Is Putin Using a Strategy that Is Unconcerned with Ukraine's Civilian Casualties?

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Executive Summary

It has been proposed that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unconcerned with civilian casualties.
We analyze this claim.

Introduction

It has been claimed that Putin is unconcerned with civilian casualties in his invasion of Ukraine.

The Establishment Media on Putin

This video interviews a representative from Ukraine that proposes Putin is killing thousands of civilians. And it implies that Putin does not care about civilian deaths.

One thing to note is is that this is a spokesperson from the Ukraine who has an incentive to exaggerate the negative behaviors of the Russian military to obtain Western support. Secondly, this interviewer is not asking questions or providing any balance to the Ukrainian spokesperson.

A Video Who’s Title Does Not Match the Content

This video is titled Russian civilians attack families. However, it shows civilians fleeing the area, but it does not show them being attacked. The video then changes topics into how bad the invasion is. That is true, but it is not the topic of the video. In fact, the topic of the video, which is not accurate, only relates to the first minute or so. If the Russian military were attacking civilians there would be large numbers of civilians dead, you would see dead civilians lying around the area, not civilians evacuating from an area. It’s extremely easy to kill civilians if one wanted to. The Russians are capturing territory, so naturally, people need to evacuate those areas.

At the 2 minute mark, the video transitions to Zelensky demanding the US implement a no-fly zone, which would mean US and NATO jets would engage Russian jets. Zelensky is behaving as if Ukraine is part of NATO when it is not. Neither the US nor the NATO countries have any obligation to help defend Ukraine from Russia.

This seems to be part of the issue.

Zelensky appears to have taken his close interactions with Western powers as some type of guarantee that if Ukraine were attacked by Russia that these countries would come to their aid. These countries have placed major pressure on Russia in many ways to stop the invasion, but are stopping short of providing fighter jets or directly engaging Russia.

The video further left out that a ceasefire was initiated by the Russian military to allow the residents of Kyiv to leave the city. This is not something one would do if Putin were unconcerned with civilian casualties.

This claim is not unique to the establishment Western media, but is promoted by the US government, as can be found in the following quotation.

A senior US defense official who briefed reporters Tuesday estimated that up to 4,000 Russian troops had died since Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. The official said Russia had lost about 5% of its vehicles and weapons, leaving it plenty of combat power. The CIA director also warned Tuesday that Putin was “likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties.” – Business Insider

*Note this estimate is from March 9th and natural will increase as time passes.

The claim is a bit odd coming from a US official. This is because since WW2 has had it as the central part of its military strategy, not to be concerned for civilian casualties. And this statement is coming from the director of the CIA, which again is not an organization known for ethics or concern for civilian casualties. The CIA has supported dirty wars all over the world.

Secondly, the last sentence in the paragraph is also strange. Yes, Putin wants to win the war. And this will be “grinding down” the Ukrainian military. I suppose that is on way to put it. But how else is winning wars done? When the US bombed Afghanistan, wasn’t that grinding down the Afghanistan military or militias and the civilians? Or was that bringing them freedom? It is curious how the terminology changes depending upon who is doing it.

The US Concern for Civilian Casualties in Germany

For the US claims about Russia’s supposed wanton killing of civilians to be analyzed in context one must review the history of the US when it invades or attacks countries.

This video shows the bombing results of German cities.

Earlier in WW2, the US was more concerned about reducing civilian casualties, but later, the US created infernos that exterminated cities in Germany.

Go ahead and watch the video on YouTube, as they restrict it from playing as an embedded video due to age restrictions.

The US Concern for Civilian Casualties in Vietnam and Southeast Asia

So many bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia that after roughly 50 years, they are still deactivating enormous numbers of bombs. They have had major birth defects in this region due to the chemical weapons that were used. And countless people died after the war after stepping on this unexploded ordinance. When the US left Vietnam, they put zero effort into addressing all of this ordinance. Newsflash, all of this killed and injured civilians.

