The first Gallup poll I cited was from July 2014. Do you think that a lot of people left Crimea by then?
One doesn’t have to be an expert to see which side caused more death. Mariupol. All war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine pale in comparison to an entire city leveled to the ground.
Leveling Mariupol to the ground is a war crime that’s allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine. I first heard that claim from a Russian friend who sourced it through a relative of a friend who was on the ground. Russian media is also making the claim. It’s unfortunate that EU censorship makes it harder to know that this is what Russian media is saying and thus to know what “war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine” involve.
Neither of the two makes me confident that Ukraine is responsible, but it certainly falls into the category of war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine.
I just don’t see how the conclusion you’re making follows from the statements you make in the post even if all of them are true.
If you agree that Crimea would not be peaceful under Ukrainian rule and in a state of constant violent conflict and you care about global security, having Crimea under Ukrainian rule is not good.
The idea that if Ukraine only manages to retake all its former territory that means it’s safe from future attacks from Russia is faulty especially if there’s a lot of resistance in Crimea to Ukrainian rule.
Nuclear risk and global security matter.
I think if you believe that the borders of Ukraine don’t matter and what matters is nuclear risk, then it’s useful to be able to make a peace deal that does not back Putin into a corner where using nuclear weapons is the only thing that might keep him in power.
Food prices are also a huge global security risk and having a peace deal sooner than later would be good on that front.
Leveling Mariupol to the ground is a war crime that’s allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine.
This is the first time I heard anything like that, so I checked Wikipedia, and the Russian page says:
В 2022 году в ходе российского вторжения город был оккупирован вооружёнными силами России и самопровозглашённой ДНР после продолжительной блокады и обстрела российскими войсками, в результате чего, по оценкам ООН, в городе были повреждены или разрушены до 90 % жилых зданий и до 60 % частных домов.
In 2022, during the Russian invasion, the city was occupied by Russian armed forces and the self-proclaimed DNR after a lengthy blockade and shelling by Russian troops, which, according to UN estimates, damaged or destroyed up to 90 percent of residential buildings and up to 60 percent of private homes in the city.
So, seems like the editors of Russian Wikipedia haven’t heard about it either.
(My Russian is not fluent enough to check the entire talk page carefully, but skimming the text did not reveal any edit war about who actually destroyed Mariupol. I am saying this because even where Wikipedia editors are biased, one can usually find the accusations of bias on the talk page.)
Russian Wikipedia is very oppositionary. It tells pro-western point of view with 90% propability (this pro-western point of view is usually also truth, but the point is that you should not additionally update from Russian Wiki).
There’s an RT article that makes the claim. I’m unsure about whether it’s wise to currently link directly to RT, especially when posting censorship-circumventing links.
Quoting RT is a bit like quoting QAnon. If there is not even another Russian source that would confirm the information, I think it is quite safe to assume that it was made up.
For those unfamiliar, watch this. (Yay, European censorship trivially circumvented.)
Christian is not saying that RT is reliable, only that we can’t trust either side. Only if both sides report something or if there is independent reporting—but where will you find that? I wouldn’t trust Wikipedia on this either—who knows what filtering/blocking of accounts goes on.
My argument is that if some pro-Russian information is not even supported by mainstream Russian media (which are fully under Putin’s control), but only by RT, we can falsely assume that it is a lie.
Please do not “both sides” at me when one of those sides is RT. Note that I am not saying “Russia” here, but “RT” specifically. Using RT as an argument for… anything… is just silly.
Sorry, I am running out of patience here. Using RT in a discussion is exactly the same level of insanity as using QAnon. If RT merely repeats statements made by someone else, please use the original source. If RT is the original, then please let’s just not discuss that at a wannabe rationalist site at all.
With regards to Wikipedia, I do not trust the articles, but I trust that if a controversy exists, it will appear on the talk page. (At least in form of: “A suggests X” “B suggests to ban A; A is banned”.)
If RT merely repeats statements made by someone else, please use the original source.
Are you actually reading what I write? This has nothing to do with what I said. I have two independent sources, not one source repeating what another source says. Neither of the two nor them together is enough for me to be confident that the claim is true.
I did refer to both sources. The other is an eye-witness report (with two people in between) and not a media report. Given that I noted that in the first post, it feels strange to me that you assert I somehow only referred to RT.
