Comment by A_D_E_P_T
2 years ago
That ratio is by all estimates lower than 10%.
UN Estimates, as of March 1st, are "10,675 [civilians] killed, 20,080 wounded" -- on both sides.
The number of soldiers killed on both sides (combined) is certainly no less than 100k, and might even exceed 400k.
In Gaza, more than 25,000 civilians have already been killed. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145742
This is a callous, inexcusable massacre. By comparison with the Israelis, the Russians look like "gentle and parfait knights." But the former are presumably on our side, and the latter are our geopolitical opponents. So.
That's not true. The UN themselves state that their numbers for Ukraine are likely severely undercounting the total casualties simply because they don't have any insight into what is going on in occupied territory. They do not give "estimates" for Ukraine, the numbers are what they have been able to confirm. So for you to call that very specific number an "estimate" is incorrect - which should probably have been self-evident.
>> The U.N. human rights mission in Ukraine, which has dozens of monitors in the country, said it expects the real toll to be "significantly higher" than the official tally since corroboration work is ongoing.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/civilian-death-toll-ukr...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/more-than-8000-civilian...
There are more than 10,000 fresh graves in the city of Mariupol alone and many of them appear to contain multiple bodies - which was the case in other graves uncovered in places like Kherson and Lyman.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariup...
The actual civilian death toll is almost certainly in the tens of thousands, not a singular ten thousand.
Also consider the death toll caused by the withholding of medical assistance to those who refuse to take Russian citizenship, and the flooding caused by the destruction of the Nova Khakovka dam.
Other sources also have the number at around 10k fatalities. For e.g., the Harvard Kennedy School: https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/russia-ukraine-war-report...
Perhaps the number is higher. What's your best estimate for the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine? How about military casualties on both sides?
And, quibbling over numbers aside, surely you can see that the nature of the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are very different. In Gaza, civilians are taking the brunt of the fighting. Ukraine, in contrast, is hell for soldiers, but civilians and aid workers are generally moved away from the front, and they're more rarely treated with the wanton disregard and disdain that Gazans suffer.
To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally.
That's not a source, it's a link back to the very same UN figures I just explained the problem with. Literally if you follow the citation on that page for that section, it goes straight back to the UN report, which explains how each casualty was corroborated (NOT estimated. independently verified.)
>And, quibbling over numbers aside, surely you can see that the nature of the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are very different. In Gaza, civilians are taking the brunt of the fighting.
I do not see the difference between Gaza and Mariupol, except that the population of Mariupol is older and the temperatures drop below freezing for months of the year. It was carpet bombed, residential areas were shelled, there were reports of civilians needing to drink water from puddles, incidents of torture and murder, practically the entire city was destroyed.
>To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally.
With all due respect I do not see how you can possibly think this unless you've been ignoring much of what has been happening in Ukraine.
One example of many: https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-depth-features/images-sh...
Another: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/te9kvd/khark...
Another: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/t5s44r/cctv_...
Another: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/t4rfgy/russi...
Hospital hit with a 1500kg bomb: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/170fues/russ...
Russians using a Ukrainian POW as a human shield during an attack: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1azri7n/russ...
Russians using 3 Ukrainian POWs as human shields during an attack: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/18hnvkx/clai...
You don't want me to share the video of Russians executing 9 Ukrainian POWs with their hands behind their backs, the video of Russians castrating a Ukrainian POW and then executing him, or the video of Russians decapitating a Ukrainian POW slowly with a knife.
And Bucha, and the Nova Khahovka dam, and the torture chambers, and the air campaign designed in the Russians own words to freeze Ukrainians over the winter, and the mass graves in Lyman where raped and murdered women and tortured Ukrainian men were discovered. And the Kramatorsk railway station attack. And the Kremenchuk shopping mall attack.
Literally yesterday the Russians hit an elementary school in Dnipro with ballistic missiles, the only reason it wasn't a mass casualty event was that they had 5 minutes warning to evacuate to bomb shelters.
This is literally just what I can remember off the top of my head.
7 replies →
But this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison: we happen to use the word "war" to describe both what's occurring in Ukraine and what's occurring in Gaza, just as we use the word "surgery" to describe both the removal of birdshot following a hunting accident and the removal of a brain tumor, since, after all, the two phenomena we call war share many characteristics (violence, mutual non-recognition of legal authority, etc.), just as the two kinds of surgery do (anesthesia, scalpels, etc.). But it would be an obtuse medical review board that faulted the tumor surgeon for damaging a higher percentage of healthy tissue, or for causing a greater loss of post-operative function, or for having a higher number of her patients die on the operating table, than the gunshot surgeon. After all, the pellets will be close to the surface, easy to distinguish from benign human cells, and unlikely to be hiding behind anything as delicate and vital as the blood vessels of the cerebellum. Of course, if you weren't such a review board member making careful medical-ethical judgments but instead a malpractice lawyer trying to convince a jury of ordinary citizens of the ineptitude and even malice of some neurosurgeon, you might not be quite as scrupulous about pushing an emotive analogy too far.