this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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chapotraphouse
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That's the whole reason why both are war crimes. Using civilians and civilian infrastructure for military use justifies seeing them as targets, which is wrong because targeting non-combatants is morally reprehensible.
Yeah people forget, there's no higher power enforcing laws around wars. Only the victor will get to decide what gets punished. The purpose of war crimes is for nations at war with each other have an agreement not to do certain things or use certain weapons.
Once you start committing war crimes, there won't be police knocking on your door to arrest you or a fine sent to you in the mail. The response will come from the other side who have justification to do the exact same shit you just did. You start using civilians as cover? They're going to blow them up. You start blowing up civilians? Their civilians are just going to start attacking your troops. You carpet bomb cities? They will carpet bomb cities. You use chemical weapons? They will use chemical weapons. Etc. Etc.
There is no benefit for the Ukrainians to do this. They are in a losing position already. What's going to happen is Russia will respond with crimes of their own and then they will prosecute Ukrainians for the crimes they committed once Russia has won. There won't be any consequences for Russia itself. The UN won't have a case to build if the Ukrainians did something first. Even if they did, Russia can ignore it the way the US does.
The benefit is to harm Russia at any and all cost and if they can achieve that, they see it as well worth it. Ukraine was never in a winning position yet they have been the ones committing war crime upon war crime upon war crime literally from the very start of this conflict (and depending on when you define it "beginning," they have been doing it from before the start and this is largely what necessitated Russia's intervention in the first place). Meanwhile, Russia has been highly, even shockingly restrained when it comes to taking actions with high potential to cause civilian harm. When you honestly compare how Russia has waged this war in terms of risk to civilian life to what the west (including Ukraine) has done in military operations and wars in the past handful of decades, Russia comes out as almost kind, looking like the benevolent "peacekeepers" that NATO always tried to paint themselves to their own respective domestic populaces. (This isn't to say warcrimes haven't been committed by Russian forces, particularly before Wagner was dismantled, but they are not systemic and are not at the scale of, for example, wiping out civilian infrastructure).
This isn't just a "Russia good and Ukraine bad" thing (though we shouldn't forget that current Ukraine is literally a Nazi-led project) but there are very obvious material reasons why this is the case. Like TreadOnMe pointed out, Russia came to the aid of what were essentially militias formed from Ukrainian civilians who were fighting in resistance of their own ethnic cleansing by the Ukrainian government. Russia knows that the territories it has been fighting over will be its responsibility to maintain and rebuild so destroying the infrastructure there and making enemies of the people who live there are not at all in Russia's best interests. This is a major stumbling block for the libs who constantly want to believe Russia is just a bunch of orcs hellbent on domination and conquest: material reality does not fit the idealist narrative they need to believe in.
Just because Ukraine commits war crimes repeatedly (as they have) and even as a normal order of operation, that does not mean that Russia will then be compelled to do the same as a tit-for-tat. There are certain lines that when crossed, Russia does have to respond to, but that doesn't mean they have to respond with commensurate cruelty to civilians. And they haven't.
I didn't mean that they were necessarily going to commit retaliatory crimes. What I mean is they become "justified" if they do. Yes, Russia has shown tremendous restraint, especially compared to what NATO has been doing the last 50 years.
I'm pointing out that if Ukraine were to do something incredibly stupid like use biological weapons on Russians (such as anthrax), Russia would have a good reason to use WMDs of their own in order to accelerate the end of the war before Ukraine did it again.
This is the reason the Axis Powers didn't use chemical weapons against the British or Americans. They knew if they did, the Allies could retaliate with a much larger stockpile of more sophisticated weaponry. It's not like nazis were against chemical weapons (it's how they killed most of their victims in concentration camps).
So with Ukraine doing stuff like using civilians to carry out attacks, Russia has enough reason to escalate if they think it's strategically viable. There would be no consequences for Russia, only their own guilt and internal turmoil.