“The need for such defenses is all too clear for residents of Kyiv. Just an hour before Kuleba sat down with POLITICO at the foreign ministry on Monday, in broad, mid-morning daylight, the Ukrainian capital came under attack from Russian ballistic missiles.
A couple of loud blasts rang out just moments after air raid sirens blared across the city. Kuleba was in the city’s botanical gardens to make a video for an upcoming trip at the time.
The missiles were intercepted by Patriot air defenses. But nine people, including a teenage girl, were still injured from falling debris, including in the district near to where Kuleba was filming.
The foreign minister’s demand comes at a fraught moment for Ukraine in its attempt to repel Vladimir Putin’s invading forces. Western support, strong at the start of the invasion two years ago, has weakened in recent months, with a major new U.S. aid package held up by partisan divisions in Congress.
European allies have struggled to plug the gap in the supply of funding and arms that Kyiv so badly needs. Ukraine’s war of self-preservation is precariously placed. Russia is making advances on the battlefield and Putin, fresh from a distorted election victory, is leaping on every opportunity to intensify the Russian assault.”
“In September 2023, the Azerbaijani military stormed the Armenian-majority territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, driving out almost the entire population, an act that many outside observers have called ethnic cleansing or even genocide. It was the ugly coda to a long, brutal conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
During the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh had attempted to declare their independence from Azerbaijan, leading to a war that involved atrocities and mass displacement on both sides. (The territory is also called Artsakh in Armenian.) The conflict froze in the mid-1990s and restarted with an Azerbaijani offensive in September 2020.
“If they do not leave our lands of their own free will, we will chase them away like dogs and we are doing that,” Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said in an October 2020 speech. Aliyev also stated that he would welcome Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians as fellow citizens, a claim that Armenians were inclined to disbelieve after Azerbaijani troops beheaded two elderly Armenian men on camera.
Azerbaijan’s wars have been funded, in part, by the American taxpayer. Congress initially tried to stay out of the conflict, banning military aid to Azerbaijan in 1992. A decade later, the U.S. government reversed course, hoping to gain a new strategic ally, because Azerbaijan is located between Iran and Russia and along key air routes to Afghanistan.”
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“U.S. military aid, which mostly focuses on border security, is not a make-or-break issue for the Azerbaijani army. Between 2010 and 2020, the majority of Azerbaijan’s weapons came from Russia, with smaller contributions from Israel, Belarus, and Turkey. Russia also supplied nearly all of Armenia’s weapons in the same period.
In addition to selling weapons to both sides, Russia has had peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh since November 2020. Those troops have largely not acted to protect the local population.
However small U.S. aid was in the grand scheme of things, Hamparian believes that the very existence of that aid was “morally emboldening” to Azerbaijani leaders, who thought they had an American green light.”
“This gives us a minimum number of civilian war deaths of approximately 15,700. Based on 29,000 airstrikes, this leads to an average of 54 civilians killed per 100 attacks.
How does this compare to other operations? A roughly comparable operation where we have similar data is urban operations in Raqqa, Syria, against the Islamic State. In the Raqqa operation, according to DOD reporting, there were 178 civilian deaths and 10,663 airstrikes—an average of 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 attacks. This number for Raqqa was not considered to be good—never mind a gold standard. In fact, there was so much concern about the levels of civilian harm and destruction in Raqqa that DOD conducted an independent assessment of civilian harm (disclaimer: I was a member of the team that authored the report). The findings of this assessment contributed to the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP) directed by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. In the report, we also mention that this DoD estimate is likely low. For example, our study team considered the Airwars estimate of 744 civilian deaths to be more realistic. This yields a higher average of 7.0 civilian deaths per 100 attacks.
Despite the alarm over the high rate of civilian deaths in Raqqa, one finds the minimum equivalent in Gaza—54 civilians killed in 100 attacks—is eight times greater than the Airwars-based estimate and 32 times greater than the DOD estimate. And recall that 54 is a lower bound for the Gaza ratio; it is likely far higher than this. Just as miners in California could see the appearance of iron pyrite—fool’s gold—and think they had struck the real thing, it is possible to look at the IDF’s precautionary measures and at first glance think they are practicing civilian harm mitigation. But whether evaluating the IDF’s performance on its process or its results, it fails to qualify as a gold standard.”
“Because of the problem with American ammunition and the shortage at a really crucial moment when they were making inroads…they haven’t been able to push that much further…most of the marines..spend all their time in the basements hiding from heavy artillery fire.”