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.
It's unclear what this has to do with my rebuttal of your statement:
> and for some reason it's only a genocide when one loses a war against Israel.
Clearly there are numerous officially declared genocides other than the one you seem fixated upon.
> you seem very keen to believe them if a Jew can be claimed to have been implicated.
> so that people like you will condemn Israel for existing and defending themselves.
You're blinding painting with a broad brush here, I'm a little more specific than a general cartoon dislike of Israel and Jews.
Eugene Finkel, a Jewish Holocaust scholar, declared Russian actions wrt Ukraine to be genocidal and went into some detail. His criteria for that declaration, when applied to the actions of the current government of Israel, make the same case against Isareli actions in Gaza.
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.
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.