I live in Ukraine and run a software company here. I still don’t understand how the power grid is still functioning and how quickly it is repaired after an outage. I’ve been here since the war started, including some of the worst hit front line cities like Kharkiv and power outages after strikes were always resolved within a 48 hour period max, usually faster. How it’s possible to replace damaged substations within hours, I have no idea.
Now I live in a relatively quiet area with a solar inverter battery (similar to the Tesla wall) and I have almost uninterrupted power sufficient to keep my business going. Just have to avoid using heavy appliances like the washing machine when on battery power.
Power grid operators around the world are used to storms taking out their local grid all the time. Some storms are worse than others, but the world has gotten good are repairing damage fast. Ukraine is drawing on that experience for a lot.
Substations are hard only because of quantity. Every power operator has experienced a substation having a catastrophic failure so they keep spares of the big parts on hand so they can restore power in hours when that happens. The only difference here is normally they are doing a few of these per year (and most of that is planned end of life replacements not sudden catastrophic failure) not a few per day. Manufactures of substations have had to scale up their production to meet Ukraine's needs and this is the real hard part. The rest is just normal overtime (that has been going on for several years now), and thus the normal overtime fatigue.
There's a song called 'Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell. Has anyone ever done a Ukrainian cover for it? It's the only song I know that celebrates their work.
I grew up in Denmark and went to a school and gymnasium with many Middle Eastern kids. Many were 1990s Iraqi Arab and Kurdish refugees. Many spent their holidays back home in Iraq during 2005-2011 and one family actually moved back to Iraq. In my young head it didn't compute with the weekly sectarian violence and suicide attacks.
Now when following the war in Ukraine I finally understand how war can be incredibly localized in specific regions of a country with long-range attacks targeting only high-value infrastructure targets.
I don't know about Iraq, but residential buildings are routinely bombed on Ukraine, big cities, not sure one can draw parallels here. Spending nights and even being schooled in bomb shelters will take its toll, but from meeting many Ukrainian refugees, many will make light of it, very often wary of complaining while their friends, family, countrypeople, still in-country are still waking up to sirens and explosions.
The Ukranian utilities people are relentless, resourceful heroes, keeping power on, under the conditions they're facing.
Iraq was much worse. I heard it first hand from a US veteran who served in Iraq and then volunteered in Ukraine. We were driving together through Kharkiv surveying damage and he said: the damage here is nothing compared to what we did to Baghdad.
Statistical estimates put civilian casualties in the Iraq war at about 10x the rate of the current Ukraine war.
Remember some context here: much of what happened in baghdad was localized on the ground internal violence and also the US faffing about getting involved in internal violence. Civilians got targetted and collateralized in ways that are categorically different from a state actor indiscriminately killing civilians from without with limited long range weaponry.
There are places in Ukraine, like bakhmut, where it was ground combat and not long range weaponry, where you wouldn't make that side by side comparison with Iraq.
I find it hard to believe the US cared about civilian life in Iraq when the US military took out Iraq's water treatment facilities in the Gulf war then imposed sanctions to make sure they can't be repaired, killing 500,000 children in only the first 4 years of 12 years of sanctions.
Even more chilling is the interview with Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state, where she literally says the 500,000 died Iraqi children was worth it.
The US intentionally took out water and sewage treatment facilities in the Gulf war and placed particular sanctions to make sure the population didn't have a clean water supply and so diseases could spread. Based on Wikileaks and declassified documents.
https://progressive.org/latest/pentagon-documents-show-u.s.-...
Your link does not support the claim that the Albright quote is apocryphal--it in fact repeats the quote and notes that Albright does not dispute the "half million" figure, and characterizes other attempts to minimize the figure as obsolete and discredited.
Nobody said anything about the US caring about civilians. In fact i implied the US targetted civilians. So, the extremeness of your bias is showing.
My point is about false equivalences. In support of some extreme ideology, you have basically reached for every false equivalence you could have, without thinking through it at all.
I find problem with when people chalk up all the civilian deaths to "sectarian violence" as if carpet bombing whole cities, including even bomb shelters designated for civilians, hospitals, and press offices ... , doesn't kill civilians. Not to mention all the birth defects from the uranium from all those dropped bombs.
The mental gymnastics many people make to justify the war crimes in Iraq and all the other places the US invaded, terrifies me as to what new atrocities we are yet to witness.
This is a category error. Baghdad was subject to capture by an invading force, Kharkiv was never captured.
What was done to Mariupol, Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Vulhedar, Popasna, Mariinka and dozens of other places far exeeds the damage done to Baghdad. These places are basically uninhabitable now.
There are no official, broadly recognized statistics for Iraq nor for Ukraine.
The lowest Iraq estimate 120k dead civilians or so in the course of decade long conflict. This certainly tracks with estimates of Ukrainian civilian deaths.
And while Kharkiv was not thoroughly obliterated it was mainly though the strength of defensive efforts. Other cities were left in a condition that makes any comparison to Baghdad laughable.
A town of 10 000, completely destroyed, uninhabitable. Current population: 0. With scenes like these, threats of nuclear attack lose potency. Marinka looks indistinguishable from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bakhmut and other frontline towns didn't fare any better. A group of scientists tracked the destruction with a synthetic aperture radar:
“After Hang processed the images and we saw the end result, it looked like a checkerboard or mesh,” Barbot said. “We asked, ‘Why is that?’ and we realized that it’s only the roads that survived. Everything else was collapsed, destroyed, evaporated, and the entire city is completely flattened.”
“You can see a neighborhood going away, and then another and then there’s no progress because of a natural obstacle like a river,” Barbot said. “After they’ve bombarded enough stuff, the front line begins to move to the west and the Russian army advances through the crumbles. Eventually the story repeats itself and after a year, there’s just nothing left. It looks like cancer spreading throughout the body.”
True but the 10,000 civilians were not all killed while they were living there. Most were evacuated as the battlefield front lines moved towards those towns.
In Iraq, there were 10s of thousands of civilian casualties estimated within the first few days of the invasion. That's more than the entire casualty estimate for Ukraine so far.
> True but the 10,000 civilians were not all killed while they were living there.
Baghdad still stands. Many Ukrainian towns are nothing but a name on a map and a pile of rubble on the ground. I didn't mean to leave an impression as if all inhabitants have been killed, but the towns have ceased to exist as places of human settlement.
> In Iraq, there were 10s of thousands of civilian casualties estimated within the first few days of the invasion.
Certainly not, that's an insane number. Common estimates put the number of civilian casualties in low thousands for the entire invasion phase that lasted several months, and these figures include deaths from indirect causes such as crime related to breakdown of social order, which contributed roughly as much as the invading force itself, if you trust the data from Iraqi Body Count project.
> That's more than the entire casualty estimate for Ukraine so far.
Everyone doing estimates stresses that they severely undercount due to lack of access to occupied areas. You are comparing a clearly inflated Iraqi figures against clearly undercounted Ukrainian figures.
While formally not civilians, many who have died as Russian combatants were Ukrainian civilians who were forcibly conscripted from occupied areas. These so-called "mobiks" alone make up tens of thousands of dead because they were untrained, poorly equipped and expendable.
There's estimated 47k to 100k civilians who have perished in a couple of months in siege of Mariupol, not sure what the "entire casualty estimate" you're talking about.
Because you aren't using "estimates" for Ukrainian casualties, you're using the numbers that have been able to be verified with evidence by third parties.
In Mariupol alone there were ~10,000 new graves on satellite imagery and some of them are large enough for multiple bodies, which we know was done in Lyman when those mass graves were excavated.
Can you please provide a source for the 10s of thousands claim? I find it extremely hard to believe, considering the way the war was persecuted. The US did not indiscriminately shell cities with cluster munitions [1], and Iraqi cities are less dense and smaller than commie block filled Ukrainian ones.
> The US did not indiscriminately shell cities with cluster munitions [1]
Like I said, I heard first hand from a US veteran who served there in Iraq and was with me in Ukraine. He said Iraq was "much worse" in terms of civilian casualties in his estimation. Almost all statistical estimates you can find online also seem to confirm this, the civilian death toll was much worse in Iraq.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and hearsay and unnamed "statistical estimates" are hardly extraordinary.
The claim is definitely extraordinary since both wars are extensively documented, and we just know (like, we have verifiable videos) that Russia has much, much less regard for civilian casualties, employs much less precise fires, and Ukraine is more populous and dense than Iraq.
