3 ms·

It is kind of interesting seeing the ukraine war tiptoe from actually striking the tail in earnest. We see some attacks on moscow refineries in recent days, yes

• siriusastrebe 3mo ago
  Moscow could only accomplish this with nukes, and only early in the war. By this point Ukraine has dug underground for most of its crucial war-sustaining industry. Ukraine, well they don't have nukes but as I understand it, much of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was built in Ukraine. I suspect Ukraine could respond tit for tat.
  • asdff 3mo ago
    Why can they not use firebombing and other conventional munitions? If they can deliver a nuke surely they can deliver a conventional warhead. That is enough to level an urban area as we see in Gaza.
    • siriusastrebe 3mo ago
      Russia fires conventional warheads into Kiev all the time. Thousands of civilians have been killed and injured. The city survives. Buildings in Kiev aren't made out of wood. Firebombs would do very little damage.
    • lostlogin 3mo ago
      Israel levelled Gaza after capturing the area, with artillery and with air strikes. Russia hasn’t captured Kiev, their artillery can’t reach that far and they don’t have air superiority - Russia hardly has an airforce anymore.
      • marking-time 3mo ago
        Also worth remembering that Gaza is effectively an island when it comes to logistics. This made it easy for Israel to cut off food/medicine/fuel. Essentially medieval siege warfare transferred to the present day.
    • skywhopper 3mo ago
      Because Russia doesn’t actually have the resources to do this at the scale required. Russia is also not trying to obliterate Ukraine. They want to take over a real economy, not a wasteland.
      • actionfromafar 3mo ago
        At this point, I think they would take the wasteland "win" if they had to. But they really don't have the resources to do carpet bombing or something like that. Just lobby pot-shots.
    • mrguyorama 3mo ago
      Russia cannot fly a plane into Ukrainian airspace. They barely even fly over Russia's side of the line right now. They toss bomb from miles back. Flying conventional bombers over enemy cities requires the ability to replace most of your bombers per year, or air supremacy, neither of which Russia has even a hope of doing. WW2 was industrialized the likes of which nobody has ever seen again.
    • AngryData 3mo ago
      If you level a city you just removed 95% of the reason for trying to capture that city. Spending untold billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives for a pile of ash would never pay itself off.
      • mothballed 3mo ago
        The reason for Putin at this point is more reputational than inherent value of whatever lies in Ukrainian city. I fully expect Putin would nuke the ever living shit out of Ukraine into a glass worthless pile of rubble if he thought he could get away with it.
      • ponector 3mo ago
        But this is exactly how russians are capturing Donbass: each sity they managed to capture for the last two years are total ruins.
        • orthoxerox 3mo ago
          That's because Donbass is seen as useless. It's like bombing upstate New York or Michigan when invading the US.
          • lazide 3mo ago
            Hey, many tears would be shed for the Traverse City Cherry Festival, i’ll have you know.
        • antihero 3mo ago
          Doesn’t Eastern Ukraine have more resources and more ethnic Russians?
          • ponector 3mo ago
            Eastern Ukraine had more Ukrainians who had russian language as primary one, but they are not ethnic russians. Also this is the result of the ethnic cleansing and mass deportation of Ukrainian people russians did for the last two senturies.
  • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
    Plus deploying nukes would be a guaranteed escalation - after WW2 nobody has ever used nukes in war because of this. But it would and always has been the last resort. If Russia feels like they have no choice left, they might do it. But also, at the start of the war they used it as a deterrent, promising to use them if e.g. Ukraine were to strike across the border. That ended up being a false threat in the end, but you can see how Ukraine only slowly and carefully started becoming more and more bold with going across the border. All bets are off now though, with long range drones being used to target the very vulnerable refineries and oil industry. If they take out the power industry as well, and given time, it'll collapse Russia's military logistics network and isolate the front lines from supplies.
• dgacmu 3mo ago
  I think you're over-estimating the capability of both sides of the fight (absent nuclear weapons on the part of Russia). Both sides appear to be using drones and missiles as fast as they can manufacture them. One could argue Russia could be more selectively targeting industrial infrastructure - I don't know if their attacks on residential areas are an inability to target well or some kind of hope that demoralization will be effective - but Ukraine is, I believe, doing as much as they can to Russia's oil & defense sectors as they are able. example: "CAR’s analysis, based on physical examinations of marks on the remnants, shows that the missile that struck Okhmatdyt hospital was produced at most three months before the attack. Or perhaps even eight days before. " [1] Sanctions and limited parts availability are limiting Russia's ability to manufacture weapons [2] [1] https://global.espreso.tv/russia-ukraine-war-car-researchers-find-out-when-missile-that-hit-okhmatdyt-hospital-on-july-8-was-manufactured https://global.espreso.tv/russia-ukraine-war-car-researchers... [2] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/assets/kcl-fasi-paper31-wings-still-clipped-web.pdf https://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/assets/kcl-fasi-paper31-win...