If RT makes a claim then that claim is a claim that’s alleged. Then it’s a set of the “all war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine” that throwaway62654 talked about. You can talk about how important that set happens to be but if you want to make arguments about its nature, then to me this clearly falls into that set.
mainstream Russian media
Unfortunately, I don’t know any Russian, so I can’t check what mainstream Russian media says about Mariupol.
I’m not saying “both sides” here. I see Russia as the much worse aggressor. It seems clear that Putin used the real but very weak Nazi accusations to expand his energy empire. But we have only very weak evidence of what goes on in the war zone unless both sides agree on some aspect.
My argument is that if some pro-Russian information is not even supported by mainstream Russian media (which are fully under Putin’s control), but only by RT, we can falsely assume that it is a lie.
Agree.
I understand Christian’s point as primarily about stopping the war to help people on the ground—with all the difficulties that brings—many might not want to be “liberated” . Cheering Ukraine isn’t helping that cause.
But we have only very weak evidence of what goes on in the war zone unless both sides agree on some aspect.
I know we’re in a hostile information space, but this takes epistemic learned helplessness way too far. There are lots of ways to find things out other than being told about them, and when you don’t have specific knowledge about something you don’t have to adopt a uniform prior.
Taking Mariupol as an example, our two suspects are the Russians, who were attacking Mariupol and didn’t have any assets there, and the Ukrainians, who were defending Mariupol and did. Given those facts, before we hear from either side, what should we expect? If you’re unsure, we can look at other events in similar reference classes. For example, of the German towns destroyed during World War 2, how many would you predict were destroyed by Allied attackers, and how many by German defenders?
Usually that’s just about denying strategic assets, though: blowing up railroads, collapsing mine shafts, that sort of thing. Blowing up the museums and opera houses is pointless, because the enemy can’t get any war benefit by capturing them. All it does is waste your own explosives, which you’d rather use to blow up the enemy. Scorched earth practiced by attackers, on the other hand, tends to be more indiscriminate: contrast the state of Novgorod post-WW2 with that of the towns west of it, or the treatment of rice fields by North Vietnamese vs. Americans during the Vietnam war.
The Wikipedia number for Mariupol’s ethnic Russian population is 44%. Russia certainly had the intention to make Mariupol Russian territory. Making Mariupol Russian territory is worth more if it stays standing. Russia has to invest less money into rebuilding Mariupol if it’s not destroyed.
The inability of the Russian army was not as apparent at the time Mariupol was taken as it’s now, so it’s quite plausible that Ukrainians didn’t expect to be able to retake it at the time.
World War II was not a far fought to take over German territory, so it’s not in the same reference class. That’s especially true because of lessons from World War I, that the German population might have to see part of Germany being destroyed to really understand that they lost.
I’m a little curious what reference class you think the battle of Mariupol does belong to, which makes its destruction by its defenders plausible on priors. But mostly it sounds like you agree that we can make inferences about hard questions even without a trustworthy authority to appeal to, and that’s the point I was really interested in.
The reference class would be “wars to extend a country’s territory permanently”. As such there’s an interest to have the value of the newly won territory as high as possible.
When waging war over a city, for both sides there are actions that can be taken to increase or decrease the amount of damage that the city takes.
In Ukraine, it seems that no party went out of its way to reduce the damage to cities. We know that from Amnesty trying to understand what happened and them finding that frequently Ukrainian army stationed itself inside the city and got shot at by the Russian army.
This dynamic does explain that a part of the city is destroyed but it doesn’t explain why 90% of Mariupol’s residential buildings had been damaged or destroyed (Wikipedia numbers). The 90% sounds to me like this is more than just collateral damage but that someone made a conscious choice to destroy more of the city than they would need for purely military reasons.
One reason to do that might be propaganda reasons and to make the population fear you. Given that according to Russian propaganda Russia came to liberate the Russian minority, destroying a city with a large number of ethnic Russians makes little sense for that goal.
Often in war destruction is also done as a punishment. Russia punished the population in Chechnya for their local resistance in the Second Chechnyan War. It’s unclear to me why the population of Mariupol would deserve to be punished from the Russian perspective.
On the other hand, at the time that Mariupol was taking Ukrainians might have thought that this war will end in a way where Donetsk and Luhansk would permanently be part of Russia. Under that assumption making Mariupol worth as little as possible seems to me like an understandable reason.
Reporting suggests that taking Crimea was expensive for Russia. Having Mariupol destroyed means Russia would have to invest more money into it to make it function again after the war.
