Iran had also contributed significantly in 2020. Although their regime ended up acknowledging their role, unlike Russia whose policy is bold faced lies.
The internal dynamics of different nations is always interesting to me. My understanding was that in Iran top leadership wanted to maintain the lie but there was a lot of resistance within the government, so much so they chose to admit it.
Iran is governed by factions that are occasionally aligned, but can have divergent interests. It’s very hard to understand recent Iranian history if one assumes that a single political entity is in control. I mean, Khamenei is nominally in control, but it’s not always that tight.
Russia is very different: Putin clearly has absolute control over all government entities.
> Were that true, I doubt all the bribery and corruption would have been allowed to destroy their military equipment.
I wasn’t precise enough. He does not control every individual specifically, just all organisations (as in, there is none that dares to contradict him, and the people in charge who do, don’t do it for long).
That’s a consequence of the power structure. It is optimised to avoid factions and keeping dissenting voices under control, but micromanagement has its limits. To some extent, corruption also helps in several ways at the highest levels. This seems to be one of the reasons why they cannot stop it. It enables selective enforcement, and is an effective tool to get rid of people who get too powerful, too independent, or not obedient enough (there are many examples of this in the last couple of years: when Putin wants to reshuffle the government he finds corruption charges). It seems that this culture spread down the ranks and pervades the whole state.
> I’m surprised they were able to shoot a plane down at all.
If anything, a civilian aircraft is a sitting duck for anti-aircraft missiles: it has no decoys, no flares, no jamming or any kind of countermeasures. Surely, not shooting it down when firing at it takes some effort. Also, we don’t know how many missiles were fired.
Yeah, it provides some history, and I wouldn't have flagged it personally, even though I don't think it was a particularly good response to the question. But then some one flagged my comment too, so maybe just trolls flagging everything.
Maybe not entirely seriously, but there is a direct causative path initiated by the United States that you can follow which lead to this result.
Iran shot down this airliner after mistaking it for a cruise missile launched by the US, which was arguably a credible fear given the events of days prior. If the US didn't assassinate Qasem Soleimani (with a drone, near an airport), Iran wouldn't have made this terrible error, as they would not have made a retaliatory strike.
Additionally, you can go even further back and argue that if the US didn't withdraw from the nuclear deal struck in 2015, none of these events would have taken place.
There’s a direct causal path from any event to every event in its future light cone. You need more than “if not X then not Y” to blame Y on X. Otherwise you end up with ridiculous things like saying your cat saved your life by barfing on the carpet because cleaning it up made you late for your bus which crashed.
This is absolutely a counter. There would be no assassination of an Iranian general in Baghdad had he not commanded the insurgency with the sponsored militias in Iraq.
That sounds like "another critical factor". A chain of events led to this. The parent is saying "one link in the chain is US involvement", you are saying, a different link in the chain is Iranian involvement. Both can be true, and neither invalidates the other. You've done nothing to invalidate the parent's post because you haven't removed their link from the chain, you've just added other salient links to the chain.
Stop treating blame like it's some simple, single element. It's a complicated, multi faceted chain of events.
If country a starts a war and then country b defending itself accidentally shoots down a civilian airliner it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. You’re saying it’s completely ridiculous to blame country a?
Yes. We rightfully expect people with guns to have an idea of what they are shooting at. Firing wildly at anything that moves tends to earn condemnation.
If you qualify country A's actions as "starting a war" then country B had started many dozens of wars themselves in the previous decade, and subsequent one.
That's basically my point. Ultimate responsibility lies with those who decided to fire a missile at a civilian airliner without doing any due diligence or applying common sense, not those who "created tension" or whatever you want to claim the US did in that situation.
I was assuming you were referring to the Ukrainian airliner shot down by Iran in the aftermath of the Suliemani killing, which is an actual example and not a hypothetical one.
It is. It's ridiculous when Israel hits aid workers with missiles and rockets, it's crazy when people wearing press jackets are killed even after communicating their position directly to military command and control. It's ridiculous when children die early, gruesome deaths because they sat next to a bad man with a pager at a Lebanese grocery store.
It's not the 1950s anymore, accountable nations are expected on the international stage to understand what exactly they are shooting at. Israel is under much closer scrutiny than Russia because they represent modernized doctrine and should be using their technological superiority to enable more targeted strikes rather than more indiscriminate ones. Modern Russian warfighting tactics have been under serious scrutiny since the Afghan retreat, then again in the Gulf War, and then again now during the retreat from Syria.