  • asdff 3mo ago
    Russia has been able to target Kyiv and destroy arbitrary apartment buildings the entire war. I've just spent a few mins searching through news articles over the years, there's a story of a destroyed Kyiv apartment in 2022 and one from 3 days ago now in 2026 of course. So why the stayed hand? Clearly Russia then and now is capable of reaching out and destroying Kyiv arbitrarily. I still believe they could have turned it into Gaza within mere days or weeks 4 years ago if they really wanted to. But clearly there are factors beyond their capabilities that prevent them from using their capabilities to the fullest extent. One might wonder what the US response would look like if Kyiv was actually destroyed and some 3 million were now refugees——american boots on the ground perhaps? Yugoslav war style joint coalition?
    • dgacmu 3mo ago
      Russia's inability to have a decisive victory against Ukraine is at odds with the idea that it has sufficient stockpiles and launch capability to reduce kiev to rubble any time it wishes. If it had that capability, it would have the capability to destroy Ukraine's defense manufacturing sector - or simply its entire manufacturing sector - which it clearly does not. It's also at odds with the evidence that Russia is launching missles roughly as fast as they can build them.
• thisislife2 3mo ago
  > Similarly, why doesn't Kyiv look like Gaza? The stated Russian military goals are the "liberation" of the Donbass region and to enforce Ukraine's neutrality (i.e prevent it from joining any military alliance inimical to Russia). With the second goal, there is also the hope that future Ukrainian governments may not be as hostile to Russia as the current Ukrainian leaders and future Ukraine-Russia relations may be normalised as it was in the pre-Zelensky era. Deliberately targeting civilians, with a genocide in mind, makes that highly unlikely. Note that for the Israeli-right, genocide is the goal because their zionist ideology is based on the settler-coloniser philosophy, and the population of the Palestinian muslims currently outnumber the Israeli Jews (when you include Palestinians that are refugees too, who have a "right to return"). The Palestinians also have a higher birth rate than the Israelis. This is a huge obstacle to the one-state solution - even the Israeli moderates on either political spectrum fear to make Palestinians Israeli citizens (which is one way of ending the conflict) as they fear Israeli Jews would then become a minority. The Israeli-right's solution to this is to make the Palestinian muslims a minority in their own land. (Akin to what the settler-coloniser Europeans did in Canada, USA, Australia etc. with the native population - this is corroborated by a UN probe that says Palestinian children and Babies were ‘special targets’ of Israeli killings - https://www.rt.com/india/642399-israel-gaza-babies-targets/ https://www.rt.com/india/642399-israel-gaza-babies-targets/ ). Moreover, as the Israeli-right are mostly religious fundamentalists and have already amended the law declaring Israel to be a Jewish state, they are also resolutely opposed to making Israel a secular state. Thus, in their political vision of Israel, only Jews can ever be a first-class citizen, while non-Jews are always meant to have lesser political rights. > I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities. It's not about military capabilities but the political repercussions. NATO cannot supply enough weapons to Ukraine till they shift to a war-time mode. Moreover, they cannot allow Ukraine to use their territory to attack Russia, which is needed for successfully executing such an operation. (They have been "experimenting" in this area by ignoring Ukraine's drone intrusions into their airspace, as the drones move towards Russian assets). And you also have to ensure that you don't push the Russians into a corner as they are a nuclear weapon state. With Iran, it is true that the Americans do have the capabilities to launch such an attack successfully. However, American allies - Iran's neighbours - fear that they will be caught in between the attack and bear the brunt of Iran's retaliatory attacks, specifically on their industry (oil and gas). Thus, in both cases, it is mostly politics that holds them back. For me, the most interesting bit of the article is this tid-bit: > To survive in contested environments, the Army must transition from a centralized hub-and-spoke sustainment model to a decentralized network of smaller, dispersed, mobile, and signature-managed nodes. Sustainment elements must be capable of relocating with the same frequency as maneuver battalion tactical operations centers, while distributed caching of fuel, water, and ammunition across concealed locations should replace the current reliance on large, centralized supply dumps. This transformation must be paired with deliberate investment in camouflage, concealment, and deception tailored to sustainment operations. That sounds very much like how the current Iranian military and para-military organisations are with their underground bunkers, warehouses and tunnels, with the ability to make independent command decisions in the absence of orders from central command. Even Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, is somewhat modelled similarly and that is why Israel's attack on Hezbollah's leadership (the pager bombing) hasn't had the impact that the Israelis hoped for - they are still bogged down fighting them in Lebanon.
• kakacik 3mo ago
  Dude, read some proper war news ffs. During a recent single night, those russian assholes send on Kyiv around 500 shaheds, 50 kalibr missiles, 50 of something else I dont recall etc totalling around 600 long range missiles/warheads/medium sized long range drones, each capable of significant damage due to big heavy explosive load. If they could they would send more, luckily russians and competence dont meet at the same room often. If Ukraine's defense didnt shoot down >90% of them depending on the type it would be a total carnage, day after day. Of couse its largely useless wave of terror, very similar to V1/V2 terror attacks nazi germany did on London, with similar results - increasing resolve. But infrastructure is hammered, during winter it can be brutal, and country cannot go on like that forever.