The idea that if Ukraine only manages to retake all its former territory that means it’s safe from future attacks from Russia is faulty especially if there’s a lot of resistance in Crimea to Ukrainian rule.
The idea that if Ukraine make a peace deal with Russia means it’s safe from future attacks from Russia is even more faulty. In fact Ukraine made a peace deal with Russia in 2015. And I’m not even talking about Budapest Memorandum.
I think if you believe that the borders of Ukraine don’t matter and what matters is nuclear risk, then it’s useful to be able to make a peace deal that does not back Putin into a corner where using nuclear weapons is the only thing that might keep him in power.
Borders don’t matter in and of themselves. But they matter to Putin. Somewhat. Therefore they can be used as a tool to prevent him from being encouraged to continue his conquest.
In fact Ukraine made a peace deal with Russia in 2015.
They didn’t. They made a ceasefire agreement. Then they wanted to pass laws to do what the ceasefire agreement calls for and then there was the episode with the grenade in front of the Ukrainian parliament and they didn’t pass laws.
Therefore they can be used as a tool to prevent him from being encouraged to continue his conquest.
Taking territory against the will of the local population is hard and painful as the Soviets learned in Afghanistan and the US in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. This whole episode should be good in showing that the Russian army is not capable of doing that.
Reducing the amount of territory that could be taken with the support of the local population discourages conquest.
The idea that Putin would just accept Crimea as being Ukrainian without planning another attack to take it back seems strange to me.
The idea that Putin would just accept Crimea as being Ukrainian without planning another attack to take it back seems strange to me.
He won’t. I don’t even know if retaking Crimea is a wise strategy. Ukrainian military may well decide to not proceed to Crimea because of nuclear risk. My point was that any attempt at peace without Putin giving up something of value would play directly into his hands.
The paragraph explicitly states 1) Russian aviation and TOS-1 Buratino targeted residential areas with bombings.. 2) Russian commanders prioritized capturing the city swiftly, disregarding the safety of civilians. 3) Russian commanders provided false information to their subordinates regarding the presence of civilians in residential areas.
You can get some insight into the situation from the text, I believe. It’s just one data point but there are countless evidence like that provided by Russians themselves. And nothing that kind of magnitude from Ukrainian sources.
But ofc you can not really answer “Why are there so many destroyed homes in Mariupol?”. Each side should provide a spreadsheet indicating the number of houses destroyed with video confirmations to really answer the question :)
Well, I think I have nothing to say anymore. Have a good day!
I’m able to separate out claims made where I know they are alleged from other claims where I have a strong belief that they are true
When you have only these two mental boxes for claims you can’t distinct between 60% probable alleged claims and 10% probable alleged claims. Or maybe even 1% probable alleged claims, you are citing RT, after all.
This is an easily exploitable position. Coincidently, the one that Russian state is optimized to manipulate very well by throwing lots of completely unevidenced claims and talking about them as facts, so that reasonable people put them in the alleged category.
Russian media is extremely untrustworthy. If you think that of course it is, after all Western media is untrustworthy as well—you have no idea. The Russian media and Western media are in two completely different reference classes of untrustworthiness. My best example is your outgroup network, but completely unrestrained with even a resemblence of memetic competetion with your ingroup network. There is no insentive to be correlated with facts at all moreover there is an insentive not to be.
When you have only these two mental boxes for claims you can’t distinct between 60% probable alleged claims and 10% probable alleged claims. Or maybe even 1% probable alleged claims, you are citing RT, after all.
Who said that I have only two mental boxes? I responded to a statement about what “alleged claims” happen to be. I wouldn’t have brought this up if we wouldn’t have talked about what claims are alleged.
While I’m referring to RT, my process was “friend makes a claim, that’s sourced independently of RT and not to any Russian media outlet but to people on the ground” → search additional sources to see whether that’s actually what the Russian position is.
I didn’t cite any Russian media in my main post. In the comments, I once referred to https://khpg.org/ for a translation but not for other factual claims because it might be a too Russian-leaning source.
I only referred to Russian media when discussing what claims are alleged.
Here you are talking about separating claims in these two mental categories.
I’m able to separate out claims made where I know they are alleged from other claims where I have a strong belief that they are true.
Also you acted as if at the moment you were indeed using only two of them.