Besides, the numbers I could find are the other way around. This study [1] estimates 3,750 civilian deaths in Iraq, and this UN report [2] says 10,582 recorded civilian deaths (that is, it's definitely an undercount, unlike the estimation in Iraq).
Maybe that's true for Kharkiv, but entire portions of other cities like Bakhmut were entirely leveled, and the bits that remain standing will need to be demolished. No person could live there.
I don't know if your perspective is represenative. My girlfriend's mom actually went back to Kharkiv just a few months ago after having fled. She used to be scared of rockets over head but the more it happens the more people are just used to it. My girlfriend's students (located all over the country) couldn't give a shit about it. They're completely desensitized to it. Obviously that's not true of anyone who lives near the actual front lines. That shit is a terrible nightmare and hard to even talk about. So I tend to agree with GP about localization.
Fear. Terror. Destabilization.
This lowers GDP, causes frustration, and "make this just go away" sentiment.
Also, I think it happens out of frustration on the russian side. When the "three day special operation" failed, there was a wave of random bombardment of urban areas.
On a side note, I do heavily recommend watching 20 days in Mariupol.
Disasters often increase GDP, because money spent repairing damaged stuff moves thru the economy. Of course that doesn't mean this spending is productive or really is making the economy grow. Just one of the reasons GDP, as any other metric, has to be taken with a grain of salt.
An active war provides plenty of damaged stuff to use all the repairing spending you can add on your spreadsheet. A disaster at the same time will just move the resources around.
I mean... You'd think? That's definitely the motivation behind a lot of bombers.
But one of the more resilient findings of 20th century warfare is that terror-bombing does not work to pacify a people's will from the bottom-up, only their pulse. It strengthens resolve in some people, in AT LEAST equal measure to weakening it in others.
What are you on about? I made a general statement about authoritarian regimes and genocides and ideology.
Gaza, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, Ukraine, you name it. We have several active genocides and government-led terror campaigns built upon projection and manufactured consent.
I literally made no claims about Ukrainian soldiers doing anything. Did you respond to the right comment? Your link just goes to a Wikipedia page on a music festival, with zero information relating to your comment.
No, Nderitu was fired because their own application of the word genocide did not meet the UN's requirements. Your logic is backwards.
Nice try at denialism, though. Your words are easily reversed. Israel hates Palestine for existing. And the US-Israeli military industrial complex blame the Israeli attacks on Palestinians on the Palestinians, every day, like you're doing right now.
Probably best to just leave it at that, it's going to take a while to get your foot out of your mouth.
the Israelis don't hate Palestinians for existing, what are you talking about? they let them work in Israel, they gave them health care in Israel, they provided food, electricity and water from Israel.
they hate hamas for attacking them. if they wanted to get rid of the Palestinians, it would be cheaper to carpet bomb them - not use precision weapons and send in their own forces to get killed.
if this is a genocide, then it's the least effective one in history - both in the number of people killed and in the fraction of the population killed.
she refused, correctly, based on her extensive experience researching crimes against humanity, to call the war in Gaza a genocide (one where the supposed genicidal regime provides free food, water and electricity to the supposed victims).
> As of January 2024, researchers at Oregon State University and the City University of New York estimated that as much as 50–62% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip had been damaged or destroyed. Meanwhile, Israel has claimed only 16% of Gaza buildings were destroyed.
Precision weapons? You're either being willfully ignorant or disingenuous. Do some basic research on the extent of damage in the Gaza strip. The way in which civilians are systematically targeted and executed. Schools, hospitals. Journalists. Medics. Everyone is getting caught up in the crossfire. Women and babies are dying every day. Hundreds of entire family lines wiped out forever. Poverty, starvation, infection. Cultural alienation. Mass, indiscriminate death. Drones which broadcast the sounds of screaming, injured people, and then vaporize curious Palestinians.
This is one of the most well-documented colonial actions in the history of the world. Touch grass. Look at some pictures and videos, if nothing else.
yes, even Sinwar had a UN employee's passport with him when he died - if his body couldn't be identified, you'd have been claiming him as an innocent civilian UN teacher doctor.
When hamas operatives die, they transubstantiate into civilians.
does "let's leave it at that" only apply when you've said your piece?
Of course you might argue that Al Jazeera's Middle Eastern affiliations prevent them from giving unbiased coverage. Even though that would discredit every single Palestinian journalist. I honestly don't give a hoot if you keep your head in the sand.
The problem is you don't seem to have a well-developed trust model. Trusting authority isn't even needed because of all of the grassroots journalism coming out of Gaza. Trust is what people with underdeveloped research and information processing skills do. You don't need to trust anything. Verify. Corroborate. But it's also important to recognize when large groups of governments are coming together to condemn an activity.
Groups of people are dying left and right across the globe, persecuted, raped and killed for both ideological and capitalistic reasons, and there is absolutely no excuse for any of it. It takes two seconds to confirm with your own eyes what is happening to civilians in Gaza.
"Even various actions of Russia wrt Ukranians have been declared war crimes and crimes against humanity."
yes that's because Ukraine doesn't build munitions depots under schools and hospitals. remember when Israel was said to have bombed a hospital, it turned out the rocket came from hamas, was launched from the hospital and landed in the parking lot.
a lot of the stories that you read online are basically made up, or greatly exaggerated, but you seem very keen to believe them if a Jew can be claimed to have been implicated.
I've made no statement here other than to assert that several events have been officially declared as genocides in the past decade.
This is a factually true assertion.
You can verify that each of the events has been declared as such for yourself by checking the official UN statements on each.
If you disagree with their declarations about, for instance, the Rohingya genocide then you can write a strong letter disagreeing with their lengthy report.
It remains a fact that each event listed above has been described as a genocide by multiple counties, humanitarian groups, the UN, etc.
In most cases residential buildings are not the original target, some rockets/drones just miss, some get shot down and fall wherever. It happens to the both sides of the front line, btw. Not to downplay the humanitarian catastrophe that is the current war on Ukraine, but it's just a war, no need to add drama, there's more than enough as it is.
Russians prey on civilians using FPV drones[1]. They clearly see their target. Then they publish video with strikes on civilians in Russian Telegram channels and have fun. With ballistic missiles they have a lot of fun.
This is really weird to suggest that Russia hasn't systematically bombed a very large number of residential areas. That's been their SOP in several conflicts.
When hospitals and supermarkets are being hit repeatedly by multiple "precision" munitions, and then (sometimes) the Russians post drone footage of the impacts because they just happened to have been watching that location, and when the Russians have also used video footage of strikes on Syrian hospitals to market the effectiveness of their munitions, it's not crazy to suggest that they engage in terror bombing tactics.
They don't bomb residential buildings in areas with civilians present. The 'residential areas' they are fighting against are positions taken up by Ukranian soldiers. The Russians are happy to go block by block with artillery to remove the opposing soldiers, they're not targeting civilians.
You are absolutely wrong. They 100% target civilians - and FFS they will post videos of themselves doing it and brag about it on Telegram and Twitter.
Chechnya and the Syrian civil war were no different, but now there's video evidence and admissions of guilt all over the internet (and more than that, they laugh about firefighters and medics being blown up by drones and bombs), and yet still people deny it. It's nuts.
If you're saying this stuff, you're either not actually paying attention to the evidence or you're deliberately closing your eyes to it. It's that absurd.
Nonsense. The first link is dead. The 2nd link, half the town is already destroyed, as you might be able to see. Anyone still in that area is likely a combatant.
Kherson is not empty of civilians. Your link only claims that "southern" Kherson was evacuated. If you look at a map it's pretty clear why - it's at low elevation and hard to reach due to various waterways. It was also hit hard by the flooding after the Khakovka dam was destroyed.
It is extremely trivial to find out that Kherson still has a significant civilian presence, although many have indeed left.
And FFS you can see in the video that several of the people targeted are clearly elderly or medics / firefighters.
Maybe you should let go of the propaganda narrative. If there are still significant numbers of civilians in a city that's actively being shelled, especially for a country the size of Ukraine, then the authorities there are obviously morons.
From the CNN article:
> At 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, three shells landed near the home of Hrigorii, who did not want to give his surname. He said he believes a nearby hospital was the intended target.
That's talking about artillery, that's what 'shells' are. Artillery has a very finite range. Why in God's name are their still civilians in the city, let alone WITHIN ARTILLERY RANGE? That's beyond stupid. So either these stories are complete fabrications, which is likely, or there will need to be a lot of Ukranians tried for war crimes after they finally surrender.
