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I know two people in Ukraine who have received automatic weapons from the gov't...I do wonder how reasonable it is to arm untrained civilians. Turning someone w

• zttg 5y ago
  People are dying there because of those weapons! Guess what criminals do when you can get automatic rifle for free? Do they fight against invaders?
• amelius 5y ago
  Also, how is this coordinated, and how do they prevent being shot at by their own people?
  • op00to 5y ago
    They are trained by the local defense organization.
  • peakaboo 5y ago
    It's a war. Normal rules to not apply. If you are ever in one, you will want a weapon, trust me.
    • Friday_ 5y ago
      ... there are some rules by Geneva convention This civilians with guns are now combatants. And must "carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war"
      • lazide 5y ago
        Lulz - that’s all well and good, except that gets paid mostly lip service even by the professional militaries, who are the ones who have the most to lose by not following the rules. Civilians do what they need to do to survive and protect their loved ones. If that means shivving a soldier in the back while pretending to be unarmed, so be it. Having guns is way better than civilians usually get.
        • Friday_ 5y ago
          Yea, they can do that but i think it is a war crime. Not sure thou im not lawyer. Anyway it probably confuses soldiers so they start shooting civilians.
          • lazide 5y ago
            They do that anyway. And war crimes are solidly in the class of ‘if you win, it’s not a crime’ unfortunately. For example, the US (as much as it tries) often commits what are clearly war crimes, and it’s crickets.
      • darksaints 5y ago
        Unlawful combatants aren't protected by the laws of war, they're protected by the laws of the land they are in. I think you'd be surprised at how lenient the laws of the land can be for people who technically commit crimes like murder against invading forces.
  • CodeGlitch 5y ago
    You wear IFF coloured bands. From photos I've seen the Ukrainians are using yellow arm bands, and Russians white leg bands.
• op00to 5y ago
  They are already at high risk of being shot. Merely leaving the city they are in puts them at massive risk of attack. There are almost no instances where we should be arming people, but having evil, rampaging attackers kilometers from entices one to defend themselves rather than submit to occupation and likely death.
  • ch4s3 5y ago
    In 1995 Chechen anti-tank teams drawn from the local civilian population disabled a whole Russian tank battalion while suffering very few loses themselves. You can do a lot with volunteers on home territory. The Ukrainians are in a struggle for self determination, these people are volunteering and they should be able to if the want to.
    • cjbgkagh 5y ago
      AFAIK The Chechens were ex soviet military and had been operating a large scale black market for weapons - so they had plenty on hand. Towards the end of that conflict Russia started using AA guns on the tanks to counter the ambushes. I’m pretty sure they learned a lot from that experience.
      • ch4s3 5y ago
        They were, but a lot of Ukrainians have military service experience. It also seems like Russia didn’t learn those lessons, and others. Their armor looks to be stretched thin. In urban fighting having lots of people firing from a lot of places on advancing Russians will make it hard for them to focus air support. Just pinning down small groups of Russian infantry will allow the Ukrainian army to roll them up if they can maintain mobility.
      • rjsw 5y ago
        Russia started using AA guns on the tanks to counter the ambushes. Haven't seen any pictures of these [1] in Ukraine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMPT_Terminator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMPT_Terminator
    • 5y ago
• CreepGin 5y ago
  Ukraine is one of the 28 countries with mandatory military service. But regardless, I think anything goes when your country is facing an existential threat.
• chefkoch 5y ago
  I don't understand why they are doing this, Wikipedia states that they have 900 000 citizens that went through military service. If you can't defend your country with almost a million soldiers No amount of untrained civians will.
  • seer 5y ago
    Thats the thing - they’ve passed the mandatory military service, so they know how to follow orders and maintain discipline, but they went home and became doctors/programmers, now that there’s war, they are given arms and asked to remember their training.
    • chefkoch 5y ago
      But then they aren't just giving out guns to civilians, but they are calling them back to service (i don't know the proper english term for this).
      • dylan604 5y ago
        In the US, we have active military members where they are 24/7 soldiers. There are also reservists where once a month, they get together for a weekend to do solider stuff. There's also a two week stint once a year to keep up training. So not quite as well trained as active military, but a hell of a lot more well trained than just handing rifles to someone with a slap on the backside with a "good luck" for extra measure. Otherwise, calling a retired active military member back to active service is known as being recalled.
• ezconnect 5y ago
• tempestn 5y ago
  It's certainly not ideal, but their only other choice at this point is to surrender to Russian occupation. The Russian military greatly outnumbers that of Ukraine, so without civilians joining the defense, they'd really have no chance. Of course these people are at high risk, but obviously they feel it's worth it to defend their freedom.
