long before the orange pedophile decided to attack Iran.
Maybe you should try listening to scientists and move away from oil and natural gas. Use your boot straps and produce your own energy instead of importing it in. The cost today appears to reflect the actual damage those barrels are doing and the quality of life you had was all an illusion based on the exploitation of resources you didn’t actually control.