You brought up Ukrainians war crimes in the post, crediting respectful sources as Amnesty International. Than throwaway62654 replied that even if it was true it is tiny compared to credible Russian crimes like destroying Mariupol. Till this moment the mental box “alledged Ukrainian crimes” include only those who came from reasonable sources which are somewhat correlated with the truth. You reply with
Leveling Mariupol to the ground is a war crime that’s allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine.
Thus putting a very improbable crime into the mental box. What used to be “alleged crimes according to Amnesty International” is now “alleged crimes according to Amnesty International and Russian state media”, which isn’t a helpful category anymore, but exactly the kind of mental category Russian propaganda machine wants people to have.
I don’t think of the crimes that are well-documented by Amnesty International as alleged crimes but as well-documented crimes. That’s the mental category in which they are for me. As Viliam explained in detail, those are claims by a source with left-wing London values and not one with pro-Russian values.
It feels very strange to see the set as alleged crimes, as only those alleged by Western sources and not count allegations by non-Western sources.
The problem seems to be that this wasn’t clear from your original comment. I admit that after reading it I was under the impression that you were giving at least some credence to the claim that the Ukrainians turned Mariupol into Grozny 2.0. Though rereading it now, I see that my impression was coloured by your other comments—I interpreted it as “no one can tell what really went down, seeing as both sides are blaming each other” rather than “it’s worth knowing what both sides of an argument are saying if you want to come to a compromise”.
This is a pity, since while I don’t agree with you on (my understanding of) your stance on the war and how to best end it, you raise important points which should definitely be considered.
The problem seems to be that this wasn’t clear from your original comment.
I’m not sure what you think “allegedly perpetrated” is supposed to mean when it’s not about who alleges things when I respond to a comment that’s about what’s alleged.
“no one can tell what really went down, seeing as both sides are blaming each other”
I do think that it’s pretty hard to know anything about what happens on the ground in a warzone in real time. I do believe that it’s useful to be generally skeptical of one’s knowledge. People are generally biased to be overconfident when thinking about politics and that’s especially true in times of war.
I don’t think claims from either side should make one confident of what happened. Independent claims like those from Amnesty or the UN human rights council are better. Currently, Amnesty seems to give Russia the blame for bombing a theatre with a lot of civilians in it but doesn’t make claims about the responsibility for leveling a lot of civilian buildings to the ground.
Then why are you spreading unconfirmed claims? That is not nice. The city was encircled by Russians on 1st March. Could you explain me how and why AFU destroyed half-million city just in one week? :) If you’re really honest here do at least some fact-checking.
throwaway62654 stated that Russians destroyed Mariupol.
One doesn’t have to be an expert to see which side caused more death. Mariupol. All war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine pale in comparison to an entire city leveled to the ground. While people were still there.
You opposed and made the statement about possible involvement of Ukrainians.
Leveling Mariupol to the ground is a war crime that’s allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine. I first heard that claim from a Russian friend who sourced it through a relative of a friend who was on the ground. Russian media is also making the claim. It’s unfortunate that EU censorship makes it harder to know that this is what Russian media is saying and thus to know what “war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine” involve.
Neither of the two makes me confident that Ukraine is responsible, but it certainly falls into the category of war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine.
According to Russian sources all the war crimes are done by Ukrainians. Does it make Ukraine a subject to praesumptio culpae? Is it a reasonable framing? Should we from the beginning include Ukraine into that category? Should Ukraine always prove that it didn’t do all the horrible things while being invaded?
I can write an article that Mariupol was allegedly destroyed by North Korea (sorry for using absurdity). Will you include North Korea to the list of possible actors? Will it be useful? If not than what is the difference?
Should Ukraine always prove that it didn’t do all the horrible things while being invaded?
I don’t think anybody in this discussion is operating with the authority of the Ukrainian government, so this is a quite strange claim. I’m not calling on the Ukrainians to prove anything anywhere in this post.
I’m able to distinguish my epistemics from claims for what people should do and don’t mix that together. We are arguing here on a rationality forum and it’s helpful for rational reasoning to be able to think clearly about what’s true.
I’m not calling on the Ukrainians to prove anything anywhere in this post.
Yeah but by assuming things (directly or not) you are framing the discussion in a way which significantly influences perception of the topic.
I’m able to distinguish my epistemics from claims for what people should do and don’t mix that together. We are arguing here on a rationality forum and it’s helpful for rational reasoning to be able to think clearly about what’s true.
