Could be just being forgetful (do remind me if I am!), but I don’t recall Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc., getting this kind of restrained, painstaking civil aid in the midst of active war zones. Obviously, it’s a war-time report from one of the belligerents, so careful reserve must be used in case of possible propaganda content. But lots of past observation of how Russia acts suggests that these details are probably pretty accurate. What a contrast with ‘our’ hyper-war-criminal gics, eh? Fallujah, Raqqa, and on and on… And on:
They’re still pushing the nuclear disaster narrative…
Arguably, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 played a key part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s deep in the Russian psyche, and it makes no sense whatsoever that Russian forces would try to destroy nuclear power stations in Ukraine.
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Heard on BBC radio news today
"Here’s the war ethics and humanitarian specialist. Dr Hugo Slim. "
BBC Radio 5 News (Nihal Arthanayake programme, News an hour in)
Dr Hugoi Sim:
“The Russian way of war is a brutal way of war. And one of the things the Russians will be trying to do is constantly intimidating people, so they will be playing with corridors, they’ll be saying yes we might let you leave you can leave tomorrow, people will prepare, then they will disrupt that process and then they’ll let them leave to certain various places.”
Russians are just brutal - they torture their prey, you know, like a cat with a mouse.
No need for even a link, as their evilness is so well known…
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The first casualty of war, etc, etc, but IMHO the more convincing reports (as opposed to the mithering of Hugo) are those telling that people are threatened with being shot by snipers if they dare to try and use the humanitarian corridors.
Without their civilian shields the militias could certainly expect brutality. Albeit mercifully short.
Russian intervention in Syria, to my way of thinking the most significant, and bold, geopolitical move of the last decade, demonstrates to my satisfaction that combatants are the focus not civilians. I guess I just haven’t watched enough telly to think otherwise.
The USA uses siege warfare, dressed up as sanctions, and reckons 500000 lost Iraqi lives to have been “worth it”. They are the most bloodthirsty gang of thieves in all known history, and I say that knowing all too well British history, and the French and Belgian atrocities in Africa.
The sheer chutzpah of these people.
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Gives me a steady glow of quiet satisfaction to see the evil empire of these indescribably vile criminals - the gics running the (crashing) Anglozionist empire - falling into perdition whilst we watch; and with so much of that terminal catastrophe inflicted by their own hands, guided by their insufferably-self-inflated, delusional, incorrigibly high-handed reality-denying policy choices. Hallucinated ‘indispensability’ (and ‘invincibility’) as their self-inflicted sober-up club upside the head! Love it! 
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Here is Hugo agonizing about the R2P, which is a new thing that can justify invasions (except for evil sadistic Russians, of course)
The Responsibility to Protect from Terror: The Ethics of Foreign Counter-terrorist Interventions
It’s unlikely you’ll want to get very far - I didn’t. Without these new abstractions being evaluated independently and objectively, it just seems to give more options for those in control to spin the judgement for or against as they wish.
Has anyone mentioned Russia’s R2P the Donbass people? They have a much stronger connection to the so-called protectors than in any US waronturr assault in the last 20 years.
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Some sample weasel words (and I didn’t get very far either):
international community
Translation: America and it’s allies vassal states
The fact that they [drone strikes] are sometimes done without the consent of the state in which they are conducted makes this a controversial strategy
Translation 1: sometimes => every single time
Translation 2: consent = archaic. olden days word for explicit permission in full possession of the facts pertaining to that which you are permitting. antonym: an email telling you what we did
Translation 3: controversial => prompting whataboutery in an editorial in NYT/WaPo/Guardian headlined “Is killing the wrong people remotely immoral?” (900 words later: a bit. But…)
International law
Translation: archaic. c.f. Rules Based Order
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Defining terrorism…
“For the purposes of this paper, I will understand terrorism to be the use of violence against civilian targets with the aim of spreading fear among a wider population.”
“Spreading fear among a wider population” is a political aim, and having political aim is a much more usual definition of terrorism. So why narrow it down to just one of these possible aims?
Well, it just so happens that this takes it further away from conventional state military attacks on populations, which will usually have other alleged aims - so happily, these are not terrorist, then.
“We often define political concepts with particular purposes in mind and, as we will see below, my definition of terrorism picks out a form of violence which cannot neatly be addressed with existing principles from mainstream theories in the ethics of war. It thus represents a category of action that warrants further investigation to determine whether forceful responses to it can be justified and, if so, what form these can permissibly take.”
We often define political concepts with particular purposes in mind
Then we are biased, aren’t we?
At the end of this paragraph, he’s achieved the (“sometimes”) US policy as responding to a special case for breaking the rules, that can’t of course be extended to US actions themselves.
Ethics innit 
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Hi folks, as far as I understand it the UN charter only supports the preservation of sovereign states unless there’s genocide in the victim area. Conveniently no international judiciary exists to prosecute a State for Aggression and no independent judiciary has found an international agreed definition of Genocide. The faux tribunal ICTY charged Milosovic with genocide even though the evidence showed deaths on both sides adding to a few thousand in Srebrenica , they never found him guilty before he died of a " heart attack" in gaol. In Rwanda the facts were reversed and the wrong side was accused of genocide again according to Herman and Peterson.
Of course self defence or defence of an ally seems sound law under the UN charter , which is what Russia appears to be doing.
Interestingly this is the exact same approach that the West took in breaking up Yugoslavia - recognising the independence of breakaway republics and then allying themselves to them at the same time claiming the Serbs were committing genocide when there was no real evidence of anything other than a State trying to avoid civil unrest inside its sovereign borders and getting hammered by NATO supporting the breakaways. Or so Herman and Peterson et al have laid out.
As a supporter of peaceful solutions it’s difficult to champion the use of force in any situation. Russia is, imo, keeping force to a minimum - so far. The constant barrage of sanctions and injection of arms into Ukraine by the West is clearly just pouring oil onto the fire and making it even more difficult to end this relatively peacefully. The Russians seem to liken their struggle in Ukraine as a family dispute which sometimes involves dealing harshly with the black sheep!
The MSM and unsocial media platforms should be prosecuted for warmongering imo.
cheers
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Anothee attempted play of the “genocide” card was the plight (I believe hugely exaggerated) of the ‘Rohingya’ in Myanmar. It’s one of those potential flashpoints that seemed to go dormant but I’m not sure why.
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Oops - Slim didn’t write the essay I quoted from. I wandered on to someone else’s essay at Brill publishing (where Slim also writes). Slim has written and talked quite a lot on R2P, not many are accessible.
The one I quoted from is this: https://brill.com/view/journals/gr2p/aop/article-10.1163-1875-984X-14010013/article-10.1163-1875-984X-14010013.xml
Re the original thread title - in a video just posted by @RobG on the other thread on Ukraine, Scott Ritter has some insights and observations on the Russian army and its conduct in Ukraine, that support the account depicted in the threads posted by @RhisiartGwilym, as opposed to the official narrative as speculated by ethicist Dr Hugo Slim.
(To be fair to Dr Slim (or charitable?), I think his appearance on the BBC was triggered by some ‘news stories’ or allegations that morning, that might be difficult to question when thrown under the spotlight. If they say ‘How terrible is this’ and give him a mic, he might not get much chance to look at the evidence. Maybe he’s been happy in his ivory towers all these years, churning out boffin work on human rights and theory of thoughts about other thoughts about war, not realizing that he could be called up for active service and obliged to use shorter words and sentences.)
Anyway Scott Ritter is on Galloway’s MOATS video starting about 35m and lasts about 23m.
