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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, fine, maybe the UN report is all wrong -- even though everybody seems to use it.
What's your best estimate of civilian + military casualties in Ukraine, with whatever supporting evidence you care to muster?
Edited to add:
You've edited and added to your post after my response.
In response to your Reddit links, I think that they distract from the main point, which is that the Gaza war has disproportionately affected civilians, even in comparison with the worst of Ukraine's battlegrounds.
Ukraine has depth, and not only can its civilians move west to cities such as Lvov, its citizens have been invited into Europe.
In contrast, Gaza is a sprawling low-rise cityscape with a population of 14,000 people per square mile -- far in excess of anything in Ukraine; nearly double Kiev's population density -- and Gazans are, for the most part, forbidden from leaving. Egypt can't take them, save in special circumstances. All the privation of war is felt by this civilian population -- and, at least to an extent, this is used by Israel as a weapon.
Russia, for all its faults, has a straightforward strategy and straightforward, even realistic aims. I don't think you can say the same for Israel. It's just wild.
There were actually some unfortunate people who fled Ukraine for Gaza - families who had Palestinian-Ukrainian marriages back in Soviet times, and more recently, that are now in an out of the frying pan into the fire situation
> Sure, fine, maybe the UN report is all wrong -- even though everybody seems to use it.
It's not wrong, you're wrong. You called it an estimate of casualties. The UN calls it a list of verified casualties and say that they estimate the number is "far higher".
I don't have a problem with citing those numbers if you call them what they are - the hard minimum that can be independently verified. "at least" 10,000 dead civilians, as opposed to "only" 10,000 dead civilians. That is a significant distinction. "everyone" uses those numbers to make Israel look worse at the expense of whitewashing Russia, which is appalling to me.
An actual estimate is extremely hard to find. It appears that Ukraine estimated in February 2023 that the number of civilians killed was around 100,000. The UN themselves won't say what they think the number is other than that it's "likely far higher" than the confirmed number in one statement, "tip of the iceberg" in another, etc.
In any case, the highest the UN was ever able to count in Mariupol was around 2000, whereas there's more than 10,000 fresh graves, many of which are big enough for several bodies, alongside some mass graves. And that was over a year ago, in one city. Dunno what more to tell you.
If you want to compare apples to apples, then Hamas' claims of ~25,000 dead civilians should be compared against the Ukrainian government's claims of tens of thousands of civilian dead. Otherwise don't compare claims against numbers that have been independently verified to be correct (minimums).
And also, oh my god, don't say
> 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.
or
>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.
Because that's such utter horseshit. Everything the Israelis have ever been accused of doing, the Russians have done in Ukraine. Don't claim otherwise just because those pictures / videos don't get as much traction on TikTok
> Everything the Israelis have ever been accused of doing, the Russians have done in Ukraine.
This is demonstrably false in trivially obvious ways. How many Ukrainians have left the country? How many Gazans have been permitted to leave? And the question you keep muddying the waters around: What's the military to civilian casualty ratio? It's much worse in Gaza, no matter how you slice it.
Even if we run your apples-to-apples comparison: 25k civilians dead in Gaza, "tens of thousands" (let's say 40k?) dead in Ukraine. (I am not sure how credible this is). The Ukrainians also claim that 180k Russian soldiers have died. Israel hasn't killed more than 12k Hamas members; Hamas claims 6k dead. In the one war, far more military than civilian casualties; in the other, the reverse. There's really no way to spin this.
No, they were often NOT allowed to flee. Sometimes they fired on the humanitarian corridors travelling back to Ukraine, sometimes they forced people in occupied territory into "filtration camps" and took their passports to give them new Russian passports. People with Ukrainian passports weren't allowed through border checkpoints.
About military-to-civilian casualty ratio: again, compare like-for-like. Mariupol is the best analogue for Gaza, and Mariupol suffered tremendous civilian casualties despite not having all that many soldiers in the city. I would be shocked if the ratio was not comparable to Gaza if not worse. Had Kyiv been encircled it would have suffered the same fate or worse.
Even if you use the UN-confirmed deaths in Mariupol (around 2000), which we agree is an undercount, that's around 0.5%, compared to 1.2% in Gaza. On the other hand if it's 10,000, which still might be an undercount, that would be significantly more than Gaza.
But yes, Ukraine has "depth" and a larger population, so yes, lots of the fighting takes place away from cities. That doesn't, of course, prevent Russia from bombing and striking apartment buildings and kindergartens. Like this incident from a few days ago
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.
For every militant they correctly identify (90% of the time, they'd have us believe) and kill, they also kill dozens of innocents. This doesn't give them pause; on the contrary the Israeli public revels in the carnage and bring out lawn chairs to watch. It's genocide.
Many people in the west enjoy it too. Lots of Europeans and Americans don't like Muslims (or even Jews or just people who don't look 'white'), and they like turning on the news to find out how many have been killed each day because it wouldn't be acceptable to carry out in their own countries, especially in the era of DEI.
There's the two-wrongs-make-a-right atonement for the holocaust aspect on the German side and the promise of the rapture for Americans also.
Maybe most importantly willingness to show eager support for something that may seem 'bad' such as genocide functions as a shibboleth to display allegiance to one's political party and society because ultimately what's happening in the news has no deep significance for most westerners beyond that of a football match. Showing you're not an anti-semite is the most important thing one can do, and there's no better way to do that than support whatever the current Israeli government feels like doing (perhaps sparking a large regional conflict) and rounding up any Jewish people who object on charges of being race traitors.