I can substitute should with is it rational if it drives the point home better :) Or I can expand shoulds to should we dilute our attention and efforts with statements which are most certainly false to find the truth.
Anyway I see we are kinda stuck here and I have nothing more to add.
I’d like to object that it’s rational. Sooner or later any lie will be revealed and the reputation/trust will be lost irrevocably. Without trust Ukraine will lose external and internal support and then the war. The risks are just not worth it.
It would be great if war propaganda lies would lead to irrevocably lost trust, but in most cases that’s not what happens. Most people excuse lies from people they consider to be on their side in war.
In any case, at the start of this war, we had false propaganda stories like the Ghost of Kyiv. They didn’t choose the strategy of not telling any lies and I’m not aware of any army doing that during a war.
Yes, they didn’t. And I think the story about the Ghost of Kyiv is net negative. But not all propaganda is equal. One thing is to lie about a mythic mighty pilot to comfort people (which is still bad imo) and completely other thing is to say that Ukrainians destroyed Mariupol, killed people in Bucha or spend millions to vilify Ukraine and poison EU in information space.
The first Gallup poll I cited was from July 2014. Do you think that a lot of people left Crimea by then?
Leveling Mariupol to the ground is a war crime that’s allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine. I first heard that claim from a Russian friend who sourced it through a relative of a friend who was on the ground. Russian media is also making the claim. It’s unfortunate that EU censorship makes it harder to know that this is what Russian media is saying and thus to know what “war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine” involve.
Neither of the two makes me confident that Ukraine is responsible, but it certainly falls into the category of war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine.
If you agree that Crimea would not be peaceful under Ukrainian rule and in a state of constant violent conflict and you care about global security, having Crimea under Ukrainian rule is not good.
The idea that if Ukraine only manages to retake all its former territory that means it’s safe from future attacks from Russia is faulty especially if there’s a lot of resistance in Crimea to Ukrainian rule.
I think if you believe that the borders of Ukraine don’t matter and what matters is nuclear risk, then it’s useful to be able to make a peace deal that does not back Putin into a corner where using nuclear weapons is the only thing that might keep him in power.
Food prices are also a huge global security risk and having a peace deal sooner than later would be good on that front.
This is the first time I heard anything like that, so I checked Wikipedia, and the Russian page says:
So, seems like the editors of Russian Wikipedia haven’t heard about it either.
(My Russian is not fluent enough to check the entire talk page carefully, but skimming the text did not reveal any edit war about who actually destroyed Mariupol. I am saying this because even where Wikipedia editors are biased, one can usually find the accusations of bias on the talk page.)
Russian Wikipedia is very oppositionary. It tells pro-western point of view with 90% propability (this pro-western point of view is usually also truth, but the point is that you should not additionally update from Russian Wiki).
There’s an RT article that makes the claim. I’m unsure about whether it’s wise to currently link directly to RT, especially when posting censorship-circumventing links.
Quoting RT is a bit like quoting QAnon. If there is not even another Russian source that would confirm the information, I think it is quite safe to assume that it was made up.
For those unfamiliar, watch this. (Yay, European censorship trivially circumvented.)
Christian is not saying that RT is reliable, only that we can’t trust either side. Only if both sides report something or if there is independent reporting—but where will you find that? I wouldn’t trust Wikipedia on this either—who knows what filtering/blocking of accounts goes on.
My argument is that if some pro-Russian information is not even supported by mainstream Russian media (which are fully under Putin’s control), but only by RT, we can falsely assume that it is a lie.
Please do not “both sides” at me when one of those sides is RT. Note that I am not saying “Russia” here, but “RT” specifically. Using RT as an argument for… anything… is just silly.
Sorry, I am running out of patience here. Using RT in a discussion is exactly the same level of insanity as using QAnon. If RT merely repeats statements made by someone else, please use the original source. If RT is the original, then please let’s just not discuss that at a wannabe rationalist site at all.
With regards to Wikipedia, I do not trust the articles, but I trust that if a controversy exists, it will appear on the talk page. (At least in form of: “A suggests X” “B suggests to ban A; A is banned”.)
Are you actually reading what I write? This has nothing to do with what I said. I have two independent sources, not one source repeating what another source says. Neither of the two nor them together is enough for me to be confident that the claim is true.
I did refer to both sources. The other is an eye-witness report (with two people in between) and not a media report. Given that I noted that in the first post, it feels strange to me that you assert I somehow only referred to RT.
