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Founder and creative director of Bellingcat (definitely not pro-russian) advises being careful with this one: > Some claims that the missile strike on the apar

• mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  > Also, you can look at my comment history if you think I'm pro-russian It's a sad state of things where someone asking a legit question has to add this disclaimer. As someone in an uninvolved third country, I don't understand why hackernews is cheering for one side: Politicians and diplomats executed some realpolitik type moves and it backfired into a hot war.
  • nerdponx 5y ago
    From my uneducated perspective on the other side of the world, this looks like a mostly unilateral act of aggression by Russia against Ukraine. Is that not the case?
    • mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      From my equally uneducated perspective, I understand that this started with the 2014 revolution that the Russian government calls a coup. A conventional war several thousand kilometres away shouldn't affect me regardless of the outcome but media has been trying to project this as world war 3, more and more countries are seemingly getting involved (and GitHub issues are being created to block Russian users). Makes it scary.
      • pixl97 5y ago
        >has been trying to project this as world war 3 I mean, Putin has made a number of nuclear and 'significant' threats in the past week. It shouldn't be surprising that this would concern a great number of people.
      • _jal 5y ago
        > A conventional war several thousand kilometres away shouldn't affect me Think of it as sort of akin to the very early days of COVID-19. There were far more unknowns than known facts, it immediately became politicized which poisoned the discourse, and multiple historical precedents demonstrate how much worse it could have been. (And of course, it also isn't over...) Today this is Russia attacking Ukraine. But Europe is deeply interconnected, war is definitionally out of control, and there are multiple historical precedents demonstrating how bad this can get. I do hope your faith that this stays "just" a regional disaster holds true, but right now do not see reason to share it.
      • throwaway290 5y ago
        How does a coup in literally another country justify invading it? (Add: sorry, I should not have phrased it so sharply since you state it as an uneducated perspective.)
        • bckr 5y ago
          Funny how you could call it either a "revolution" or a "coup", and they both mean more or less the same thing, but "coup" delegitimizes it, while "revolution" legitimizes it. Anyway, the revolution overthrew a pro-Russian, anti-EU president. So there you go.
          • throwaway290 5y ago
            Thanks for supporting my point. Additionally, 'coup' in my view has the connotations of a regime overthrow by a militant minority, which does not seem to have been the case.
            • 5y ago
    • Merem 5y ago
      [flagged]
      • yurish 5y ago
        I would add cutting of Crimea from water supply. All I heard here in comments was reasoning about making cost of possessing it higher for Russia not about suffering of people in Crimea.
  • 323 5y ago
    > I don't understand why hackernews is cheering for one side Because sometimes there is an actual good side and an actual evil side. Not all good and evil is relative.
    • fuckcensorship 5y ago
      When it comes to something as vastly complicated as global politics, I disagree wholeheartedly.
      • mhh__ 5y ago
        That argument is what tyrants thrive on. Sometimes you need to decide.
        • mohanmcgeek 5y ago
          Calling the other side evil is what tyrants thrive on.
          • mhh__ 5y ago
            I am absolutely happy to call the Russian government evil, I don't live too far away from Salisbury so it's not exactly a theoretical discussion.
            • mohanmcgeek 5y ago
              I mean, Russians would have definitely called the West and Ukraine as evil in their domestic channels. No? There's no good vs evil in international diplomacy.
              • koonsolo 5y ago
                Do you have the same sentiment for Nazi's?
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    The recent history doesn't seem like it backfired into a hot war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has to have been in planning and staging for at least several months.
    • lostlogin 5y ago
      It’s likely been at least a year in the making. Troop build ups were noticed in March 2021. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021–2022_Russo-Ukrainian_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021–2022_Russo-Ukrainian_cr...
    • vl 5y ago
      Operation like this takes years to plan and prepare, and if anything it comes surprisingly late, given that civil war continued for 8 years in Ukraine. You would think they would act sooner then risking losing Donabas to Ukrainians. My guess it was delayed by Covid.
      • jacquesm 5y ago
        That is a great point. I always figured that if this was going to happen that it would be at the moment when America was most confused, the transition period from one president to the next, but you are right, that coincided with COVID which may well have screwed up their timetable.
  • bitcharmer 5y ago
    > I don't understand why hackernews is cheering for one side Excuse me, what? How is that not blindingly clear who the aggressor is here?
    • mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      Does hackernews take part in cheering a side in every other war too? Like the Azerbaijan Armenia war that happened last year or the Saudi Yemani war sometime ago? I'm really wondering why this one is different.
      • bitcharmer 5y ago
        I just looked at your comment history. It's quite obvious what and who you represent so whataboutism and other discourse steering techniques are more than expected. Yes, Russian trolls are present even here; we just shouldn't feed them.