  • cjbgkagh 5y ago
    I don’t see how a civilian force will significantly improve their chances. Edit: this isn’t a video game. Civilians taking up arms makes them targets. The Russian aim is regime change, and at this time it appears that Russia will prevail. It is existential for Russia. All a civilian resistance will do is maybe slightly delay the inevitable at horrific cost. I think people should be discouraged from throwing their lives away on a lost cause. Even the Ukrainian propaganda of heroic deaths contains an understanding that there is no hope.
    • AYBABTME 5y ago
      Russian forces are mostly conscripts, so it's not that much better. They probably have marginally better training, but they're less motivated. Also, there's military service in Ukraine. The average civilian probably has a decent understanding of weapons handling and basic tactics.
      • remarkEon 5y ago
        They also have less knowledge and understanding of the key terrain involved. That’s the key here in urban warfare. Understanding the critical choke points, areas of overwatch and lines of sight etc will be something they know intuitively because they’re from there. Russians will have to look at their maps.
      • openasocket 5y ago
        The forces fighting in Ukraine are not conscripts, but contract soldiers. Russian law doesn't allow conscripts to be deployed overseas. Of course it's an authoritarian regime so they could do it anyway, but there would be serious domestic repercussions and largely isn't necessary to get the troop concentrations they have
• lazysheepherd 5y ago
  Consider all 4 dimensions of the battlefield. You cannot be aware of every direction, at all times. Especially in cities, which has 3 spatial dimensions of potential hostile infantry positions. Therefore sheer numbers do matter. Especially in the cities, all insurgents have to do is wait, and rain down bullets. Many will miss, but some will hit.
  • giantrobot 5y ago
    One key to success in military operations is tempo. Armed defenders using guerrilla tactics disrupt an attacker's tempo. Every minute a platoon of soldiers hesitates crossing a street or gets bogged down clearing a building is a minute closer to sunset, a minute more of vehicles burning fuel, a minute longer for defenders to get reinforcements, and more stress and fatigue on the whole unit. An attacking force doesn't have infinite resources to attack indefinitely. A mechanized force that runs out of fuel is extremely vulnerable. Those extra minutes burning gas not being able to push forward add up.
• sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Heh. You can really tell in this thread who has grown up with guns and who hasn't. I remember my grandpa taking me under some bridge somewhere and letting me loose off a few .45 rounds. I was about 8. It was supremely stupid. In fact, I have a vivid memory of it almost being a disaster. My grandpa lived in a bad part of Alton, IL. His house got broken into on a regular basis. So he kept a loaded pistol right next to his bed. Somehow I found this thing at around the same age, and started fooling around with it. But then something interesting happened. The thing my grandpa taught me: never to assume a gun wasn't loaded, and always check it. So I checked it, and sure enough, I did not squeeze the trigger that day. My point is, it doesn't take much training to be safe around weapons. Military tactics are an entirely different matter, of course. It's not a great idea to have random people running around with guns. But they're not random people. They're defending their home. If SF was under attack by Japan in an alternate universe, wouldn't you do the same? Seeing Kiev unfold makes me feel a strange kinship with Washington, of all people. There too, people had very little combat training, and were pretty much arming the neighbors. But it turns out that armed neighbors can sometimes be effective. Here's a fascinating piece of propaganda for you: https://twitter.com/peedutuisk/status/1497310882069581824 https://twitter.com/peedutuisk/status/1497310882069581824 It's propaganda, but it's very good propaganda. For a brief moment, I was actually crazy enough to wish I was out there helping them.
  • Avicebron 5y ago
    To be fair to myself and you, I grew up in rural america around with guns everywhere. Took hunter safety, whole shebang, never really got around to buying myself or using automatic weapons. I see your point on the American revolution, but please, let's not forget times have changed. the US population were on home ground with rifled barrels, easier to aim and using geurilla tactics against an old british standing line firing system (also their rifles weren't always rifled ;) ). The chance that a population of civilians with weapons goes to hide in a bunker with or without unarmed people is higher than it is with military troops, and what happens when Russian intel says there are enemy combatants hiding in a bunker vs a bunch of civilians hiding in a bunker...chances go up that they will receive a bunker buster knock and talk more than if there were unarmed people there. this isn't 1776.
• tyingq 5y ago
  You might be surprised how little weapons training many actual soldiers get.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• pc86 5y ago
  Is the risk to minimize total casualties (military and civilian, injury and death) or to repel an invading force? Because it's very likely that if your goal is the latter, putting a gun in everyone's hand regardless of their skill with it might be the best course of action.
• paxys 5y ago
  It is pretty likely that all of those people have handled guns before in some capacity.