Some percentage of those are missing their actual targets due to GPS jamming (others, just straight up terror bombardment). Also, part of the purpose is to create dilemmas for an air defense with limited resources - save the ammo factory or the children's hospital.
I still vividly remember pictures of a strike on a kids hospital in the very first days of the war, where a 2 year old has been killed by a Russian missile. No one has been using that hospital as a military base at the time.
Nothing justifies this. There is no logic that could be twisted here to somehow make it look like it was OK for Russians to fire at those targets. In fact it isn't "OK" for Russians to fire at any targets within Ukraine, no matter their setup or positioning - I don't think it can be any clearer than this.
Which doesn't add up either. It's Ukraine's largest children hospital.
Meanwhile there is a sprawling military plant Artem nearby, which has been a target of multiple Russian missile strikes.
The Russian MoD said the hospital was hit by a malfunctioning Ukrainian anti-missile, but if you don't believe that, what do you think is more likely: that the military plant was the target and a Russian missile missed it, hitting a corner of the hospital building instead, or that the hospital was the target, but the missile failed in its attempt to kill scores of children being treated for cancer, which would be one of the most heinous war crimes imaginable?
I literally don't understand what point you're trying to make - even if Russia only accidentally hit a children's hospital.......they are still the ones firing the missiles. They are still killing children. They are still kidnapping and moving them to Russia. They are still killing their parents in a war that they started. The "legality" of their strikes on civilian infrastructure is an idiotic thing to discuss when they shouldn't be doing any strikes in the first place.
My point is that saying that Russia deliberately target hospitals is a lie.
>The "legality" of their strikes on civilian infrastructure is an idiotic thing to discuss when they shouldn't be doing any strikes in the first place.
And yet people are busy spreading atrocity propaganda. Why is that?
Russian representative at UN SC two days before that mentioned in his statement that Ukrainian military forced inhabitants out of a different maternity ward in Mariupol and made fire points there. [0]
Now look at the woman at 1:10 in your video. Here is a BBC's interview with her[1]:
"But Marianna told me there were no Ukrainian military stationed in the building where she was. She says she saw Ukrainian soldiers in the oncology unit in the building opposite the maternity unit."
My take is that at worst it was a strike made by mistake by people who were unaware that the hospital wasn't evacuated.
So then if Ukraine strikes Russian maternity hospitals or other civilian assets it would plausibly be because there were Russian soldiers stationed there?
This organization has no creditability at all. It lost it complaining about countries defending their borders from immigrants and recent antisemitism campaigns. Sorry. It’s now another anti western propaganda machine comparable to Russia Today. Long way traveled for once Nobel prize winning organization.
> Also, part of the purpose is to create dilemmas for an air defense with limited resources - save the ammo factory or the children's hospital.
And how it would happen? Putin calls an AA site and tells them "tehre is two missiles your way - one for ammo factory and other for the children's hospital - it's your choice what to defend"?
> If everything is a legitimate target the defender has to decide whether to expend limited AA to protect civilian or strategic targets.
And this is precisely why targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime, as is hiding/embedding military infrastructure in or below civilian infrastructure.
Fortunately for Russia & Israel, not to mention the US, there are no longer any earnest attempts to establish an architecture for enforcing the Geneva Convention, except as vengeance of the victors on the losers.
> why targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime
Remind me, who was tried for this?
>> NATO planes have attacked bridges, oil refineries and other targets in raids that have affected civilians. But until Monday they had refrained from striking the electrical system. The alliance has repeatedly insisted its fight is with President Slobodan Milosevic, not with the Yugoslav people.
>> "The fact that lights went out across 70 percent of the country shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch now," said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. "We can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want to."
>> "We realize the inconvenience that may be caused to the Yugoslav people, but it up to Milosevic to decide how he wants to use his remaining energy resources: on his tanks or on his people," Shea said. While NATO sought to downplay the effect of the strikes on civilians, the raids remain politically sensitive.
I agree that the US / NATO has bent and crossed international rules (way) too much in the past and without consequences - the US didn't sign the ICC accords for a reason.
>> But until Monday they had refrained from striking the electrical system.
>> "The fact that lights went out across 70 percent of the country shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch now," said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. "We can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want to."
>> "We realize the inconvenience that may be caused to the Yugoslav people, but it up to Milosevic to decide how he wants to use his remaining energy resources: on his tanks or on his people," Shea said. While NATO sought to downplay the effect of the strikes on civilians, the raids remain politically sensitive.
There will be quite the aftermath in the Israel/Palestine conflict for that. No matter what, the ICC investigation is here to stay - and both sides will have to face justice.
For Russia/Ukraine I'm less certain that anything will come around because even if Russia gets driven out of Ukraine in its entirety, there is zero chance any Russian will be held accountable by anyone on the world stage.
We can hope that Russian economy will be driven to collapse under the weight of military expenditure. Then we might see their elites sacrificing some talking heads to appease US and get sanctions lifted.
Why would Putin needs to call? The missiles announce themselves.
It sounds like you think the dilemma can only appear in the spur of a moment. Once the missile is already in the air. But the dilemma also appears before that. When you decide where to put your AA batteries, and when you set policy on when and how to engage.
Russia has so much ammunition from the Soviet times with maybe 500m CEP. Who knows maybe 5% hits the target. Either way it is cheaper to just fire them more or less randomly than to keep them in stock.
They use for example air to air or naval rockets that were designed to hit an aircraft or ship. But in ground mode their seekers are just not used.
if we are going to be racist, then let's argue about americans being who they are, causing revolutions and threatening revolutions to keep said governments inline
You'll have to ask the aggressor. I'd imagine they'd tell you it's the same benefit they hoped to derive in targeting a theatre in the middle of town that was known to be in use as a bomb shelter, and had the world "Children" painted in large letters out front:
>> Since mid-July, Kherson and its neighbouring villages along the western side of the Dnipro river have suffered more than 9,500 attacks with small drones, killing at least 37 people and injuring hundreds more
If you want to know what's really happening, follow one of the mappers on Youtube. They have daily updates on what bombs fell where, usually with footage and everything. You will get a really good idea of why this is happening.
Why does Russia bomb medical facilities, hospitals, and maternities in Ukraine? Why did they do the same in Chechnya?
It's terrorism and one of the many crimes of genocide Russia is committing in Ukraine:
> A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and
A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group [0]
While the comparisons to Nazi Germany don't make sense, because Nazis were their own thing, Putin's Russia is also their own thing and should have a reserved space in History for their atrocities. Their contributions to people's misery are enough to sustain their place.
Like people forget the propaganda campaign about freezing Ukrainians in the winter after the destruction of their power grid? This was boasted with pride on Russian propaganda, there's pride in making Ukrainians suffer.[1][2]
The alternatives to using previously or normally civilian buildings are, I believe, to be outdoors or in tents. Originally military buildings are too few and probably already in bad shape.
Gliding bomb hitting an apartment building must have been mentioned in the news, care to provide a link?
I googled a bit, but all I found was gliding bombs falling nearby and doing some damage to the buildings, but not direct hits.
After seeing reports like this one[0], saying that those inhuman Russians hit Kharkov residential area destroying a shopping mall and then seeing true picture where two Ukrainian MLRS launchers were parked nearby and were hit by Russian missiles during the night when mall was closed[1][2], I'm a bit skeptical.
It's quite surreal when a colleague apologizes as they won't attend the daily standup bc they need to leave to get to the bomb shelter. Or another one joins the standup while working in a bomb shelter and apologizes in case their laptop runs out of juice as they're getting electricity from a generator.
While you're sitting there in your cozy office in one of the neighboring countries, and your biggest worry is that you've run out coffee beans.
Men are not allowed to cross the border, also everyone has family and relatives, it is not straightforward to just take everyone with you to another place and be able to support all of them also financially.
The long range “precision” attacks by Russia often just end up randomly killing civilians.
Eg: missile strikes on Kyiv blowing up a children’s hospital, or the September strikes on Lviv blowing up a random apartment building and wiping out almost an entire family.
You can easily go “what are the chances” even when shahads are flying over your head and the sky is lit up with tracer fire from mobile air defense units after some exposure.
It is true that war can rage in a country and people not on the frontline can live reasonably normal lives. I returned to Kyiv in August of last year, and lived for over a year during some of the worst air attacks on the country.
It’s not so much that there is no danger or the war is far away. I woke up many times to explosions in the distance and air raid alarms in the capital are a daily occurrence. Attacks are absolutely not limited to critical infrastructure. Even if Russia didn’t deliberately target civilian populations (and they definitely do), air defenses don’t vaporize enemy ordnance so it’s going to fall down somewhere, and when attacks are happening in cities then it’s likely that it will land on something populated.
