Unjustifiable except as means of generating terror

In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that Ukraine really does seem to be making progress on the Kherson front. I’ll let him handle the details. If that’s all there was to this report I would have skipped it. But there is a morsel of something bigger. I’ve written about the numerous Russian weapons depots that have gone boom. Ukraine seems to be targeting them precisely, limiting civilian casualties. Sumner quoted a tweet by Illia Ponomarenko, who quoted Darth Putin who appears to be giving the Russian position.

For every ammo dump Ukrainians destroy we will respond by destroying apartment blocks full of civilians.

Ponomarenko added:

The worst thing here is that it’s not even a joke. This is literally what’s happening.

And there have been many examples through this war. Sumner included another tweet by Ponomarenko:

24 civilians dead following a Russian missile attack in Chasiv Yar in Donbas. They just smashed another huge residential block in the middle of the city and said it was a territorial defense base full of “nationalists.”

Sumner wrote the death count has been revised to 30. Sumner posted another example of Russia’s tactic:

But what Russia is doing in Ukraine—specifically what it did on Thursday in the city of Vinnytsia, and in many locations before that—demands to be seen. Because Russia is reserving its most sophisticated weapons to deliberately attack targets unrelated to any military goal, far from the battlefield, for the purpose of maximizing civilian deaths. All war is hell. People, both soldiers and civilians, suffer and die. But what Russia is doing in Ukraine isn’t war. It’s terrorism.

Sumner included several videos of the attack on Vinnytsia. I didn’t watch any of them because Sumner warned they are very graphic. Russia has used blunt force weapons, ones that are not very accurate – and when a city is being indiscriminately shelled, accuracy doesn’t matter. But in this case the town was hit by three precision weapons that can be fired from 400 miles away. They fly at high speeds so they slam into the target, increasing destruction. The high speed and other tech mean they’re harder to intercept. These precision missiles hit an office building, a cultural center, and a medical center. Civilian targets, not military targets. We must pay attention, “not because it’s uniquely horrible, but because, horribly, it is not unique.” Several members of Congress, including Rep. Ted Lieu, are urging Biden to designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. That would strongly expand restrictions of trade to Russia (yes, much has already been done) and also requires the US to call on other countries to restrict trade.

Russia’s government isn’t just the sponsor of terrorists, they are engaged in acts of terrorism. Acts that are unjustifiable for any purpose, military or economic, except as means of generating terror. More so than even the Taliban, the Russian government under Vladimir Putin is a destructive, terroristic force and is harmful to Ukraine and the world.

In another post Sumner added more detail to the Vinnytsia attack. Russia had launched five missiles. Ukraine was able to knock out two of them. Someone in the Ukraine military was able to save many more lives, even as many were lost. Sumner reported the latest in Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter. Musk appears to be doing all he can to sabotage the deal and Twitter will take him to court to exact some sort of penalty for reneging. I’ll let Sumner discuss the details. Strange that Musk is using his Twitter account to trash Twitter. Sumner reported on another aspect of the deal. Musk had said once he is owner he would allow the nasty guy back on. That announcement attracted a large number of the nasty guy’s followers to also follow of Musk. Now that Musk has announced he wants out of the deal all these followers plus the nasty guy are now trashing him. On to something beautiful and pleasant. Sumner, in his space column for Kos, wrote about Webb Telescope Day. The James Webb Space Telescope is a highly complex instrument that can see into the infrared. It was launched last October to take up position not quite a million miles from earth. And now NASA is releasing the first batch of photos. Sumner included a few. And they’re spectacular! Sumner included the First Deep Field image which shows a tiny bit of space in great detail. There are many red and white smudges in the image. When examined each smudge is seen as a galaxy. There are a lot of galaxies in this image. Leah McElrath showed that First Deep Field image and included a quote from NASA that gives a sense of the telescope’s capability to see detail:

This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.

Alyssa Goodman, an astronomy professor at Harvard, posted a video made by (I think) AAS World Wide Telescope that puts that First Deep Field image into context. NASA’s own Webb Telescope twitter feed includes amazing images of five galaxies. It looks like four, but one is in front of another. NBC News included a page that compares images from the Hubble Space Telescope to the Webb Space Telescope. Hubble was amazing in its time, but now it is so 1990s. For example, the first image is of the Carina Nebula which is made up of dust that is a star nursery. Webb can see into the dust to reveal the young stars. And one more item just for fun. Buitengebieden of the Netherlands posted a 15 second video of a dog wagging its tail and a cat trying to catch it.