Comment by siriusastrebe
2 days ago
Moscow could only accomplish this with nukes, and only early in the war. By this point Ukraine has dug underground for most of its crucial war-sustaining industry.
Ukraine, well they don't have nukes but as I understand it, much of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was built in Ukraine. I suspect Ukraine could respond tit for tat.
Plus deploying nukes would be a guaranteed escalation - after WW2 nobody has ever used nukes in war because of this.
But it would and always has been the last resort. If Russia feels like they have no choice left, they might do it.
But also, at the start of the war they used it as a deterrent, promising to use them if e.g. Ukraine were to strike across the border. That ended up being a false threat in the end, but you can see how Ukraine only slowly and carefully started becoming more and more bold with going across the border. All bets are off now though, with long range drones being used to target the very vulnerable refineries and oil industry. If they take out the power industry as well, and given time, it'll collapse Russia's military logistics network and isolate the front lines from supplies.
Why can they not use firebombing and other conventional munitions? If they can deliver a nuke surely they can deliver a conventional warhead. That is enough to level an urban area as we see in Gaza.
Russia cannot fly a plane into Ukrainian airspace. They barely even fly over Russia's side of the line right now.
They toss bomb from miles back.
Flying conventional bombers over enemy cities requires the ability to replace most of your bombers per year, or air supremacy, neither of which Russia has even a hope of doing.
WW2 was industrialized the likes of which nobody has ever seen again.
Israel levelled Gaza after capturing the area, with artillery and with air strikes.
Russia hasn’t captured Kiev, their artillery can’t reach that far and they don’t have air superiority - Russia hardly has an airforce anymore.
Also worth remembering that Gaza is effectively an island when it comes to logistics. This made it easy for Israel to cut off food/medicine/fuel. Essentially medieval siege warfare transferred to the present day.
Russia fires conventional warheads into Kiev all the time. Thousands of civilians have been killed and injured. The city survives.
Buildings in Kiev aren't made out of wood. Firebombs would do very little damage.
Because Russia doesn’t actually have the resources to do this at the scale required. Russia is also not trying to obliterate Ukraine. They want to take over a real economy, not a wasteland.
At this point, I think they would take the wasteland "win" if they had to. But they really don't have the resources to do carpet bombing or something like that. Just lobby pot-shots.
If you level a city you just removed 95% of the reason for trying to capture that city.
Spending untold billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives for a pile of ash would never pay itself off.
Israel wants the Palestinian land. Many of them would be happy to raze Gaza to nothing and rebuild it.
But this is exactly how russians are capturing Donbass: each sity they managed to capture for the last two years are total ruins.
4 replies →
The reason for Putin at this point is more reputational than inherent value of whatever lies in Ukrainian city. I fully expect Putin would nuke the ever living shit out of Ukraine into a glass worthless pile of rubble if he thought he could get away with it.