It’s more that the odds of being killed or wounded as a civilian in the capital are higher than in a peaceful country but low enough that the mind just gets used to it and you go on with life.
I finally left Ukraine a few weeks ago, for fear of how bad the winter will be with the infrastructure bombing. My wife and I moved to Budapest. Believe it or not, we miss Kyiv and want to move back in the spring, war notwithstanding.
Having said all that, I was in Baghdad in 2006 and I do not understand why any Iraqi family would move back there during that time, unless they were Kurdish and moved to the northern Kurdish territory.
That’s a long story. Mostly just a series of unexpected turns and a search for meaning in my professional life.
As for why I stayed, it’s hard to believe but even today, modulo the air raids, my life in Kyiv is just better than the life I led before in Miami, and vastly better than my life now in Budapest. I fell in love with that city when I started traveling there on business in the 2010s, and decided to move there to build my next company in 2018. The people, infrastructure, services, startup culture, healthcare, etc are all much better than a country with Ukraines history and geographical fate would suggest. That’s down to the Ukrainian people who have by force of will achieved some remarkable things with very little.
The war is already destroying some of what they have achieved, and depending on how it ends may destroy it all. But as I said, even now in a brutal and relentless war, life goes on.
I should also point out that as recently as last month I heard a lot of American accented English from obvious tourists on the streets in Kyiv. I was at a trendy restaurant with a Ukrainian colleague and nearly every other table had at least one foreigner. Some are there to cash in on the wartime opportunities with drones and other offensive and defensive technologies, some are deniable operators doing god knows what, but my sense is that a fair number are just tourists. Go figure.
> In my young head it didn't compute with the weekly sectarian violence and suicide attacks.
I had a similar confusion as a kid, but for me it was how Ireland and Northern Ireland were portrayed in the news — I was 14 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
There is but they only have a finite supply of those weapons. As the Russians are experiencing, going after infrastructure and civilian targets is not really giving them much advantage on the battlefield. And with their own logistical and supply challenges, there seems to be a shortage of actual military targets that they go after. Like Ukrainian troops on Russian soil in the Kursk area. It actually looks like the Ukrainians will spend Christmas and the winter occupying the Kursk area.
The Ukrainians are using the threat of these weapons extremely effectively. They've hit a few targets that sounded like they mattered but they are mostly holding back. The not so veiled threat to the Russians here is that anything they value within reach is a potential target. That includes command centers, troop concentrations, defensive weapons, air bases, etc. That's actually resulting in them pulling those things away from the battlefield. So, those missiles are doing their job without getting fired.
Acting mean lowers both your own morale and the international support. And any such act, like blowing a substation somewhere in Russia, would likely produce a short-term inconvenience for some civilians at most, while giving the Russian side a legitimate reason to fight harder. It's best if RF soldiers experience shame while serving, not vengefulness.
Instead, Ukraine targets oil refineries that produce fuel for the army / air force, with some success. This does not cause civilian casualties: though some employees might be hurt, I never heard of the workers dying as a result. That's the kind of infrastructure, along with military infrastructure, that is likely wise to attack on the Russian soil.
The thing is, Ukraine does not want to do the same as Russia does. For one, it would be a war crime on its own, but especially, they don't want to give Putin the propaganda points "the evil UA Nxzis bombed our power plants!!!" that the 5th column worldwide would parrot while conveniently ignoring that Russia did that shit for two years.
One big PR issue is that Ukraine and the West collectively forgot how deterrence works. Russia arguably never really learned.*
Preemptive formulation and announcement: "If you X, we will escalate in Y way. If you do not X, then we will not."
Instead, there's a hodgepodge of reactive escalation, which is far less effective.
The point is to bargain your willingness to escalate into a self-limitation on your opponent's part.
F.ex. this war might never have happened if NATO had said, before the post-Crimea invasion, that if Russia further invades territorial Ukraine then it would supply massive amounts of arms to Ukraine.
* Russia, on the other hand, apparently never figured out that announcing everything as a red line and constantly making nuclear threats makes such announcements useless. But it seems like authoritarian regimes often have trouble interacting with freer information spaces.
They didn't forget. They remembered extremely well that both sides can do that. They know that it leads to a feedback loop where the threats escalate.
And in a nuclear world, those threats can escalate to annihilation. The result is Mutually Assured Destruction, and choices are made based on whether you believe the other side is in fact crazy enough to commit suicide.
Russia knew that the US would supply arms. They also expected that they would be able to conquer the country before that could help. They were wrong, but that came as a surprise to everybody (except perhaps the Ukrainians).
The US keeps weighing how much they're going to escalate the threats. They've prevented Ukraine from using their weapons to attack Moscow, precisely because Putin has used Mutually Assured Destruction. Get anywhere near him, and he will use nuclear weapons to destroy the world.
Do you believe him? That is literally the most important question in the world right now, because if you guess wrong, the consequences go way, way beyond Ukraine.
> And in a nuclear world, those threats can escalate to annihilation.
They haven't thus far. And the US was a lot more pointed about deterrence (including nuclear escalation threats) in the 60s/70s.
The status quo is that Russia frequently threatens nuclear escalation to all sorts of Ukrainian actions, and the West... doesn't threaten anything preemptively.
Can you think of one instance thus far where the West preemptively said "If Russia does X, then we will Y" for clear Xs and Ys? And then did it?
The US has said that it stood with Ukraine, and would give money and weapons. It hasn't been specific, but I don't think that increased specificity would have deterred Russia.
It's more meaningful to actually do the thing than to talk about it. As you note, Russia's red lines are meaningless. We don't even really take his nuclear threats seriously.
The strategy has been to avoid escalation, but just to outlast Russia on its own terms. Russia is running its war badly. They seem willing to spend blood and treasure on it, and no amount of threat is going to stop that. Ukraine just needs to outlast it.
What's really going to succeed for them is not that the West failed to make enough threats, but that the US is about to capitulate. Under those circumstances, Ukraine likely cannot outlast it.
Some have said all along that the US should have enabled Ukraine to fight to win, rather than outlast. Not a threat, but just going ahead and fighting. Under that theory, Russia would see that it would take more damage than it could afford, and give up.
It's possible that this is correct. We'll never really know. The siege strategy seemed viable because the US did not expect to surrender so easily. Giving up in Ukraine wasn't really a major point in this election. But that is how war goes; you do your best with the information you have, and sometimes you fail anyway.
> The [Western] strategy has been to avoid escalation
This is the part that feels like it's failed. Because the West has escalated, but only reactively to battlefield conditions and without preemptively announcing the steps that will be taken.
That ceded the bargaining power that, f.ex., a preemptive "We will give Ukraine surplus F-16s if _____" could have produced.
it certainly will lead to proliferation . somewhere in some Pakistan mansion there is most awkward reunion of russias neighbours bidding for nukes. latvia 5million, khazakstan 10 milliin, who raises the bid. One way or another donbas is russias last conquest ..
That's not how escalation and escalation management works, and "Mutually Assured Destruction" is mostly a lie.
Putin is a paranoid coward and fears for his life like few people you know. No he's not going to "destroy the world", it would endanger his own life and the palaces he built for himself.
No it's not binary, there's a vast, vast gulf between limited nuclear use and a full-on attack on CONUS. In fact, any nuclear use by Russia would likely bring its rapid defeat, since their main allies (India and China) are nuclear armed countries with a border dispute and are very interested in the nuclear taboo staying intact.
No it's not "Mutually Assured Destruction", the mainstream of nuclear targeting is counter-force disarming strikes, and the US is perfectly capable of winning a nuclear war. "Winning" here means ending up in a situation where cities are mostly intact on both sides, but only one side is capable of threatening them. Moreover, being credibly capable of winning a nuclear exchange was (during the Cold War) and is necessary to keep European and Asian allies safe. No, militaries are not deliberately glassing cities if push comes to shove, it doesn't make any military or political sense. You don't kill a hostage to win a negotiation.
No, a nuclear war is not a "suicide". It's very bad news for everyone (although chances are we will see battlefield nuclear use in our lifetime), but there's an incredible amount of nuance and complexity. "Putin presses the red button and everyone's dead" is a take that is not even wrong.
But Minsk was dead for several years already even before the FSO.
Nonetheless it seems clear now that the West could have come up with a greatly more coherent escalation strategy that it seems to have sleepwalked into.