The only "clean" war Russia fought in recent years was Crimea, which was "won" by lying to the international community and breaking their trust forever. As evidenced by Ukraine, today's Russian republic cannot win a war with tactical prowess alone. The "special military operation" has devolved into IRBM fearmongering and rattling the nuclear sabre - Putin knows he's not the president of a world superpower anymore, he's a Tesco-branded Kim Jong-Un.
Russia was even well known for targeting any area listed as a hospital in Syria and specifically bombing it, taking basic humanitarian protocol to protect civilians and using them for evil.
Syrian doctors had to hide their locations to prevent the murder of their patients and themselves.
They pretty much operate under a version of "They realized that to be in power, you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't"
Maybe people complain because Ukrainian government was caught lying too many times? Like when Zelensky announced that Russians killed all border guards on the Snake Island after one of them said "Russian warship, go f*ck yourself". Needless to say, the border guards were returned to the Ukraine alive a week or two later. [0] After learning that cold-blooded murder of the border guards was one big lie I discount 90% of Ukrainian reports of Russian atrocities.
Anyway, let me quote your source: "These are medical facilities in the de-occupied territories, as well as those that have suffered minor damage: broken windows, roof destruction, damage to the facade, etc. " Broken windows from blast waves hardly fit your claim of "destroyed hospitals and clinics".
Or take this one [0]:
"A few days before the attack, Ukrainian soldiers took up positions inside the nursing home, effectively making the building a target.
Two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Russian forces assaulted a nursing home in Stara Krasnyanka in the eastern Luhansk region. "
What Ukrainian soldiers did was a war crime, but that case surely is somewhere in your number of medical facilities destroyed by Russians.
Some of them suffered minor damage is not the same as you claiming it was just incidents involving medical perosnel. "After learning that cold-blooded murder of the border guards was one big lie I discount 90% of Ukrainian reports of Russian atrocities" I really don't care what you discard or not. Russia is an expansionist colonial empire trying to retake it's former colonies by any means including force. You can simp for them as much as you like it's not gonna change eventual outcome. As every other colonial empire before it, it will continue to desintegrate the way USSR did.
>Some of them suffered minor damage is not the same as you claiming it was just incidents involving medical personnel.
Source for one inflated number (742) contained incidents with individual medics along with damaged facilities, the source that you provided next includes buildings with broken windows.
>I really don't care what you discard or not.
That's your right, but I cared to explain why "Dude I am from Ukraine" and numbers coming solely from the Ukrainian government aren't trustworthy.
>Russia is an expansionist colonial empire trying to retake it's former colonies by any means including force.
That's a very odd use of the word 'colony'. Where have you seen a colony where its metropole developed aerospace and shipbuilding industry, for example?
Like when Zelensky announced that Russians killed all border guards on the Snake Island after one of them said "Russian warship, go fuck yourself".
First, Zelenskyy was just reacting to what the DPSU (State Border Guard Service) told him. And mostly likely what they reported was (at worst) a somewhat premature, but not unreasonable inference based on the information they had at the time.
This information being, at the time, the following facts: (1) The aggressor opened fire shortly after the guard patrol refused to surrender, and rightly told the warship what, precisely, it needed to do with itself; and (2) all contact with the patrol was lost shortly after that; and (3) before the close of the same day it was observed that all infrastructure on the island had been destroyed after an intense air and naval bombardment.
Further, there was a significant delay (about 48 hours -- in any case on the 26th, 2 days later) between the assault on the island, and the first indication by the DPSU that some of the personnel on the island might still be alive. In any case confirmation was not provided by the aggressor until the 28th.
Meanwhile Zelenskyy's statement was issued on the 25th, so entirely within this window in which the details were not fully known, but during which it was perfectly reasonable to assume the soldiers had most likely been killed, based on the information available. Plus the war had literally just started, and it wasn't like he didn't have a lot of other distractions at the time.
In sum: no story here, just the usual fog of war. Definitely not in the category of an intential deception ("one big lie") as you're making it out to be. And unlike the DPSU, you've had close to a full 3 years to catch up with the full story by now, so if anything it is your own less than forthright representation of the matter which should be raising eyebrows, in view of this context.
In this evil, awful, insanely stupid war, based entirely on lies from the very start.
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