This was done to multiple countries that posed no security risk to the US. That is the stakes could not have been lower, so there is no way of arguing that the US was required to behave this way out of fear of what Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia would do to the US militarily. Today the vast majority of US citizens have no idea that the US bombed Vietnam in the way that it did, or that the US ever bombed Laos or Cambodia.

The US Concern for Civilian Casualties in Iraq

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the “Shock and Awe” programs, which means extensive bombing programs before sending in the army, not only killed a large number of civilians. Around 200,000 Iraqis were killed in the initial bombing — but many more died as the sewage systems damaged by the bombing polluted the Tirgis. Many more died from waterborne diseases, which the US maximized by keeping chemicals like chlorine from Iraq during the latest sanctions. Leaked documents show that this was done purposefully. Typically, the destruction of infrastructure has longer-term mortality implications for civilians.

The US military with compliant media presented this bombing as humane and precision bombing, and these claims turned out not to be true. And there was little media coverage of the deaths that came from the after-effects of the bombing.

Estimates of Civilian Casualties in Ukraine

This is the most updated information I could find when I did this research into the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine.

From 4 a.m. on 24 February 2022, when the Russian Federation’s armed attack against Ukraine started, to 24:00 midnight on 15 March 2022 (local time), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 1,900 civilian casualties in the country: 726 killed and 1,174 injured. This included:

a total of 726 killed (141 men, 104 women, 7 girls, and 13 boys, as well as 32 children and 429 adults whose sex is yet unknown)

a total of 1,174 injured (107 men, 77 women, 15 girls, and 4 boys, as well as 44 children and 927 adults whose sex is yet unknown)

In Donetsk and Luhansk regions: 780 casualties (186 killed and 594 injured)

On Government-controlled territory: 606 casualties (143 killed and 463 injured)

On territory controlled by the self-proclaimed ‘republics’: 174 casualties (43 killed and 131 injured)

In other regions of Ukraine (the city of Kyiv, and Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Zhytomyr regions), which were under Government control when casualties occurred: 1,120 casualties (540 killed and 580 injured)

Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes.

OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, especially in Government-controlled territory and especially in recent days, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. – UN

So roughly 726 killed, which is exceedingly low for an active warzone. Obviously, the number is higher, so let us just double the number, which would be 1452.

The invasion began on Feb 24, which is as of March 16th (that is the date on the article). That is 1452/21 or 69 per day. This is essentially a rounding error for other conflicts.

Furthermore, any war where one side has little concern for civilian casualties would have much higher numbers than this. The best way to demonstrate this is to compare the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine to other wars and conflicts.

The Issue With Ukraine Military’s Use of Ukrainians as Human Sheilds

The Ukrainian military is itself increasing this number by using civilians as human shields.

This topic covered in this video about the Ukrainian military using their own population as human shields is not explained anywhere that I could find. The establishment media will allocate every civilian casualty to the barbarity of the Russian military. And as directed by the DOD and US State Department, they will not cover the story of Ukraine’s human shields as a battlefield tactic.

This is further explained in the following quotation.

One of the Russian Government’s main accusations against the Government of Ukraine’s President Volodmyr Zelensky is that Zelensky’s forces are using Ukraine’s civilians as “human shields” in order to prevent Russian forces from bombing Ukrainian Government forces: in other words, Russia says that a major reason for civilian casualties in this war is the Ukrainian Government’s using its own citizenry as hostages to the conflict, so as to rely upon the non-brutality of Russia’s forces in order to protect Ukraine’s own forces.

On Tuesday, March 15th, CNN headlined “Mariupol deputy mayor says Russian troops are destroying his city” and reported that “Sergei Orlov, deputy mayor of Mariupol, said Russian forces are ‘destroying’ the besieged Ukrainian city and that patients in a hospital were used as captives.”

