It seems a bit disingenuous to put pre 2021 together with the current war.
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I’d still bet a lot on the majority of the badness being Russian. Their army has a history of bad behavior, which seems to be repeating itself now. Looting and wanton destruction are both rampant and institutionalized.
If you want to extrapolate from history, both armies have a history of torturing roughly the same number of people within the bounds of uncertainty we have for those estimates.
Besides that history, we should also expect that a good portion of the Ukrainian army comes from those street militias. I only cited the attack of the women’s March as one example but there are also countless other examples of bad things they did. I would not expect that kind of people to wage war without badness.
Thanks for the info on torture—I should really have investigated it myself—do you have any more data on the scale of it?
That being said, setting up bases in residential areas during an active conflict where you’re fighting to protect/recapture said areas
Most residential areas where soldiers located themselves were kilometres away from front lines. Viable alternatives were available that would not endanger civilians – such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby, or other structures further away from residential areas. In the cases it documented, Amnesty International is not aware that the Ukrainian military who located themselves in civilian structures in residential areas asked or assisted civilians to evacuate nearby buildings – a failure to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians.
These are civilians who are Ukrainian citizens. My point is not about the badness of this particular act, it’s about the kind of heuristics you need to have to think that if you are the Ukrainian army, using Ukrainian citizens as human shields is a good idea. An army that operates with those heuristics is going to do a lot of badness.
Which honestly surprised me, since I assumed that I’d find a load of Polish nationalists shouting about how bad the Ukrainians are.
There’s a lesson here: People like the Polish nationalists are bad at doing research. Just like most of the COVID skeptic posts you find on social networks are also very poor in quality.
Again—a lot depends on how often this happens, proportionally.
At 22 out of 29 schools visited, Amnesty International researchers either found soldiers using the premises or found evidence of current or prior military activity – including the presence of military fatigues, discarded munitions, army ration packets and military vehicles.
To me, that sounds like it proportionally happens a lot.
All that said, if we get a peace deal that will reduce badness that both sides inflict. War is bad.
If you want to extrapolate from history, both armies have a history of torturing roughly the same number of people within the bounds of uncertainty we have for those estimates.
Besides that history, we should also expect that a good portion of the Ukrainian army comes from those street militias. I only cited the attack of the women’s March as one example but there are also countless other examples of bad things they did. I would not expect that kind of people to wage war without badness.
The article does cite OHCHR which is the UN Human Rights organization. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/arbitrary-detention-torture-and-ill-treatment-context-armed-conflict is the report.
Most residential areas where soldiers located themselves were kilometres away from front lines. Viable alternatives were available that would not endanger civilians – such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby, or other structures further away from residential areas. In the cases it documented, Amnesty International is not aware that the Ukrainian military who located themselves in civilian structures in residential areas asked or assisted civilians to evacuate nearby buildings – a failure to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians.
These are civilians who are Ukrainian citizens. My point is not about the badness of this particular act, it’s about the kind of heuristics you need to have to think that if you are the Ukrainian army, using Ukrainian citizens as human shields is a good idea. An army that operates with those heuristics is going to do a lot of badness.
There’s a lesson here: People like the Polish nationalists are bad at doing research. Just like most of the COVID skeptic posts you find on social networks are also very poor in quality.
At 22 out of 29 schools visited, Amnesty International researchers either found soldiers using the premises or found evidence of current or prior military activity – including the presence of military fatigues, discarded munitions, army ration packets and military vehicles.
To me, that sounds like it proportionally happens a lot.
All that said, if we get a peace deal that will reduce badness that both sides inflict. War is bad.