> But if it was retaliation I’m sure it would be ok.
I certainly wouldn't cry over some Russians in Moscow feeling the impact of their own war. But unfortunately, Russia's trolls would instantly spin even an immediate reaction to the bombing of an UA power plant in a negative way.
The dirty games Ukraine is performing are exactly the same as Russia is doing. Both countries are corrupt in an extreme fashion. Just check out how the Ukrainian TCC grabs people from the street and send them to the meatgrinders. Warcrimes are everywhere there.
>Ukraine has no alternative to mass conscription, if there's one, I'm happy to hear about it.
The problem with the mass conscription going on on paper in Ukraine is that it's not really applied in mass in practice, but only selectively targeting the poor people without connections who can't leave, bribe or game the system to escape the draft.
The wealthy men with means have long left the country or got papers to escape the draft, so only the poor suckers end up dying on the front line.
That's the problem, the selective draft. If it were truly a mass draft affecting the rich and poor alike evenly, things would be different, but that's not the case.
Hell, I would dodge the draft too if I could. Why should I die to protect the wealth of some oligarchs and the interests of great powers? What did the country do for me that deserves my sacrifice? What even is a country if not just a lot of land that doesn't really belong to me but to some oligarchs and foreign corporations who exploited me every step of my life? Fuck'em! I don't care about that land since I don't own any of it, I care about my life, and I can start a new life in another land. If I must die to protect it I want to see first the rich and powerful people dying alongside with me instead of drinking champagne abroad.
If's of the future don't change the present situation either, but now that they've restored power using their nuclear power plants, the question for the future of the planet is what's going to happen. Ukraine is currently signatory to the NPT and follows the IAEA rules about not making nukes, but Russia broke the Budapest Memorandum, so the alternative to mass conscription, is for them to develop nukes. If the US chooses to withdraw support, is Ukraine going to manage to hang on for 5 years to develop their own nuclear weapons and delivery systems?
Tell that to the western elitists that deliberately pushed Ukraine into a position to let have Russia no other choice to intervene. The west will never stop waging war. Its in their dna. The US alone is riddled with weapons and violence. And yet its inhabitants are defending it. Pathetic.
In what way did Ukraine and the west threaten Russia? What bad thing do you believe would have happened to Russia if they hadn’t decided to invade and destroy big parts of Ukraine? It’s difficult for me to imagine that they had no other choice.
Its the economic pressure western nations use to bully other countries. They aggressively bought themself into Ukraine by bribing officials and other key persons. Its no secret that companies like Monsanto and others played dirty games and did not care for it citizens at all. Just like now. Or do you believe there any sympathy for Ukrainian citizens from western powers. Of course not. They only see dollars and more dollars. Ultimately the west with its economic expansion greed needs Russia to fall apart so that they can continue to grab what they need.
There's never been any economic sanctions against Russia until they invaded Ukraine. The economy is shitty in Russia because it's a broken country where the oligarchs are stealing all the money.
And yeah sure it's also about money as well, Ukrainians compare the situation in Poland and Romania with the situation in Russia and Belarus. Let's say that all the Russian propaganda in the world means nothing against such a wealth gap.
Ukrainians don't want to stay poor in Russia's influence the same way that the rest of eastern europe didn't as well.
Could you expand on this? Why did Russia have no choice apart from trying to annex Ukraine?`Because to me it appears like they have all the choice, still, they just don't want to stop trying.
Why do you think so? How huge cities are generating heat now without power plants? Half of the generating power is destroyed, but there are many power plants still standing.
Maybe, or they might get all of NATO running to attack Russia. China is also currently giving Russia support (while claiming to be neutral, their actions are clearly leaning to support Russia), but is very likely to invade. Nobody wants nuclear weapons used in war again.
Would you and your friends volunteer to run to attack Russia? Hell, most of my friends in Ukraine did not run to defend our country, many ran away to Europe. Now talk about fighting a foreign war..
Well, this is good news, but this is not enough. Nuclear power, especially huge soviet systems don't maneuver as good as natural gas or hydro.
What Ukraine grid really needs are small/medium gas turbines or large scale storage systems.
Also large amounts of electrical equipment as it constantly being destroyed by ruskies.
yeah, so afraid that they occupied zaporizhzhia plant, which is the largest of it's kind in Europe and put military systems in it.
Also nuclear is useless without the grid, and as a matter of fact, an active hazard.
Directly, you don't. You hope that the adversary isn't able to strike hard enough or at enough targets, or is unwilling to go all in on war crimes by destroying civilian infrastructure. Iraqi and Yugoslavian grids were taken down almost entirely in days in the 90s and they only came back because there was a very careful use of weapons and tactics that didn't completely annihilate the gear. And modern equipment is far, far, far less field-repairable then whatever an average Iraqi substation had installed in 1990.
It's only going to get worse in conflicts where there's willingness to attack infrastructure because energy infrastructure is fixed in place, delicate, physically large and easy to detect and locate and vulnerable to even small drone-sized attacks, let alone missiles. And that's assuming you have to attack it physically at all and not just remotely disable it somehow.
If you have to harden the infrastructure, all you can do really is simplify hugely so you can repair it when attacked (fewer imported Infineon IGBTs, fancy Siemens PLCs, and networked UHVDC switchgear on 2 year lead times) and decentralise to minimise single points of failure and avoid cascading failures. Which is hugely inefficient in physical terms like wasted capacity and losses as well as the human effort required to keep it running, but some places might have some power.
Even then, in the next decades, against a state level adversary who could make and deliver, say, drones that can autonomously recognise and attack anything that looks like a ceramic insulator disk or a solar panel, if you can't threaten grave retaliation, you're back to the good old tutting about war crimes.
I fear such civilian attacks are going to become more commonplace over time. It is well hypothesized that should China invade Taiwan, Taiwan would destroy the three gorges dam and completely annihilate a good chunk of China. It is just as much a deterrent as nuclear weapons, probably worse in this specific case.
This is why you can't go for the throat of a regime anymore, even if you have overwhelming force. Because if you do then, well, you are already going to jail for war crimes anyway.
I don't know, I think that's always been a possibility. Hitting massive civilian infrastructure has always been kind of a MAD thing. And hard to spin as anything other than a war crime - floodplains covered in civilian bodies looks bad.
What seems scarier to me is the newer possibility of a huge number of very small remote attacks that utterly devastate the fabric of civilian systems, but none of them individually look like egregious war crimes. With the right PR, they can be defended as "limited" and "surgical" attacks denying "dual-use" infrastructure. Put all the blame for "looking suspicious" onto the locals with advance warning. Solar panels on the roof? Just like a command post. Radio antenna, looks like a communications relay. Fuel tanks? Vehicle pool. You can even give notice of all the strikes, you don't need to bomb them personally, they'll be out of mind without food, water, sewerage, healthcare or heating. For bonus points, then you can blame the defending government for failures of governance when they can't organise, say, waste treatment any more.
Cruise missile dives into water near dam base, creates a large bubble with slow explosives, and the subsequent collapse results in a water hammer against the structure.
Substations wouldn't be hard to protect against drones. Building reinforced concrete bunkers around them is something we know how to do. I'm surprised substation makers aren't offering Ukraine models with armored plates (or maybe they are?), a couple inches of steel is expensive but would stop small drones. The wires themself connecting to the substation are cheap enough to replace.
Of course the above all comes at a cost. It is much cheaper to put your substations in open air.
That's so completely impractical I don't know where to begin.
There are hundreds of thousands of substations in a modern country, and more transformers on top of that. And the bigger substations are huge. An urban 275kV substation could easily be 10 acres in size.
"Wires" are also not especially cheap or easy to replace either, even at "low" voltages like under 33kV. It's not a few feet of twin and earth and an h-clip.
And a couple of inches of steel will absolutely not stop small drones if they're designed from the ground up to be anti-materiel devices. Anduril are hawking these right now complete with their wierdly gleeful videos, and if they're the only ones in the world then short my secondary and call me a slagpile.
And that's ignoring weapons anyway in use like those tungsten filled rockets that just shred everything in the area. They'd go right though both sides of your armoured switchgear.
"attacking electrical infrastructure is a war crime" is quite a woolly and interpretable thing. It's not blanket, there are questions of purpose and proportionality. If, for example, you strike a single civilian substation because by doing so you take out the power supply to a critical defence radar and are then able to attack an otherwise defended military target, then it's hard to argue that's a war crime. Any more than bombing civilian infrastructure like roads and railways.