CNN wasn’t intentionally confirming a Russian-Government accusation, but merely reported what their source, Orlov, had said. No context was provided for his statement which would call attention to the fact that Orlov was actually confirming what Russia’s Government has been saying about this war. The CNN report didn’t even so much as just mention that Mr. Orlov is an official of the existing Ukrainian government in Mariupol, and that the Russian forces are trying to take over the city from that government — the government of which he is an official.

The CNN report went on to quote Orlov as saying, “the Russian army used doctors and patients as hostages in this building,” but that is obviously false, because the attacking forces there are the Russian soldiers, and the defending forces there are the Ukrainian soldiers — and, consequently, any “human shields” there would be used as “shields” BY the Ukrainian soldiers. The report went on to assert that “A Ukrainian official has also accused Russian troops of holding people captive at the hospital,” and this is yet more of the Ukrainian government’s assumption that CNN’s audience are incredibly stupid — stupid enough to think that “human shields” are used by attacking forces instead of by only the most despicable type of defending forces: ones that protect themselves at the expense of the civilians they’re supposed to be protecting. – Modern Diplomacy

Yes, the Russian military is on the offensive. Why would they need human shields?

Comparing the Russian Record of Treating Civilian Casualties Versus the US Supported Saudi Arabian Bombing in Yemen

The war in Yemen was estimated in 2021 to have 377,000 casualties. As that estimate is old and the war continues, it seems the current number would have to be closer to 450,000.

Yemen is not being bombed by the US. But the US is approving of and providing air support for Saudi Arabia, using all US weapons to bomb Yemen.

As with most wars with high casualties, the deaths are not primarily from bombing but from the dissolution of society and infrastructure. The UN describes the situation in Yemen.

Last month UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that Yemen was in “imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen for decades” and Henrietta Fore, head of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) , said the country was facing “an imminent catastrophe”.

“By mid-2020, Yemen had returned to alarming levels of food insecurity and acute malnutrition. All indications suggest that the severity of needs for large sections of the population is increasing. COVID-19 has compounded food insecurity, mainly due to limited work opportunities, lower incomes and reduced remittances”, OCHA said. – UN

Not all, but many of these casualties are due to direct or indirect causes of the Saudi Arabian bombing. The US has provided both weaponry and military logistics support. Even after the US told Saudi Arabia to stop bombing civilian targets like hospitals and schools, the US continued to provide this support to Saudi Arabia until it stopped doing so in 2021. However, the US continues to provide other support to Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the US continues to support Saudi Arabia’s blockade of the country, leading to famine in the country, as is explained in the following quotation.

While President Joe Biden announced an end to U.S. support for Saudi-led offensive operations in Yemen in response to the Houthi’s renewed offensive, it remains unclear how the United States defines offensive operations and which types of support—including arms transfers, funds, and logistical and intelligence support—will cease. Moreover, while the United States announced an end to supporting offensive operations, it has refrained from pushing Saudi Arabia to end a blockade on the coast of Yemen, which has prevented fuel tankers from entering Hodeidah, the main port and access point for humanitarian aid to flow into the country. Nearly twenty-five million Yemenis remain in need of assistance, five million are at risk of famine, and a cholera outbreak has affected over one million people. All sides of the conflict are reported to have violated human rights and international humanitarian law. – CFR

This is a consistent part of US policy that the US allows and enables Saudi Arabia to kill or starve those they deem necessary. And you can be sure, the western establishment media will never cover this story. This is because the US and Saudi Arabia are considered to have a “special relationship,” and that means no negative media coverage.

Furthermore, the US is actively bombing Yemen, as is explained in the following quotation.

