Definitely a lot of back and forth here and elsewhere on whether Ukraine or Russia shot that missile, seems like its not in doubt it was a children's hospital struck, and it'll probably be days or never before we get any real confirmable details, most likely never. But not sure how much you can read in with just the limited information we have now. Plenty of people looking for pixels in footage shot of an object moving so incredibly fast that granular details like wingspan are not reliable on a per-frame basis. Though the level of damage is questionable for a russian cruise missile, they tend to turn entire buildings into rubble not one room of them. The trajectory doesn't say much, there is clear footage of a rain of russian missiles all striking the arms factory from near vertical over and over

Pretty similar pattern to the strike that hit civilians in sevastapol a couple weeks ago. First Russian media ran to blame it on Ukraine and say it was an act of terror, then it got murkier when it appeared a Russian anti-air missile intercepted a Ukrainian missile above the beach, which showered the beach with fragments of the two missiles and their bomblets

I will point out that the x101s seen in footage of the arms factory strike do have very visible and pronounced center wings, in every frame they are silhouetted it clearly sticks out in the middle. But angles and speed and recording artifacting can blur that

Does it matter at this point? I mean yeah it's sad if innocent people die, but most are now fairly calloused after 2 years in Ukraine, after the Gaza war. These things happen every other month. It's a carousel of non-intended targets getting hit, most likely in error/faulty rocket/bad intel, whether it's the beach goers in Crimea or this or the dozens of other strikes throughout. No one cares to remember a few months later once it fades from coverage. No such thing as clean wars. Ukraine can use this to showcase and hopefully get some additional international support but other than that, it'll fade like all others.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Jul 8 2024 06:44pm

It might perhaps matter with regard to the response from the international community if one side could show that it fights distinctly less dirty than the other side.

I don't think so. The lines have been drawn a long time ago and no one is going to pearl clutch so much more now than before who already wasn't already going to do so. You think India is going to change anything as it relates to Russia because of this? Modi is visiting Russia now, you think this even registers as a footnote in their conversations? It's the same with the Israeli-Gaza war. No matter how much al-azeera spams that Israel is killing civilians in Gaza headlines, the same people that cared before will continue to care while many more just kind of go on, because it has become normalized for many months, so shock value is gone.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Jul 8 2024 06:57pm

This is how Kh-101 looks like, find 10 differences. Also check it's attack angle.

Israeli-Gaza is now mostly an american shitty problem, Ukraine is not. Israeli crimes are largely silenced by american media, Russian free agression is not.

Modi probably plays the long game to keep getting the oil while waiting the Russian regime to die, appeasing Putin, even giving him some parts for his tanks, will take some time...
But it will not be like North Korea poohole.

Largest trading partners with India, guess who?

This post was edited by Meanwhile on Jul 8 2024 07:15pm

I gotta disagree. Sure, it won't change which countries stand roughly on which side, but the intensity of their support is still influenced. If incidents like on the Sevastopol beach repeated themselves very frequently and became a pattern, it would imho reduced the appetite by the Western public to supply Ukraine with jets and guided missiles. Likewise, if Russia started indiscriminately blasting residential buildings as its primary target, the support for Ukraine would increase.

Same story with the Gaza War. Footage of destroyed hospitals and dead or wounded children absolutely had an impact on public opinion and caused Israel's allies to call them out, join diplomatic initiatives aimed against Israel or to withhold arms sales.

Ah yes, a regime that has been on the verge of death for how long now? Didn’t you post about Putin having cancer or some other terminal disease?

At this point, Putin looks like he will outlast pretty much all major western leaders. Bojo, Sunak, Merkel, soon Macron, Biden and Castro’s bastard up in Canada.

Shit atm, France looks way less stable compared to Russia. Getting whiplash with how wild the political swings are.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Jul 8 2024 07:47pm

Sure, glory to Putin, gruk

If this is the calculus, then why would Russia want to target civilians knowing it would rile up more international support? Their whole intention and path to victory is literally the complete opposite. Are they just dumb orcs incapable of foresight? Also, if the intention was really to target civilians and stack up kills, there are thousands of 10 story apartment buildings all across Ukrainian cities. They could literally target those and get at the very least double digit kills regularly. Or how about crowded open air markets? Again this theory that they'd be intentionally targeting civilians really doesn't hold. They're really bad at it if that's truly their intention.