Doing it as part of a deliberate campaign of terror whose main purpose is to harm and intimidate civilians is probably a war crime, although it's very easy to fig leaf it if there's any way that attacking the infrastructure impedes war production directly. Doing it proportionately in retaliation is less likely to be.
I suspect we may see a tit-for-tat rider added to modern warfare since the big guys no longer bother trying to live within the spirit of the Geneva conventions. Russia is literally raping and geocoding all through their controlled areas of Ukrainian territory. Saw a video just last week were they ordered POWs to lie on the ground and they just shot them for no reason, this is common place. Why should Ukraine just throw up their hands and say “nothing we can do!”
This is a nice link share. I am surprised something like that did not make HN front page. Was Ukraine and Moldova previously 50Hz, but not synced with EU grid?
This goes both ways. If the enemy can get a ground-penetrating missile to hit a buried cable, it's a huge issue to repair it, needing heavy machinery, and all the long while you're digging it out, presenting a juicy double-tap target.
> How do you protect a power grid from state actors?
I think one of the best ways is mutual destruction assurance. Ukraine should be given the capacity and clearance to also take down Russia's power grid.
It doesn't matter if they get the capacity and clearance - they are not stupid enough to do it. Modern war has done a lot of studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight. Ukraine wants to take out things that would make Russia less willing to fight on (or lacking that things that would make Russia unable to fight on)
They've been killing Ukrainians for almost 3 years.
So if they're not inclined to fight, they sure don't mind the killing and destruction of Ukraine, which is more of an entrepreneurial motivation than anything else:
- Some want to try to enrich themselves by killing Ukrainians;
- Others don't want that risk, but they're ok with it;
That sounds really good, but is actually surprisingly ineffective, because you can't effectively protect the decentralized parts. You can put some Gepards or a missile battery around a nuclear plant. Good luck protecting 1000s of wind turbines or solar panel installations.
And this isn't just theory: the nuclear power plants are the pretty much the only thing still running in Ukraine.
Also, if you are thinking of renewables, those tend to have more centralized points of failure than you think, see:
The Gigantic Unregulated Power Plants in the Cloud
The amount of missiles needed to circumvent even a quatuor of anti-missile equipment placed nearby a nuclear plant which produces at the very least 2% of your gridpower (France) and maybe up to 33% (Ukraine) is way, way lower than the amount of missiles needed to blast unprotected wind turbines or sonar panels producing a similar fraction of your gridpower.
Then your ability to repair various wind/solar sites also is very probably way better because few want to work on a damaged nuclear plant (especially with all local population running away as far as possible), spare parts (nuclear-grade) are less commonly available in other industries, the site may once more become a target because it isn't one-among-hundreds...
The amount of missiles you need to penetrate the defenses and actually get through the extremely hardened/resilient shell of a nuclear power plant is invariably more usefully spent elsewhere.
A group of terrorists once attacked a French nuclear plant. Admittedly only with an anti-tank missile, so smaller warhead, but apparently they had a hard time finding the scorch marks. The containment of modern reactors is designed to withstand an airplane strike, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the warheads of cruise missiles or tactical ballistic missiles.
Whereas you can probably take out solar panels with a hand-grenade, which you can lob directly or carry via drones. Don't even need to expend a suicide drone, just have it drop the grenade.
And once again: apart from actually not being well supported logically, your theory is also contradicted by the real world evidence on the ground.
Doubt so. There are cases (for example when triggering a panic/exodus or condemning an area is useful) were attacking a nuclear plant is an adequate option.
> group of terrorists once attacked
It was a joke, it was done while the plant (Superphénix) was a work-in-progress, and didn't even scratch the concrete.
> The containment of modern reactors is designed to withstand an airplane strike, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the warheads of cruise missiles or tactical ballistic missiles
Nope, the containment cannot withstand any airplane strike, and many missiles (even without any nuclear warhead) have a way better concrete-penetration capabilities than a plane.
> take out solar panels with a hand-grenade
Indeed, however wherever solar provides a large fraction of power you will need hundred of thousands of grenades/drones. The efficiency (effects/cost) will be abyssal, especially new panels will quickly be deployed.
> your theory is also contradicted by the real world evidence
This is your mere opinion. The facts are well-known. Here is a sample: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-89-iaea...
Quote: "Director General Grossi reiterated his grave concern about the situation at the ZNPP and that any military action jeopardizing nuclear safety and security must stop."
Many other similar documents were published by this UN Agency in charge of nuclear civilian applications.
Do you really consider a little rocket (RPG) as equivalent to a missile, or it a joke?
> See how "funny" whatever anti-terror forces
Not sure anyone considers them sufficient since quite a while (9/11, anyone?)
> list an opinion of someone expressing "grave concern"
He is the boss of the UN Agency in charge of nuclear civilian applications and the communiqué clearly describes the causes of his concerns.
> nuclear is the pretty much the only power generation left in Ukraine
Because they don't have any other industrial electricity-equipment, and therefore no other option (bar a nearly-permanent nearly-complete-blackout), as they didn't start their energy transition yet (for various reasons).
> Ukraine is building new nuclear power plants
Those now are bare approved projects. My point is about the risk, not about choosing nuclear (balancing the pros and cons, risk included, and doing so objectively) nor building then exploiting it as planned.
Nuclear plants have generally not been attacked. NATO and China have both strongly implied if there is nuclear anything attacked used they will jump in and force end this war in Ukraine's favor. We don't know for sure but it seems likely that would happen.
Which isn't hard. Many people in the US own something that could be used and we are not even under attack. While most home depot generators deliver dirty power the better ones can provide stable 60hz (US uses 60hz not 50) - those could be used to provide the 60hz to the grid (it wouldn't be worth everything needed to actually do this, but in theory could). there are a lot of "solar generators" that also can provide stable frequency. Many houses are off grid completely and have their own stable source of frequency when they want it (those most often those run on DC, they have the ability to provide AC for things they can't get a DC version of)
But: where do you start with those after a blackout (which I assume is pretty possible in a scenario where the grid is under attack). How do you sync them all in that case?
Can maybe be done via GPS timing, but hard to get that coordination going after you've needed it.
You only need to synchronize when you are connecting two different generators. If you house is getting 51 hz, or 50hz but out of phase you won't care because everything works anyway (some clocks will run too fast but otherwise you won't even notice). Only when you want to connect two grids (because one can't make enough power and the other is making more than they need) do you need to synchronize. Even then they only need to synchronize to each other, not the rest of the world.
Yes - but the point is, rather than tracking and synchronizing against an existing power sinusoid, you can track and synchronize against a global clock source and never deviate.
You make it mobile- aka nuklear barges or small nuklear power plants on trucks. Also there seem to be minimal - Tit for Tat rules of engagement - you do not hit the reservoir upriver of moscow, i do not blow up zhaporischia. But moscow is running out of hostages and time. All the dams are gone in ukraine- so moscow could be flooded, unless they take the nuclear power plants hostage. Which ukraine could do to btw- no reason why warcrimeas shouldnt go both ways, now that the west is betraying them
Not even in theory, it's solidly science fiction. And since you presumably need to park up and plug them into something to actually use them, they'll always be an blindingly obvious target. They'll be the things surrounded by wires, pumping out megawatts of heat.
Which would last how long in a conflict? You obviously can have mobile reactors, it's called a modern submarine or an aircraft carrier for a start, but a fleet of mobile reactors scooting ahead of incoming attacks providing power and moving off is pure science fiction and completely impractical.
It also weighs over 20,000 tonnes so that's a big old truck you'll need. Even a submarine reactor, the tiniest and most compact type ever made, running on essentially weapons-grade highly-enriched fuel, are around 100 tonnes just for the reactor itself, which is far from the only bit you need to generate power.
Hmm, pretty sure you are moving goalposts. You said it doesn't exist even in theory, when in fact it is there in flesh and blood. As any structure that exists on the face of the earth, it can be destroyed. Would it be quicker than hitting a stationary object which has a known static position, I think not.
> You obviously can have mobile reactors
It's not about having reactors in objects, it's about them supplying power to the world outside of their vessel.
Which is all completely and utterly useless in the context of hardening an electrical grid. Which is the topic at hand. It would take days to connect one and start it. For all intents and purposes, it's a static installation.
And truck mounted reactors really are science fiction, if for no other reason than they'd be a proliferation nightmare (also for, well, all the other reasons).
But I don't know why I bother since everyone round here seem to have terminal software brain and think you can just scale and deploy energy infrastructure like Kubernetes.