Separate from the ongoing civil war, the United States continues counterterrorism operations in Yemen, relying mainly on airstrikes to target al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and militants associated with the self-proclaimed Islamic State. In 2016, the United States conducted an estimated 35 strikes in Yemen; in 2017, it conducted about 130. In April 2016, the United States deployed a small team of forces to advise and assist Saudi-led troops to retake territory from AQAP. In January 2017, a U.S. Special Operations Forces raid in central Yemen killed one U.S. service member, several suspected AQAP-affiliated fighters, and an unknown number of Yemeni civilians. Since 2002, the United States has carried out nearly four hundred strikes in Yemen. While Houthi rebels do not pose a direct threat to the United States, their attacks on Saudi Arabian infrastructure and territory threaten an important U.S. partner. – CFR

Comparing the Russian Record of Treating Civilian Casualties Versus the US and NATO in Syria

NATO and the US decided to topple the Assad regime in Syria. The following quote explains the outcome of this regime-change war.

According to estimates by the United Nations, more than 400,000 people have been killed in Syria since the start of the war. The UN reports that, as of January 2019, more than 5.6 million have fled the country, and over 6 million have been internally displaced. Many refugees have fled to Jordan and Lebanon, straining already weak infrastructure and limited resources. More than 3.4 million Syrians have fled to Turkey, and many have attempted to seek refuge in Europe. – CFR

And what is the coverage of this war? Very small, and the coverage that does exist in the western establishment media is completely false, blaming the US bombing of Syria and the dissolution of the country on Russia.

Understanding the Russian Military Strategy in Ukraine

This video is produced by the Caspian Report, which provides some of the most insightful explanations of world politics.

Putin has not engaged in a US-style initial bombing campaign to destroy infrastructure before sending in the army. This is a low-effort invasion designed to pressure Ukraine (and potentially the US as an intermediary to negotiations) to the bargaining table. The objective is to get Ukraine to agree never to join NATO, to recognize Crimea (which Russia already possesses) and several eastern regions of Ukraine. Putin also wants to install a puppet in Kyiv as he views the current regime as remotely controlled by the US.

Debating People on This Topic

It is curious to debate people on this topic. Here are a few examples.

I asked the following question on YouTube on an MSNBC video on the Ukraine Russian war.

I thought that the Russian military was attacking without concern for civilian casualties. So why are there so few civilian casualties versus Russian military casualties?

Answer #1

That’s because millions of Ukrainians have fled, thus resulting in less casualties vs the start of the conflict. Not rocket science.

My Response to Answer #1

No, it seems simple to you because most likely you have not studied the civilian causalities of different wars so you made something up, and you have not done the estimation of the relative degree of flight from Ukraine.

Let us begin with the flight. This article shows that around 3.5M Ukrainians have fled the country.

However, Ukraine had a population of 44 M. 3.5 M/44 M = 8%. So the largest total effect could be an 8% reduction in civilian casualties.

Now let’s look at the other side of the equation, which is civilian casualties in recent. Since MSNBC is based in the US, let look at US wars as this appears to the be the standard MSNBC is applying.

In WW2, there were between 130,000 and 250,000 civilian casualties in the bombing raid. It was designed to create a conflagration in the city which it did. When the US bombed Iraq, 200,000 died from the bombing alone, most of those civilians. However, the last casualty count I found from the UN a few days ago was 900 deaths and around 600 injured. That is a very low number of civilian casualties — completely contradicting all of the claims made by channels like this, that are told what to focus on and what to say by the US DOD.

Given the numbers, I just gave you, now what are your thoughts?

Answer #2

US troops did not waste the cities or countryside in Afghanistan. Many parts of Iraq were not wasted unless there was clear resistance, and even then some damage was done by the ‘defenders’ themselves. Had US troops fought with the unreserved shelling Russia is doing, in any of these conflicts no stone on stone would have remained.