      • nosianu 5y ago
        Scale and danger and consequences. Ukraine is a big country. Russia has nukes. It also has a huge territory, so anything significant happening in or to Russia has a high chance to be or to become important. Also, this could be a test case watched by China for a possible invasion of Taiwan, as has been mentioned. There also are a few more countries that Russia has thus far only targeted with rhetoric but could target for (re)annexation next, depending on their post mortem cost/benefit analysis of how it went in Ukraine once this is over. It also shows how little the rest of the world can do when a nuke-owning nation just starts a war unilaterally.
        • mohanmcgeek 5y ago
          > A test case watched by China for a possible invasion of Taiwan I saw this as a headline from several news websites already. So are you sure you weren't influenced by that? Reality is that the Taiwan situation is very different from the Ukraine situation and China itself thinks of it that way. > Russia has nukes. India and Pakistan, TWO nuclear weapon weilding countries, had a brief air engagement a few years ago. Nothing on HN. No sides. No GitHub issues..
  • yurish 5y ago
    Because this site is dominated by people from Western countries. As simple as that.
    • koonsolo 5y ago
      Even China isn't supportin Russia here. So no, it's not only "the west"
      • yurish 5y ago
        From where does this "only" come from?
  • eCa 5y ago
    > Politicians and diplomats executed some realpolitik type moves and it backfired into a hot war. This has been planned for months. It didn’t backfire into anything. Putin likely made up his mind weeks ago and there was nothing anyone could do. All of his demands were completely ludicrous, and either he knows it or he really has lost his mind. > cheering for one side Yes, in a completely unprovoced war not far from where I live, I side with the country being attacked.
  • koonsolo 5y ago
    One dictatorship invaded a democratic country to reinstall a puppet dictator that the people kicked out. I'm sorry, but what the actual fuck man?
    • mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      Again, from my unparticipating 3rd country vantage point, both are either dictatorships and democratic countries depending on your standards. From another comment here I learnt that there were targeted attacks on Russian population inside Ukraine and racist laws. Not something a democratic country would do (if true) > that the people kicked out People don't organically get together and _successfully_ kick out a regime without foreign support.
      • koonsolo 5y ago
        You are parroting Russian propaganda here. I know Ukrainians personally, and the truth is very clear. And the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is also clear. > People don't organically get together and _successfully_ kick out a regime without foreign support. Seems like they did, didn't they? And it also seems like they are kicking Russians ass right now, don't they? If you cannot see the difference between the two then you don't want to see. Please show evidence of Ukrainians attacking other Russian speaking Ukrainians. The Ukrainians presidents first language is Russian. So he's going to commit genocide against himself? Haha give me a break!
• giantrobot 5y ago
  > That's a good question, what happens with an anti-air missile if it fails to hit something in the sky? Does it disable itself before hitting ground? Even if a warhead isn't armed, a heavy missile moving very fast hitting a heavy building moving very slowly makes for a lot of impact energy. Unspent fuel (solid or otherwise) will also readily start secondary fires and be dangerous for rescuers and emergency crews.
• mardifoufs 5y ago
  From what I've seen it's probably a BUK instead of an s300 but most sources agree that it's ukrainian. The missile was probably trying to intercept another one and something went wrong so I doubt it's intentional
  • Merem 5y ago
    From what I've heard it's a Buk-M1 with a failing guidance system that was used to intercept a Russian missile attack on military infrastructure. Why it failed is guesswork but missing maintenance/deterioration is rather likely.
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  > worth keeping an open mind about what munition was responsible. Well, sure. But it is also worth keeping in mind that SAMs wouldn't be flying in the first place if Kyiv wasn't being attacked by Russians.
• anonAndOn 5y ago
  Anybody who has spent some time with simple model rockets knows that even they do not always go where they are expected. I have seen model rockets do some pretty remarkable "surprise" trajectories. It is very easy to understand how a far more complicated SAM launched in an urban environment could fly off course and into a building.
• jandrewrogers 5y ago
  Many anti-aircraft missiles self-destruct (by triggering the warhead) if they lose their target or run out of range. I believe this is a standard feature for most modern implementations. This minimizes the possibility of collateral damage, especially if you are using it over your own soil. Even some air-dropped munitions you might not expect, like the bomblets from cluster bombs, will self-destruct before they hit the ground if their sensors don't detect a target within their damage radius. Modern weapons go to considerable lengths to proactively auto-disable/self-destruct after deployment.
• SergeAx 5y ago
  S-300 warhead should auto-destroy itself if lost the target. Source: military department of Moscow State University.