Looks like we're waiting on Russia. Young people dying to drones needs to be addressed in the Geneva convention. Each of those deaths looked particularly cruel and unusual, they were all begging for mercy (I only saw a little bit of one). It was like an actual Valkyrie over them.
Do you believe nobody ever begged for their life during WW2? If this is your first time being able to understand the horror of war, you simply lacked imagination, or worse, chose to remain ignorant and not notice the horrors wrought in past wars.
Or do you somehow believe that getting exploded by a 155mm Howitzer, or skewered on a pike, or swiss cheesed by a 50cal, or drowning with 150 of your friends in a sinking ship, or dying in agony from disease in a cramped room with hundreds of others that smells of death and rot, or being eaten by sharks in the pacific, or evaporating in a ball of plasma and radiation, or roasted alive in a pill box by sticky gasoline from a flamethrower, or being trampled by a horse, or suffocating under a mixture of mud and your best friend's blood, or or or or.... is more dignified or less horrifying than a flying land mine?
I believe most of these people are not being killed when they beg like this. Nonetheless, the rules of war should try to preserve dignity in death. It needs to be codified at least, even if it’s violated, and perhaps some future generation will litigate the sin.
The brutality of this war probably hasn’t all gotten out.
The reality is that both sides still kill someone begging like that. Both sides are using over at least a 1,000+ drones a day and yet only 1-2 videos of this nature come out every month.
far more than one or two; easily 5+ a day just in reddit r/combatfootage, and there are many similar subreddits, many pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian.
The AFU suggested that they see maybe a 40-60% kill rate -- "kill" as in hit and damage; casualty rate -- from drones.
so you're only seeing the 40% that actually do anything, and of those, the ones that can be released, both for OPSEC, as well as simple logistics like having enough bandwidth to upload or time to edit.
Yes there are outliers but it is not the norm nor is it able to be made the norm in war and you know that. Door gunners on helicopters didn't accept surrender as choppers flew over territory. This is no different.
You think death by drone is somehow more cruel or unusual than death by artillery shell, or machine gun, or landmine, or bomb, or missile?
War is cruel and unusual.
Geneva convention-type rules, like bans against cluster munitions, are usually less about what soliders do to each other, but more about protecting civilians. But targeted drones on the front lines pose virtually no danger to civilians at all.
There’s a sadistic element here with the footage. It’s torturing an animal at the very end. There should be a clear rules of surrender here.
Indiscriminate bombing is a major sin. We have no way of litigating the current war criminals, but ICC has warrants out on some. There’s a sadistic element to cutting off food and water.
> There’s a sadistic element here with the footage. It’s torturing an animal at the very end.
Not intentionally. It takes time for the drone operator to target. There's no torture. And drone attacks are the complete opposite of indiscriminate bombing.
> There should be a clear rules of surrender here.
That would be wonderful if it were possible. But how on earth could you implement it in practice? These attacks take place on Russian front lines, often kilometers away from Ukranian front lines. The drone has enough battery to quickly fly out with a heavy explosive and attack. It doesn't have enough battery to slowly escort a soldier walking back across the no-man's-land. And even if it did, Russian forces would surely be ordered to shoot deserters. Putin doesn't care about losing lives, as evidenced by the entire war.
You can't individually surrender when you're on your own front lines. You have to make it to your enemy's controlled territory first. (An entire unit can surrender, of course, but that's effectively giving your unit's territory to the enemy first. An individual soldier doesn't have territory to give.)
I don't think it is more cruel for the victim. But I think it is more cruel for humanity, in lack of better word. I think the effect on the soldier that controls the weapon is different.
It's pretty much like being a sniper, which you could argue has an effect on the soldier who is doing the killing. Though my empathy for that is almost nil.
I don't see that happening. They're too simple and too effective for any military to ignore. The bomber drones cause more casualities than any other type of drone and most of them are just commericial off-the-shelf drones with very simple modifications.
I'm more worried about the missiles and bombs that Russia has been launching against civilians since the war started, including schools, emergency respondents, and hospitals than drones killing active war participants.
You've read about "foraging" to supply an army with food, which was done for millennia. Nice polite word. Do you know what it meant? It meant sending out soldiers to find farmers and force them to hand over their food, and next year's seed counts as food in this context. Pity the farmer's wife or daughter who hadn't hid well enough. Pity the farmer too.