My Response to Answer #2

It is doubtful Putin can ever match the US civilian body count in Ukraine. Furthermore, Afghanistan was bombed continuously for close to 20 years. Under Obama, a bomb was dropped every 20 minutes — every 20 minutes for 8 years. In Iraq, 200,000 were killed in just the initial bombing, but then over a million for the overall war, but then many of hundreds of thousands more through the sanctions. The bombing pushed the sewage into the Tigris, causing widespread waterborne diseases like typhus. Iraq is now a devastated society. Afghanistan was in terrible shape before the US invaded, but it is now worse with large-scale starvation, and we paid out $2 trillion for disaster. Vietnam led to over 3.8 million deaths, mostly civilians, and the US used chemical weapons (Agent Orange) napalm. The county was so heavily bombarded that enormous numbers of people died from the unexploded ordinance and birth defects from birth defects the chemical weapons the US used. The US bombed three countries, not just Vietnam. It was one of the most terrible abuses of military power I can recall, as Vietnam was a third-world nation with no air force. Right now, the UN estimates 900 civilian casualties and 600 injured. The UN states that the actual number is likely significantly higher. But you can see the differences in the orders of magnitude of the numbers.
Another critical point is that none of the US wars I mentioned had valid reasons. Iraq and Vietnam, I assume you know, had no reason to occur. But the logic of Afghanistan was that a minimal number of people and Bin Laden justified attacking an entire country — which is illogical. Think it through. If we thought some person suspected of a crime lived in France, could we invade France? This gets into a more extended discussion, but no evidence was ever presented by the US or anyone else against Bin Laden.

Furthermore, Bid Laden can’t have pulled off 9/11. At two of the attack sites, the supposed airplane is entirely missing. A 757 cannot crash into a field and leave no body parts or plane parts. This is revered as the “vaporizing 757.” Watch the video at the following link.

That trench was dug before Sept 11. They just added some smoking brackets to the trench. Why didn’t the establishment media cover the magic disappearing 757? Because they are told what to cover and what not to cover by the DOD.

As for Ukraine, Russia does have a legitimate reason to invade Ukraine, and the primary reason is that the US performed in a coup in 2013, which Biden helped oversee, combined with the fact that the US has been continually putting weapons into Ukraine and pushing to get Ukraine into NATO, which Russia should not accept. The US-backed Russia into a corner. Recall what the US did when Russia put nuclear weapons in Cuba. We said we would invade Cuba if they weren’t removed. The US has been trying to goad Russia into invading Ukraine for many years now. See how they tricked an inexperienced Zelensky as is covered in the article How the US Tricked Zelensky Into Thinking the US and NATO Would Defend Ukraine from Russia. I had to research these things the establishment media told me none of this.

I hope you can see the logic of what I wrote. The numbers do not add up that the Russian military has been as unconcerned with civilian casualties as the US military.

This whole video segment is highly suspect. There is a good chance everything you saw presented in this video is false as it is MSNBC who are perpetually wrong. This video segment is what the DOD wants the public to believe. MSNBC is connected to significant power interests like the DOD, pharmaceutical companies, major corporations, and defense contractors. Six companies in the US control 90% of all media. All of them are highly financially conflicted, do not declare these conflicts to viewers. They function as PR outlets for these entities. This segment is not news. It is advertizing for elite interests. I have no financial conflicts, I don’t take advertising from Lockheed Martin, and I am not some enormous corrupt establishment news network.

I am curious about your response after you have had time to digest my response.

Answer #3

But what about the whataboutisms?!?!?

My Response to Answer #3

It is important if Americans are going to make claims about Russians killing large numbers of civilians that it be compared to other US wars — for which there is generally no discussion of civilian casualties. That is how one determines hypocrisy. But it also shows the claims about the Russian military killing lots of civilians or not caring about civilian casualties are false. The entire concept of “whataboutism” is created to keep people from observing the difference in US behavior during war and the behavior of US enemies. This is found in the following quotation.

When you point out this obvious plot hole in discussions about the legality of Vladimir Putin’s invasion you’ll often get accused of “whataboutism”, which is a noise that empire loyalists like to make when you have just highlighted damning evidence that their government’s behaviors entirely invalidate their position on an issue. This is not a “whataboutism”; it’s a direct accusation that is completely devastating to the argument being made, because there really is no counter-argument. – Strategic Culture

Try to contradict the evidence I provided using math. I don’t think you will be able to.