Brother I don't disagree with you nor claim anything that I cannot claim since I don't know the domain. You wrote one thing that was incorrect (that they don't exist) and I shared a link that might inform you otherwise.
They're probably both fighting at maximum capability already.
That said:
While we all know that Russia isn't fighting all of NATO, it does claim that it is fighting all of NATO.
Do they believe what they say? I don't know.
I think if Ukraine attempts Hail-Mary tactics, if you assume the hypothetical that Russia really does believe that Ukraine is only capable of such things with NATO support, it is still bad for NATO.
There's certainly Ukrainians who want nukes now, who think giving them up was a mistake. Some say it would only take them months to get nukes… and they said that months ago. If they do develop their own independent capability, and Russia just assumes it's an American or French or British nuke, that's still bad for the rest of us, even if Trump is shouting about how the USA didn't do it.
> They're probably both fighting at maximum capability already.
Absolutely not. In my view, NATO should be supplying 1M+ artillery shells per month, so that UA can unleash scorched earth tactics on Russian positions inside UA territories.
> In my view, NATO should be supplying 1M+ artillery shells per month, so that UA can unleash scorched earth tactics on Russian positions inside UA territories
Sure, but that's not Russia or Ukraine, that's us as outsiders.
If Ukraine has secret weapons to fall back on in the scenario that — as per the comment I'm replying to — the US stops giving them weapons, why aren't they already using them? Likewise if Russia has any significant number of other weapons they could actually use*, why did they not use them already?
* while Russia may have plenty of unused submarines, they're not going to be of any significance beyond the handful of SLBMs that might spook the rest of the world into thinking it's World-War-Three-O'Clock
Because the US would withdraw weapons access immediately and - there was a tit- for tat situation implicitly, you attack my refinery, i attack your dam. But moscow has run out of tat. They have destroyed all they can destroy, after the 20th its payback time.
This expression is often misused, it seems. It sounds so cool, 'scorched-earth tactics'... like 'medieval', 'fire-and-brimstone', 'kill it with fire', etcetera.
Its russian colonial bias- none of the countries that start with "the" can amount to anything. All just farmers, peasants, runaway traitors. Its a sort of smear that ukraine CAN not do that alone.
What would happen if Russia attacked these power plants directly? Are they built to "fail safe" even when hit by a missile, or is there a big risk of nuclear meltdown?
Big risk of nuclear meltdown. Nuclear reactor cannot stop immediately. Gigawatts of power will damage equipment by high voltage and current, then reactor will melt. Nuclear reactor in Zaporizzhya finally turned cold after more than year, with multiple attempts made by Russians to disconnect it from grid by shelling the grid and targeting repair teams.
> What would happen if Russia attacked these power plants directly
There is zero need to attack a NPP directly.
If you really need to shutdown it then just target the power distribution system - a reactor can't run without providing the energy and if there is no load then you need to shutdown it.
? They had nuclear weapons, but gave them up in a treaty with Russia in exchange for security guarantees. Russia betrayed Ukraine by violating that treaty by the Crimea invasion in 2014. See the Budapest Memorandum [0]
What an interesting way to misquote this. The signatories of the memorandum were: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, russia, United States and United Kingdom.
Arguably, the ongoing policy of the US administration w.r.t. of strike prohibitions is in violation of the memorandum terms. Obviously, russia egregiously violated the memorandum as well as a multitude of (now effectively non-functional) international laws and has committed a large amount of crimes against humanity it was not and still isn't held accountable for.
Interesting question, and actually the answer could be no (surprisingly). Some US nukes use varying compositions of high explosives in the primary stage. You have to set them off in a particular order, and that's the launch code (or part of it presumably). Even possessing the nukes, it would be hard to work out that sequence, since testing the explosives is destructive. And if you fire them in the wrong order, the primary fizzles and the bomb doesn't work.
(I've no idea if the Russian weapons used such a system)
US and UK are parties in the same treaty as guarantors that provided "security assurances". US pressured Ukraine into signing the treaty so they are partly to blame for it.
Context: If your non-democratically installed government wants EU and Nato membership against the majority of citizens...that absolutely undermines Ukraine's national sovereignty.
But that is probably why you cut it out of context, and the rest is "too many instances to unpack".
The writer of the article is Lee Jones Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
If your non-democratically installed government wants EU and Nato membership against the majority of citizens...that absolutely undermines Ukraine's national sovereignty.
Here's what I mean by "too much to unpack":
(1) If your non-democratically installed government
Not true in regard to the events you are referring to (at least to a first-order approximation). Let's just say I could easily tell you why this take wrong if we had time, but because there's so much to unpack, we don't. All I can recommend is -- please check your assumptions, and do your own research.
(2) If, hypothetically, a government (democratic, autocratic, or somewhere in between) makes a decision that goes against whatever the latest polls of the moment happen to say -- no, that does not mean it is "undermining the country's national sovereignty". That's just not what "sovereignty" means. If you don't fully understand this, you need to stop right now and look into what the term actually does mean.
(3) At no point since 2010 has any government in Ukraine attempted to push for NATO membership against the tide of public opinion in Ukraine. This is a pure and simple fact, and I strongly recommend you roll up your sleeves, do the basic research and determine the valdity of what I just said, on your own, all by yourself. In particular, the years 2010 and 2014 will be very important in your analysis.
(4) I'm pretty sure the situation is exactly the same with regard to EU membership, though it's not a matter I've looked into directly. However, the infinitely bigger matter of concern for you should be: if it's your belief that this is not the case, then why do you believe this? Is it something you've looked into directly -- or just something you think you might have heard somewhere?
(5) Nevermind the author's credentials. Just consider the statement on its own terms. It literally doesn't matter at all who said it, or what their credentials are.
Academics are people like anyone else, and it turns out many of them are just as susceptible to propaganda and muddled / ideology-perturbed thinking like anyone you will meet on the street. Some even way more so, in fact. Precisely because society has told them that they're so darn smart, and that people will just automatically believe whatever they say.
The "West" is in for selling weapon and destabilize Russia, you should be naive to think that our interest goes deeper than that. And indeed Taiwan or Georgia should take notice.
Given how this site is generally a pro-market tech business place, it should be obvious to people that there are deals in which both parties benefit. US-Ukraine relationship is definitely win-win.
in this case also Russia is benefiting a lot, too much even, their economy is overheating and the unemployment rate is way too low. So this war is a deal that is making everybody happy it seems. The only poor fuckers are the soldiers fighting on the ground.
"Betray" isn't really the right term, the west were clear from the start that they were in this to bleed Russia and were only planning to provide enough weapons to keep the conflict simmering in a bloody fashion. Ukraine hopefully understood that they were just running out the clock in the hope that something miraculous would happen on the way through. It still might, wars are unpredictable.
We've already gone far beyond the limits of sanity in Ukraine. There is no upside, lots of potential downside and the stench of hypocrisy follows everyone who contributed to the recent expeditions into Iraq and Afghanistan that look mighty similar to what Russia was doing but wasn't met with anything more than shrugs and harsh language. It is a profound mystery why only one of the 3 needs to be escalated like what has been done.
> "Betray" isn't really the right term, the west were clear from the start that they were in this to bleed Russia and were only planning to provide enough weapons to keep the conflict simmering in a bloody fashion.
With which mr. West have you talked about it that he's been so clear?
As far as I know, "the West" is a collection of many countries, many decision/opinion makers. There's no singular motivation for supporting Ukraine, and there are many other, less cynical motivations than what you insinuate.
I sometimes think Americans are "shrewd" in a sense that "Hey, I don't fully understand the system we are in but through some trickle down effects, we are at the top so why bother questioning anything."
It's not a mystery. The US, the UK and France ratified the Budapest memorandum. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons in return for security assurances.
No such treaties existed for Iraq nor Afghanistan.
This is a popular narrative but really, those nukes were a burden on Ukraine and nothing more -- the forces possessing and maintaining those weapons reported to Russia and any launch needed authorization from the Чегет the Russian head of state held, whoever that was. Sure, they were on Ukrainian land but that was all. That is why Ukraine so easily surrendered all those weapons for extremely weak reassurances. If you were to read the text https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/... you would notice how there's no real security guarantee whatsoever. Basically it says if someone nukes or threatens to nuke Ukraine they will "seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine".
Sure, there are words saying "the Russian Federation [...] reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine [...] to respect the Independence and Sovereignty
and the existing borders of Ukraine" but what if they don't? tough luck. No one promised help, there's no built in penalty mechanism, nothing.
