Russia Invades Ukraine 2022

[mike]

4 million refugees now.

[mike]

What is the actual state of the war at this point? With the alleged atrocities taking up the headlines, I don't see a lot of current information. What is the actual possibility that Russia will be able to militarily attack and hold eastern Ukraine? Beyond that, is there still a possibility that Russia gathers itself together and conquers the whole of Ukraine? Their stated goals still seem to reflect that desire.

[nett]

The third largest video game market in the world is Japan where gaming is immensely popular. Yet the level of societal violence in Japan is a tiny fraction of what it is in the US. And it remains a largely pacifist country. So I would be reluctant to draw a direct link between video games and violence or violent tendencies.

Yes Japan plays quite a lot of games but have you looked at their popular titles and compared them to US games? quite a few fantasy games compared to quite a few fps games. There is a major difference in style and audience compared to the USA and suggesting that Japan is non-violent and that means games don't have a connection... you likely haven't played many of the fantasy games or the fps.

War is a brutal physical business, even in the 21st century. I would argue that spending too much time in front of a computer screen probably makes one less equipped for real war that most other activities like getting outside and playing soccer to exhaustion. Or physical things like working on cars or engines.

Yes and no. As you've pointed out a number of times, we don't want muscle to be bullet sponges, we need well trained high tech forces in our military and its only going to increase as our advances continue.

I don't think what makes a modern army effective has much to do with the reticence or willingness of troops to pull a trigger. I think it has much more to do with things like logistics, initiative, training, and leadership.

Used to be a serious problem but its easy to drop a bomb from the sky and be detached from the killing. Logistics have killed many military forces and an effective leader has to be able to calculate that too. We have never fought a serious engagement in modern history and when we invaded Iraq our troops were a day away from running out supplies because our software and people miscalculated how far they could advance.

Great points. Beyond video games, violent movies, and television further desensitize younger people to violence and death, and make it easier to push the button the drop that bomb. It's really sad.

[Ken]

Reuters (UK-based news service) has replicated the New York Times satellite analysis of Bucha and reached the same conclusions as the NYT. That the Russians are lying and that the evidence of civilian deaths happened on their watch in Mid-March during the time period that the Russians were clearly in control of the region:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sa ... 022-04-05/

Satellite images show civilian deaths in Ukraine town while it was in Russian hands

April 5 (Reuters) - Satellite images taken weeks ago of the town of Bucha in Ukraine show bodies of civilians on a street, a private U.S. company said, undercutting the Russian government's claims that Ukrainian forces caused the deaths or that the scene was staged.

Maxar Technologies provided nine images taken of Bucha on March 18, 19 and 31 to Reuters. At least four of the images appear to show bodies on one of the town's roads, Yablonska Street. The city was occupied by Russian forces until about March 30.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the dead bodies were "staged" and that images of them and what he said was Ukraine's false version of events had been spread on social media by Western countries and Ukraine.

Vasily Nebenzya, Russia's envoy to the United Nations, said Moscow would present "empirical evidence" to the Security Council that its forces have not been killing civilians in Ukraine and were not involved in events in Bucha.

The Security Council is to meet later on Tuesday.

The New York Times, which was provided a separate set of images from Bucha by Maxar, analysed the pictures in a story published April 4, comparing them to video taken at street level that showed the same scenes, and confirming the locations of the bodies. Its analysis, it said, confirmed the accuracy of the satellite images.

"High-resolution Maxar satellite imagery collected over Bucha, Ukraine (northwest of Kyiv) verifies and corroborates recent social media videos and photos that reveal bodies lying in the streets and left out in the open for weeks," Maxar said in an e-mail to Reuters, which also included analysis of the images.

Ukraine authorities have accused Russian forces of carrying out a "massacre" in Bucha and say that 300 residents were killed there during a month-long occupation. Ukrainian troops re-took the town last week.

Jeffrey Lewis, a satellite imagery expert who has seen the Maxar images, described the process of deducing what the images meant as "very straightforward."

"You see pictures on the ground that show bodies relative to cars and buildings, and in satellite images, you can see the lumps on the ground in the same position next to the same cars and buildings.

"What the satellite images show is that the bodies were present while the Russians controlled the area," said Lewis, who is director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

The Pentagon said on Monday it could not independently confirm the accounts of atrocities but had no reason to dispute them. read more

A Reuters reporter saw several dead civilians in the town, including one with his hands bound behind him. Local residents said hundreds of civilians had been killed. read more

Bucha's deputy mayor, Taras Shapravskyi, said 50 of the dead residents, found after Russian forces withdrew from the city late last week, were the victims of extra-judicial killings carried out by Russian troops. Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, have accused Moscow of war crimes.

"These are war crimes and will be recognised by the world as genocide," Zelenskiy said, speaking on television from Bucha, wearing body armour and surrounded by military personnel. read more

The deaths in Bucha, outside Kyiv, drew pledges of further sanctions against Moscow from the West, possibly including some restrictions on the billions of dollars in energy that Europe still imports from Russia.

[ken_sylvania]

Must be a picture from the future.... or else from last year. Looks very much like summer-time.

[Ken]

That picture is a screen-shot from this video showing a mobile crematorium in Russia



The same photo and video was published by the NY Post on the first day of the war:

https://nypost.com/2022/02/24/russia-ha ... ad-report/

I'm not sure the fact that the author of that tweet found a publicly available photo to use necessarily negates the claim being made by the mayor of Mariupol.

[temporal1]

https://twitter

Must be a picture from the future.... or else from last year. Looks very much like summer-time.

This would require a LOT of fuel?
Between fuel and time required, i can’t quite imagine this is probable on any kind of scale.
i don’t know.

[temporal1]

i appreciate your tenor and reserve.
i believe these kinds of responses are common throughout history, even in ancient times, writings reflect a correlation between enthusiasm for war and lack of experience with war.

the internet is just so good at presenting views quickly. it’s not inherently different, just faster. more volume.

do you see a connection with video games as far as enthusiasm for war? i have almost no exposure. but i’m aware it’s a major industry, based primarily on violence/fantasy violence/fantasy aggression. the industry lobbies against any such connection.

Civil war they called it seeing the elephant.
Some broke and ran despite their bluster, others became killers.

In ancient times often war was part of their very culture and highly praised with war games being part of children as a normal thing.

Now days we pretend we are more civilized yet we are only a step away from gladiator games being normal with what is on tv.

I play a lot of strategy war games and I enjoy them but I don't enjoy the games where you are actively shooting at another human figure.

We are pushing the boundary of realism in games https://ektovr.com this allows you to walk normally but it shifts you back to center. We are not far off of truly immersive game play. At that point reality and game blend and the closer we get to normalizing violence in those sort of settings the harder it would be to not see a very clear connection. At the same time, learning to kill does not make you a murderer by society standards.

The games gloss over the cost of war or use it purely as a way to make someone look like a bad guy, just like tv stereotypes predominate... when in actuality the truth is more complex then stereotypical idea's.

I think its good to have a divide between play killing and what we should do as play killing
is no different then a girl playing mommy with her dolls.

Both are teaching or practicing how to do something.

i appreciate this. thank you. processing ..

[mike]

...

Must be a picture from the future.... or else from last year. Looks very much like summer-time.

Yes it is from old footage.

[Josh]

That picture is a screen-shot from this video showing a mobile crematorium in Russia



The same photo and video was published by the NY Post on the first day of the war:

https://nypost.com/2022/02/24/russia-ha ... ad-report/

I'm not sure the fact that the author of that tweet found a publicly available photo to use necessarily negates the claim being made by the mayor of Mariupol.

In other words, posting pictures of this is completely deceptive. Got it.