Answer #4

This is not an argument about US brutality. During the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the international community did voice displeasure. The US was wrong. Domestically, displeasure was voiced. It’s not a thing of “because you did it we can do it”. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong.

My Response to Answer #4

My argument IS specifically about comparative brutality and comparative morality, and I am using US civilian casualties to prove my point. That is the entirety of my point actually.

I would like to leave out the “international community” because that is not what my comment was referring to. The international community is complicated because it breaks down by country. There is no unified “international community” as such because each country is different and each region in each country often has different views. Tell me the international community consensus on Israel/Palestine? Yes, there isn’t one, it depends on what country is polled. For example, Arab countries noticed Western countries much less so. However, if an Arab country attacked a non-Arab country and killed many civilians, the Arab countries would not have cared, but the Western countries would have. Islam believes you should kill the non-believer, so they don’t view civilian casualties of non-Muslims as a negative.

My comment is ONLY referring to the DOD-controlled major media outlets — CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NYT, WP, etc.. I only am focused on the establishment media, because my critique is specific to this video. First, these outlets all promoted the war, even though the US failed to provide convincing evidence. So they are complicit with corrupt US foreign policy interests before the wars started, and they never apologized for this. I am glad you see the US was wrong — but I have specific point here. But the point is it is far worse than anything Russia has done in Ukraine or is likely to do. So why is everyone getting so spun up, if it is a rounding error to US casualties? Both sides being wrong is not an adequate description of the comparison. If you kill 1,000 civilians, and I kill a million civilians, we are not ‘both wrong,” I am many orders of magnitude worse than you. This is referred to as the level of incidence of the act. If I kill a million civilians, I can’t get wound up that you kill 1,000. It makes no logical sense.

Currently, all the mainstream outlets are “clutching their pearls” in a way they certainly did not regarding civilian casualties. I barely recall civilian casualties being discussed in the establishment media. I know all of the real coverage — but it is all in non-establishment sources. But this pearl-clutching did not exist under the two wars I mentioned. It did not exist in the coverage of Vietnam. Even though they were far larger than this invasion’s civilian casualties and what Putin will likely come out with by the time the war is over. This is an important point because it goes to the objectivity of these outlets. Madeline Albright was asked in an interview whether killing 500,000 Iraq children was worth it under US sanctions, to force out Saddam, and she said “We think it’s worth it.” Yet the establishment media response was muted to this statement. Shouldn’t the mainstream media allow Putin’s military to kill 500,000 civilians and say “We think it is worth it,” before accusing Putin of war crimes or saying he is targeting civilians?

Comparative numerical analysis is critical to understanding if people are telling the truth. And right now, the current numbers do not support these claims by the Western establishment media. This is consistent with my proposal that they are puppets and function as PR entities for the US government, Pfizer, Microsoft, etc.. That is, whoever is paying.

Conclusion

There is an incentive by both the US and Ukraine to present the Russian invasion as particularly brutal. For the US, which has used extensive bombing combined with sanctions since WW2 to produce large numbers of civilian casualties, the accusation makes it appear as if the US military spokesman has no understanding of US military history. The US invasion of Afghanistan has led to large-scale starvation in Afghanistan, which is not covered, and the US is actively occupying the fertile region of Syria and starving Syrians until Assad is deposed.

The claim that Putin is unconcerned with civilian casualties is contradicted by the low level of civilian casualties versus other wars, and the strategy employed by the Russian military, which has not included pre-invasion “Shock and Awe” style airstrikes. Russia has air superiority over Ukraine so there is no military reason not to use this tactic, but Putin has chosen not to use this tactic.

The claims must be considered false when one adds in that the US is never accused of being unconcerned with civilian casualties even though the US produces an enormously higher number of civilian casualties both during bombings and using sanctions against countries after the military action.

This fits into a pattern where the Western establishment media just report what they are told by the DOD and US State Department and never evaluate or critically analyze the claims.