If RT makes a claim then that claim is a claim that’s alleged. Then it’s a set of the “all war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine” that throwaway62654 talked about. You can talk about how important that set happens to be but if you want to make arguments about its nature, then to me this clearly falls into that set.
Unfortunately, I don’t know any Russian, so I can’t check what mainstream Russian media says about Mariupol.
I’m not saying “both sides” here. I see Russia as the much worse aggressor. It seems clear that Putin used the real but very weak Nazi accusations to expand his energy empire. But we have only very weak evidence of what goes on in the war zone unless both sides agree on some aspect.
Agree.
I understand Christian’s point as primarily about stopping the war to help people on the ground—with all the difficulties that brings—many might not want to be “liberated” . Cheering Ukraine isn’t helping that cause.
I know we’re in a hostile information space, but this takes epistemic learned helplessness way too far. There are lots of ways to find things out other than being told about them, and when you don’t have specific knowledge about something you don’t have to adopt a uniform prior.
Taking Mariupol as an example, our two suspects are the Russians, who were attacking Mariupol and didn’t have any assets there, and the Ukrainians, who were defending Mariupol and did. Given those facts, before we hear from either side, what should we expect? If you’re unsure, we can look at other events in similar reference classes. For example, of the German towns destroyed during World War 2, how many would you predict were destroyed by Allied attackers, and how many by German defenders?
Ever heard of scorched earth?
Usually that’s just about denying strategic assets, though: blowing up railroads, collapsing mine shafts, that sort of thing. Blowing up the museums and opera houses is pointless, because the enemy can’t get any war benefit by capturing them. All it does is waste your own explosives, which you’d rather use to blow up the enemy. Scorched earth practiced by attackers, on the other hand, tends to be more indiscriminate: contrast the state of Novgorod post-WW2 with that of the towns west of it, or the treatment of rice fields by North Vietnamese vs. Americans during the Vietnam war.
The Wikipedia number for Mariupol’s ethnic Russian population is 44%. Russia certainly had the intention to make Mariupol Russian territory. Making Mariupol Russian territory is worth more if it stays standing. Russia has to invest less money into rebuilding Mariupol if it’s not destroyed.
The inability of the Russian army was not as apparent at the time Mariupol was taken as it’s now, so it’s quite plausible that Ukrainians didn’t expect to be able to retake it at the time.
World War II was not a far fought to take over German territory, so it’s not in the same reference class. That’s especially true because of lessons from World War I, that the German population might have to see part of Germany being destroyed to really understand that they lost.
I’m a little curious what reference class you think the battle of Mariupol does belong to, which makes its destruction by its defenders plausible on priors. But mostly it sounds like you agree that we can make inferences about hard questions even without a trustworthy authority to appeal to, and that’s the point I was really interested in.
The reference class would be “wars to extend a country’s territory permanently”. As such there’s an interest to have the value of the newly won territory as high as possible.
When waging war over a city, for both sides there are actions that can be taken to increase or decrease the amount of damage that the city takes.
In Ukraine, it seems that no party went out of its way to reduce the damage to cities. We know that from Amnesty trying to understand what happened and them finding that frequently Ukrainian army stationed itself inside the city and got shot at by the Russian army.
This dynamic does explain that a part of the city is destroyed but it doesn’t explain why 90% of Mariupol’s residential buildings had been damaged or destroyed (Wikipedia numbers). The 90% sounds to me like this is more than just collateral damage but that someone made a conscious choice to destroy more of the city than they would need for purely military reasons.
One reason to do that might be propaganda reasons and to make the population fear you. Given that according to Russian propaganda Russia came to liberate the Russian minority, destroying a city with a large number of ethnic Russians makes little sense for that goal.
Often in war destruction is also done as a punishment. Russia punished the population in Chechnya for their local resistance in the Second Chechnyan War. It’s unclear to me why the population of Mariupol would deserve to be punished from the Russian perspective.
On the other hand, at the time that Mariupol was taking Ukrainians might have thought that this war will end in a way where Donetsk and Luhansk would permanently be part of Russia. Under that assumption making Mariupol worth as little as possible seems to me like an understandable reason.
Reporting suggests that taking Crimea was expensive for Russia. Having Mariupol destroyed means Russia would have to invest more money into it to make it function again after the war.
I agree that ending the war sooner rather than later is politically the most important priority.