I’m sure that over the years they could have reverse engineered the bombs and reused the warheads for more tactical strikes into Russian even if they could maintain the ICBM versions. It’s not like there weren’t a lot of nuke engineers and scientists in Ukraine when they split up the Soviet Empire
This brings up a very old memory: the readme of Volkov Commander said the author of it is some nuclear institute in Kyiv. Yup.
(Also, I uploaded Volkov Commander to SIMTEL 31 years ago and the ignorant asshole running that site reported me to the university for pirating Norton Commander and they banned me from the university VAX leading me straight to Linux. Funny how that worked out.)
Hydroelectric dams when they fail kill the most people.
Nuclear plants when they fail, cost the most money to deal with.
Money is, at some level of abstraction, fungible with lives saved, which is why cheap to deploy, and low direct death, catastrophe proof, wind and solar (mostly solar) are the future.
The intermittency is really bad/hard to deal with unless you have a large geographic distribution with long distance transmission that can handle that level of power.
Even if you can handle weeklong cloudy stints, winter is especially rough due to shorter and less intense sun with much longer shadows potentially knocking out whole strings. Right now our home array gets maybe 4-6 hours of reasonably good generation per day, and it’s simultaneously the highest amount of load we see all year, due to heating needs.
We could try to overpanel so that winter load is met, and overcast generation is more sufficient, but it’s still challenging and would need an extreme amount of energy storage and land.
For power production, I agree, but you need batteries to be able to replace carbon or nuclear energy sources. Honestly, I don't know about the cost of adding batteries to a major solar installation.
The article you quoted also states an estimate of ~1600 deaths from the evacutation alone, and widespread rise of depression, anxiety and stress disorders among the affected population (also suicides).
Also note that death per GWh on hydroelectricity are complete BS. This is easy to get wrong, but these are typically dominated by deaths from floods and dam failures (which would've happened regardless of hydroelectric use, and the dams would've been required for flood control without having turbines installed, too).
I think environmentalists do have a strong point here: If a country like Japan (known for stability and diligence) can not be trusted to be able to prevent meltdowns (flooding was a known risk after all), how could you ever suggest them as primary power source in countries where regulation and monitoring would be a corrupt shitshow, like Italy, Spain, Africa etc?
You raise some interesting points. As I understand, the Three Gorges dam has two goals: 1) control flooding and 2) produce power. If anything, it might be said that Three Gorges has negative death rate associated with it, because it has prevented so many devastating floods.
Italy/Spain is so corrupt/incompetent to run nuclear power plants? Also, sarcastically, Africa is not a country, but 50 countries with a wide variety of development.
> Italy/Spain is so corrupt/incompetent to run nuclear power plants?
Yes absolutely. Japan has a much more respectable culture regarding safety/diligence, and basically every italian citizen will agree on that.
If Japan had to evacuate one of ~50 reactor sites within a lifetime, then it seems ill-avised for an italian citizen to let current government (which is pretty likely to flip-flop across the political spectrum at basically double the rate of normal elections in the first place) start building a reactor in the backyard.
Note that actual numbers reflect this: Last Italian referendum about nuclear power was 94% (!!) against (admittedly shortly after Fukushima).
> Also, sarcastically, Africa is not a country, but 50 countries with a wide variety of development.
I know, my statement is about all of them. Operating nuclear plants requires long-term (centuries, not decades) trust in safety culture, regulators and operating companies. Which african nation would you suggest as a paragon for nuclearization? Egypt? South Africa? (note: this is a trick suggestion; electrical power management in South Africa is the most embarassing, corrupt shitshow you could ever imagine in a somewhat industrialized state).
(A) not all environmentalists take a non-nuclear position. Be careful painting with a broad brush
(B) some people's opinion is based on emotional reaction to a technology rather than a cold calculus of how much a technology could do to reduce global warming effects and reduce humans environmental impact.
I was curious about the "not all" since it depends whether "not all" is 0.1% or 99%. So I did this:
1. Google for "largest environmental organizations"
2. Select the top 5
3. Search for their position on the subject
Here's what I found are the top five largest according to a rudimentary Google:
1. Laudato Si' Movement "In addition to being unsustainable and failing to contribute to climate objectives, nuclear power is also proven to be a dangerous, dirty and expensive source of energy"
2. WWF: "Nuclear energy cannot, and must not, be considered part of the urgently required energy transition."
3. 350.org "Nuclear: a deadly and costly distraction"
4. Climate Foundation (couldn't find anything)
5. Greenpeace "Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Say no to new nukes."
I think the environmentalists don't like it, man. I think I've seen enough. Nuclear power must be pretty bad if it is so broadly hated. Or the environmentalists are fools.
Because advocating for more nuclear power would not really help their goals now.
1) Every GW of installed renewable power makes nuclear plants less useful (and renewables will continue to be built because they're too cheap to stop). People like to crow about "nuclear provides the baseload we need", but this is ill-informed nonsense; "providing baseload" is a privilege you get to enjoy if you are the source with the lowest marginal cost (which is absolutely not a given for nuclear power), and sure, you can operate a reactor in load-following mode by turning it off half the time but then the already bad economics become even worse. What you actually need is dispatchable power (thats cheap to install per GW, like gas) and/or more storage or better grid connectivity.
2) There is a lot of pushback from the population at large (especially in countries were regulators and operators are more corrupt/less trusted), building out nuclear plants is much more time consuming and expensive and the resistance against new sites is immense.
Alienating half your support base by suddenly championing nuclear power for basically no reason is also a no-go.
I don't see how it could. "Build expensive nuclear plants because aggressors are less likely to target them while they try to annex you" is not a very convincing value proposition.
A natural disaster (largest earthquake in Japans modern history) kills a sports-stadiums worth of people and causes massive infrastructure damage with over 2000 bodies never found......
.....yet the only thing the west remembers is a single nuclear plant being knocked offline with no resulting deaths due to radiation.
Nuclear disasters would have to happen every month for years to get to the number of deaths per GWh produced that coal has. And till we have vastly cheaper storage - fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear for baseload.
Cost != price/value. You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00. The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly. You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas. There are a lot of factors to keep into account, and the cost of electricity production is often a minor one, when considering the total price.
> You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00
Batteries literally solve this problem more cheaply than nuclear.
And given the speed with which people have actually been building both reactors and batteries, this specific issue is also being solved with batteries faster than with nuclear, too.
> The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly.
What's needed for the grid is also less than needed just for fully electrifying cars.
> You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas.
Lazard 2024, CAISO scenario: nuclear is cheaper compared to go with renewables + batteries (max 4 hours). It also does not take into account integration costs, such improving network connectivity.
It is quite ironic, because European Nordic countries do not want to build more network because of the crazy electricity spot prices that Germany has because of renewables. I live in Norway and no-one wants to further connect their electricity network to Germany, and the Swedish government blocked the construction of new connections. When Germany needs electricity, people in Oslo start to pay electricity even hundreds of times more, and when Germany has too much power from renewables, the energy price goes below zero, which means that German taxpayers are paying people from other countries to buy their discounted low value electricity, damaging the other producers. It is a terrible system, and it will only get worse without a good base load or accumulators that are not realistic for the foreseeable future.
If Germany had a stable electricity production with renewables+nuclear, it would be beneficial to strength the network, which would indeed be beneficial to renewables.
If there is a place which clearly show how the fight against nuclear caused damaged is Germany: ~700 b€ between investments and subsidies to renewables, has very high emissions in the energy sector, while being dependent on Russian gas (costed ~1500 b€ in the last years) and France export of nuclear energy, high and unstable energy prices, that contributed to an industrial crisis that made France more attractive (where electricity is cheap and stable), while still failing at reaching climate targets.
The alternative would have been to keep the existing reactors open, build new ones, for a grand total of ~36 b€.
Source: doi.org/10.1080/14786451.2024.2355642
The belief that renewables+batteries alone are the only solution (even in hard to abate sectors) is not supported by real world data, nor by simulations. IPCC scenarios clearly shows that there is the need of a nuclear+renewable mix to meet the climate targets. The report from JRC recommends the same.
Historically, German citizens have chosen to be reliant on fossil fuels and highly subsidized electricity to not use nuclear energy. I just hope that at Germany will stop blocking nuclear at the EU level if other countries have different opinions on that and rather prefer not to follow the demise of the German energy policy.
Now I live in a relatively quiet area with a solar inverter battery (similar to the Tesla wall) and I have almost uninterrupted power sufficient to keep my business going. Just have to avoid using heavy appliances like the washing machine when on battery power.