SS in making
If the US had any credibility left, or if they hadn’t committed multiple war crimes themselves over the last decades, this would be noteworthy. As it is, this is just hot air without any interest nor relevance.
Of course the Russians are committing war crimes as we speak, and the Ukrainians probably too, although in a lesser proportion due to defending themselves in the first place. But as the US have shown themselves multiple times despite of all their talk, any army commits war crimes when engaged in a war.
The term ‘war crime’ is probably an oxymoron in itself to be fair. War means by definition committing crimes.
I think we need to be careful as all war crimes are not equal. War is a tragedy. There are mistakes, collateral damage and bad actors.
The US/UK has caused immense destruction, loss of life and some of their solders performed horrible acts. Despite of this generally it was bound to certain ethics. Solders were held to account.
With Russia I don’t know if there are any ethics of war. No weapon’s off the table, civilians seen as legitimate targets, a vindictive spiteful approach that mirrors Putin himself.
I don’t think we can take a , he without sin cast first stone approach. It’s right to call out atrocities. Even if we have been far from perfect in the past.
Slightly OT but I’ll mention it here. I just had a text back and forth with a friend in China about how they’re still dealing with COVID and the conversation drifted to Ukraine. I’ve known him for a decade or more and he had previously lived in the UK for more than 10 years before heading to China but his take was that the US is behind the war - which upon reading nearly made me fall off my chair! The view there seems to be that it is NATO, and the the US primarily, who are driving this, There is no actual thought to the deaths of the (likely in the tens of thousands eventually) or the suffering or the fact that it is totally being driven by one man pretty much. In a really (really) loose way you could say that the US is responsible but then by association, so are all of the other NATO members and the EU and probably even China itself. He then went on about territory being important to Russia and that much of its borders are now with NATO countries and I observantly pointed out that actually most of the boarder are with China, Mongolia, the various seas and oceans and other former USSR (largely failed) states…
Also, that there is no force out there that can successfully mount a war to conquer Russia (or even nibble away at it), it is simple too big and more importantly, it has nukes - lots of them.
It’s really quite sad how news and data can be so clearly (mis)exploited on such a large scale.
I am all for people having different vantage points but I mean…Is there anything that we (the US) aren’t responsible for?
Decent beer?