The idea that if Ukraine make a peace deal with Russia means it’s safe from future attacks from Russia is even more faulty. In fact Ukraine made a peace deal with Russia in 2015. And I’m not even talking about Budapest Memorandum.
Borders don’t matter in and of themselves. But they matter to Putin. Somewhat. Therefore they can be used as a tool to prevent him from being encouraged to continue his conquest.
They didn’t. They made a ceasefire agreement. Then they wanted to pass laws to do what the ceasefire agreement calls for and then there was the episode with the grenade in front of the Ukrainian parliament and they didn’t pass laws.
Taking territory against the will of the local population is hard and painful as the Soviets learned in Afghanistan and the US in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. This whole episode should be good in showing that the Russian army is not capable of doing that.
Reducing the amount of territory that could be taken with the support of the local population discourages conquest.
The idea that Putin would just accept Crimea as being Ukrainian without planning another attack to take it back seems strange to me.
He won’t. I don’t even know if retaking Crimea is a wise strategy. Ukrainian military may well decide to not proceed to Crimea because of nuclear risk. My point was that any attempt at peace without Putin giving up something of value would play directly into his hands.
So, Do you think after Russians had encircled the city Ukrainians somehow were able to destroy it? :)
P.S.: It is so shocking to see such statements in LW that I even registered here after 10 years of read-only.
@ChristianKl So, how are things with crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine? This one is from Wagner’s channel.
https://t.me/grey_zone/19363
That paragraph looks to me to be about how they handled civilians on the battlefield and is not about the number of destroyed homes in Mariupol.
It does not really answer “Why are there so many destroyed homes in Mariupol?”
The paragraph explicitly states 1) Russian aviation and TOS-1 Buratino targeted residential areas with bombings.. 2) Russian commanders prioritized capturing the city swiftly, disregarding the safety of civilians. 3) Russian commanders provided false information to their subordinates regarding the presence of civilians in residential areas.
You can get some insight into the situation from the text, I believe. It’s just one data point but there are countless evidence like that provided by Russians themselves. And nothing that kind of magnitude from Ukrainian sources.
But ofc you can not really answer “Why are there so many destroyed homes in Mariupol?”. Each side should provide a spreadsheet indicating the number of houses destroyed with video confirmations to really answer the question :)
Well, I think I have nothing to say anymore. Have a good day!
I’m able to separate out claims made where I know they are alleged from other claims where I have a strong belief that they are true.
In this instance, the claim is that Ukrainians destroyed it before that point.
When you have only these two mental boxes for claims you can’t distinct between 60% probable alleged claims and 10% probable alleged claims. Or maybe even 1% probable alleged claims, you are citing RT, after all.
This is an easily exploitable position. Coincidently, the one that Russian state is optimized to manipulate very well by throwing lots of completely unevidenced claims and talking about them as facts, so that reasonable people put them in the alleged category.
Russian media is extremely untrustworthy. If you think that of course it is, after all Western media is untrustworthy as well—you have no idea. The Russian media and Western media are in two completely different reference classes of untrustworthiness. My best example is your outgroup network, but completely unrestrained with even a resemblence of memetic competetion with your ingroup network. There is no insentive to be correlated with facts at all moreover there is an insentive not to be.
Who said that I have only two mental boxes? I responded to a statement about what “alleged claims” happen to be. I wouldn’t have brought this up if we wouldn’t have talked about what claims are alleged.
While I’m referring to RT, my process was “friend makes a claim, that’s sourced independently of RT and not to any Russian media outlet but to people on the ground” → search additional sources to see whether that’s actually what the Russian position is.
I didn’t cite any Russian media in my main post. In the comments, I once referred to https://khpg.org/ for a translation but not for other factual claims because it might be a too Russian-leaning source.
I only referred to Russian media when discussing what claims are alleged.
Here you are talking about separating claims in these two mental categories.
Also you acted as if at the moment you were indeed using only two of them.
You brought up Ukrainians war crimes in the post, crediting respectful sources as Amnesty International. Than throwaway62654 replied that even if it was true it is tiny compared to credible Russian crimes like destroying Mariupol. Till this moment the mental box “alledged Ukrainian crimes” include only those who came from reasonable sources which are somewhat correlated with the truth. You reply with
Thus putting a very improbable crime into the mental box. What used to be “alleged crimes according to Amnesty International” is now “alleged crimes according to Amnesty International and Russian state media”, which isn’t a helpful category anymore, but exactly the kind of mental category Russian propaganda machine wants people to have.
