Bombing civilians in Ukraine

 Reading today's Ukraine news, Russia strikes residential buildings, Ukraine more strategic things like refineries.  Is this a reality or a slant?

There is some truth in that description, but it is also an oversimplification.

The broad pattern since 2022 has been that Ukraine, being the weaker military power, has generally tried to use its limited long-range strike capability against targets that contribute directly to Russia's war effort: oil refineries, fuel depots, ammunition dumps, airfields, military factories, bridges, logistics hubs, and command facilities. Refineries in particular have been frequent targets because they help supply fuel to the Russian military and generate revenue for the Russian state.

Russia, by contrast, conducts far larger missile and drone campaigns. Russia states that it targets military and energy facilities and denies deliberately targeting civilians.

The difficulty is that the observable results often include heavy damage to residential neighborhoods. For example, in the large attacks on Kyiv this week, numerous residential buildings, apartment blocks, and civilian facilities were struck or damaged, causing substantial civilian casualties.

Where the "slant" enters is that each side emphasizes different facts:

    Ukrainian and Western reporting often highlights the apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and civilian deaths resulting from Russian strikes.

    Russian reporting emphasizes military objectives and highlights Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory, including occasions when Russian civilians are killed or injured.

    Neither side's preferred narrative is the complete picture.

If you ask whether there is a real asymmetry in targeting doctrine, many military analysts would answer yes. Ukraine's long-range strikes are predominantly directed at military, industrial, and energy infrastructure because Ukraine lacks the resources for a large-scale strategic bombing campaign. Russia has the capacity to attack a much broader range of targets and has repeatedly struck cities, electrical infrastructure, and areas where civilian casualties were highly foreseeable. Whether those civilian deaths result from deliberate targeting, acceptance of collateral damage, inaccurate weapons, or some combination of the three is fiercely disputed.

One thing that is often missed is that Ukraine's refinery attacks are not bloodless. Workers have been killed, civilians have died, and there have been environmental consequences from large refinery fires. So the contrast is not "one side attacks only military targets and the other attacks only civilians." The difference is more that Ukrainian strikes are usually aimed at infrastructure supporting the war effort, while Russian strikes more often result in large-scale damage to urban civilian areas.

As a general rule, if you see a headline saying "Russia hit apartments, Ukraine hit a refinery," that is usually describing a real event. If you see someone conclude from that single event that one side never harms civilians and the other only targets civilians, that is where advocacy starts to replace analysis.

You attribute the apparent asymmetry to Ukrainian limitations, but it occurs to me there may be some ethical aspect.  Yes there are people at the refineries, but I see no gain in hitting residential structures.  It reminds me of WWII where such behavior by the Nazis was counterproductive.

There may indeed be an ethical component, but it is difficult to disentangle ethics, strategy, and capability.

Ukraine has repeatedly stated that it seeks to comply with the laws of war and generally frames its long-range strikes as attacks on military and economic assets supporting Russia's war effort. Some of that is undoubtedly legal and moral positioning. Some may reflect genuine ethical restraint. Some also reflects practical military logic: destroying fuel supplies, ammunition stocks, or aircraft on the ground can directly affect Russia's ability to fight.

As for striking residential areas, military historians have long debated whether such attacks ever achieve their intended political effects. During the Second World War, many leaders believed that bombing cities would break civilian morale. In practice, the results were often disappointing. The German bombing of British cities during the Blitz tended to stiffen British resolve rather than weaken it. Similarly, later Allied bombing of German cities caused immense destruction but did not produce a civilian uprising against the Nazi regime.

That does not mean states stopped doing it. Leaders sometimes believe that imposing pain on the enemy's society will create political pressure, disrupt industry, force resource diversion, or simply demonstrate power. Whether those beliefs are correct is another matter.

In the current war, analysts disagree about Russian intentions. Some argue that strikes on residential buildings are largely a consequence of attacks on cities containing military and industrial targets, combined with weapon inaccuracies and a willingness to accept civilian casualties. Others argue that at least some strikes are intended to terrorize the population, undermine morale, or pressure the Ukrainian government politically.

Your observation about counterproductivity is shared by many historians. Populations under attack often become more determined rather than less. One of the recurring lessons of modern warfare seems to be that people who are frightened do not necessarily become submissive. Quite often they become angry.

There is another factor worth mentioning. Russia and Ukraine are not trying to achieve exactly the same thing. Ukraine's strategic objective is largely to make the war more costly for Russia and reduce Russia's military capacity. Russia's objective includes compelling Ukraine to accept political outcomes favorable to Moscow. If one believes political pressure on the civilian population can help achieve that goal, attacks that affect civilians may appear more attractive, even if history suggests their effectiveness is limited.

So I would not dismiss the possibility of an ethical difference. Leaders, commanders, and societies do make moral choices. But I would be cautious about attributing the entire pattern to ethics alone when differences in objectives, military doctrine, and available capabilities are also important parts of the explanation.

Your comparison to the Blitz is a reasonable one. The historical record gives surprisingly little support to the idea that bombing ordinary people's homes causes them to abandon their country's war effort. More often it seems to reinforce their conviction that the enemy must be resisted.

Killing someone's mother in her sleep is going to convert antipathy into hate.

That is a very common human reaction, and history provides many examples of it.

When civilians are killed—especially in circumstances that feel random, intimate, and unavoidable, such as being killed in their homes—the survivors often do not respond by blaming their own government. Instead, they blame whoever launched the attack. Grief can become anger, and anger can become a durable hatred that lasts for years or generations.

This is one reason why campaigns aimed at breaking civilian morale have such a mixed historical record. Military planners sometimes imagine a chain of reasoning: "If enough suffering is imposed, civilians will pressure their leaders to stop fighting." But another chain of reasoning is at least as plausible: "The enemy killed my family, therefore the enemy must be resisted even more fiercely."

The experience of the Blitz in Britain, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, many wars of national liberation, and more recent conflicts all suggest that civilian suffering often strengthens collective identity and determination rather than destroying it.

Of course, not everyone reacts the same way. Some people become exhausted and desperate for peace at almost any price. Others become more committed to resistance. Large populations contain both responses simultaneously.

Your specific example touches on something important psychologically. A refinery, a bridge, or a military depot is an abstract target. A mother asleep in her apartment is a person. Human beings tend to process those events very differently. The destruction of infrastructure may be seen as part of war. The death of a loved one is experienced as a personal wound. Personal wounds are often what turn opposition into hatred.

Whether that hatred advances any strategic goal is another question. History frequently suggests that it does not. It can instead harden the population's resolve and make reconciliation after the war much more difficult.