I don’t think of the crimes that are well-documented by Amnesty International as alleged crimes but as well-documented crimes. That’s the mental category in which they are for me. As Viliam explained in detail, those are claims by a source with left-wing London values and not one with pro-Russian values.
It feels very strange to see the set as alleged crimes, as only those alleged by Western sources and not count allegations by non-Western sources.
The problem seems to be that this wasn’t clear from your original comment. I admit that after reading it I was under the impression that you were giving at least some credence to the claim that the Ukrainians turned Mariupol into Grozny 2.0. Though rereading it now, I see that my impression was coloured by your other comments—I interpreted it as “no one can tell what really went down, seeing as both sides are blaming each other” rather than “it’s worth knowing what both sides of an argument are saying if you want to come to a compromise”.
This is a pity, since while I don’t agree with you on (my understanding of) your stance on the war and how to best end it, you raise important points which should definitely be considered.
I’m not sure what you think “allegedly perpetrated” is supposed to mean when it’s not about who alleges things when I respond to a comment that’s about what’s alleged.
I do think that it’s pretty hard to know anything about what happens on the ground in a warzone in real time. I do believe that it’s useful to be generally skeptical of one’s knowledge. People are generally biased to be overconfident when thinking about politics and that’s especially true in times of war.
I don’t think claims from either side should make one confident of what happened. Independent claims like those from Amnesty or the UN human rights council are better. Currently, Amnesty seems to give Russia the blame for bombing a theatre with a lot of civilians in it but doesn’t make claims about the responsibility for leveling a lot of civilian buildings to the ground.
Then why are you spreading unconfirmed claims? That is not nice.
The city was encircled by Russians on 1st March. Could you explain me how and why AFU destroyed half-million city just in one week? :)
If you’re really honest here do at least some fact-checking.
throwaway62654 was talking about “war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Ukraine”. I made a statement about what crimes have been alleged.
It’s useful to be able to discuss what has been alledged and what has not been alleged.
throwaway62654 stated that Russians destroyed Mariupol.
You opposed and made the statement about possible involvement of Ukrainians.
According to Russian sources all the war crimes are done by Ukrainians. Does it make Ukraine a subject to praesumptio culpae? Is it a reasonable framing? Should we from the beginning include Ukraine into that category? Should Ukraine always prove that it didn’t do all the horrible things while being invaded?
I can write an article that Mariupol was allegedly destroyed by North Korea (sorry for using absurdity). Will you include North Korea to the list of possible actors? Will it be useful? If not than what is the difference?
I don’t think anybody in this discussion is operating with the authority of the Ukrainian government, so this is a quite strange claim. I’m not calling on the Ukrainians to prove anything anywhere in this post.
I’m able to distinguish my epistemics from claims for what people should do and don’t mix that together. We are arguing here on a rationality forum and it’s helpful for rational reasoning to be able to think clearly about what’s true.
Yeah but by assuming things (directly or not) you are framing the discussion in a way which significantly influences perception of the topic.
I can substitute should with is it rational if it drives the point home better :)
Or I can expand shoulds to should we dilute our attention and efforts with statements which are most certainly false to find the truth.
Anyway I see we are kinda stuck here and I have nothing more to add.
It’s rational for Ukraine to engage in war propaganda that’s not always true. That’s generally what most countries do when they are at war.
I’d like to object that it’s rational. Sooner or later any lie will be revealed and the reputation/trust will be lost irrevocably. Without trust Ukraine will lose external and internal support and then the war. The risks are just not worth it.
It would be great if war propaganda lies would lead to irrevocably lost trust, but in most cases that’s not what happens. Most people excuse lies from people they consider to be on their side in war.
In any case, at the start of this war, we had false propaganda stories like the Ghost of Kyiv. They didn’t choose the strategy of not telling any lies and I’m not aware of any army doing that during a war.
Yes, they didn’t. And I think the story about the Ghost of Kyiv is net negative. But not all propaganda is equal. One thing is to lie about a mythic mighty pilot to comfort people (which is still bad imo) and completely other thing is to say that Ukrainians destroyed Mariupol, killed people in Bucha or spend millions to vilify Ukraine and poison EU in information space.
https://www.civic-synergy.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Words-and-Wars.-Ukraine-Facing-Kremlin-Propaganda.pdf
It is typical of the intellects that hang out here, honestly.