I'm not following the logic of why this is functional militarily for Russia. War crimes are nominated as such because they are dysfunctional for the powerful aggressors in the world to engage in. I can imagine lots of places that can't tolerate interruption, but I assume they have on-site generators. And like I say, I seriously doubt modest inconveniences demoralise the civilian population in wartime - you're not going to send your sons to the front, then erupt in fury about occasionally eating tea by candlelight. (I'm not the DV btw).

Why DV this answer? Other than the BS of war crimes crap. (Yes crap - rules only apply to those that follow them). It is demoralizing, it disrupts logistics, it not quick to fix, etc. To someone like Putin, with his demonstrated behavior, why wouldn't he do this low cost, high reward. More so if he isn't expecting to capture the land.

@Steve On-site generators will run out of fuel or have other issues when they are run for long periods of time due to power being cut due to damage from war. As for the part about not eating by candlelight if you don't have the power to cook the food or keep it from spoiling the lack of lighting is a minor problem.

@Steve Apart from just being plain evil. War crimes are usually mutually prohibited because they escalate a conflict. That can be escalation in intensity (if it's all or nothing everything is fair game and everything is thrown at the war making that more insidious and bloody), escalation in size and scope (involving more countries and more places and escalating in terms of duration, potentially creating trauma that breeds conflict for the foreseeable future and beyond that. But if they are committed by a superpower and go unpunished so that only the victims of the crime suffer from it...

@Steve 2/ They may also provide marginal tactical advantages and for leaders that apparently don't care for their own or the enemy population and that react to conflict and dissent with suppression and force that might be risks that are accepted. Also again generators are not supposed to run 24/7 and for example refrigerators or smaller utilities that are nonetheless vital might still require uninterrupted power supply. Now whether that will strengthen moral or break it cannot be foretold but it certainly puts pressure on people and makes war omnipresent.

@JoeW, electric outages used to happen here in the UK in the 1970s due to strikes. It was inconvenient for householders, but it also brought neighbours closer together to share gas stoves and that sort of thing. That's why I'm very sceptical about the "demoralisation" explanation. Even industry wasn't very badly affected, because it was all prepared for beforehand (strikes being a feature of the era), and afterwards they just called on overtime to catch up (as everything was adequately manned and rationalised). It mostly just caused political embarrassment.

@haxor789, yes war crimes cause "escalation" from the enemies of superpowers rather than eroding them, under the typical context of past conflicts. For example, wanton brutalisation of the enemy makes it more difficult for leaders to surrender and pacify their own populations in defeat, increasing the cost of achieving victory for the victor and destroying more resources which the victor may have wanted to seize. Also, in most cases, killing the sick and war wounded benefits the recipient of the attack, who is released from the resources they would need to commit - hence, a war crime to do it.

@Steve There is a big difference in an outage due to a worker strike or some sort of weather condition and the infrastructure being destroyed due to an ongoing war. In your example they are losing power for a short period of time but in Ukraine they are losing power for an unknown period of time as they scramble to rebuild the power generation that was destroyed or otherwise taken offline due to damage from the war.

@JoeW, there's not much difference in terms of the mundane practical effects. And psychologically, I don't believe such inconveniences and small prices would demoralise or affect morale - although it might anger those already opposed to the war, in the same way strikes in the 70s raised the hackles of those already opposed to strikes and increased wages.

@Steve There is a large difference in not having power for hours/days due to a strike or weather event when it can be restored in a timely manner and losing power for many months because the power plant was destroyed due to a war and can't be rebuilt because of that war? If people are having to struggle to do simple things like find food to eat because they can't keep it from spoiling that will have an impact on the population. There is a major difference between temporally losing power in a peaceful country and losing power for a long time in a country at war.

@Steve You are making the assumption that people can leave the area and they have somewhere else to go.

@Steve: Except very near the front lines power is being restored rather quickly in Ukraine for now. OTOH in Gaza... the conditions that Joe described are accurate. So, at the extreme endpoint Ukraine could end up like that.

@Steve: I should qualify that with saying that while they do that, it doesn't mean there are no blackouts. Russia managed to destroy more of Ukraine's generation capacity this summer than the peak consumption [in winter], so rolling blackouts will be a feature of life in Ukraine for a while rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/…

@JoeW, it's relatively easy for the state to arrange wooden huts, commandeer abandoned homes, or ship them off to other sympathetic countries. I agree people would be demoralised if the state left them to fend in the dark for months without even the option of relocating, but the cause then would be largely a failure to organise a remedy.

@Steve It isn't that easy to move large chunks of countries to other places when they have to go through areas where they can be attacked trying to escape to safety.

@JoeW, why would Russia attack civilians clearing out, if the point of causing the blackouts was to clear them out? Moreover, such brutalisation would assist Ukrainian mobilisation - people accept defeat because they want to go home to their wives and children, not because their wives and children have been blown up.

@Steve For the same reason that they are attacking power plants and other civilian infrastructure? The fact is they have done it in the past en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

@JoeW, this whole question is about what those reasons actually are. The Wiki is just a propaganda piece.

@Steve You seem to be missing the point that Russian attacks on civilians and civilian targets has been happening throughout the conflict and it seems you want to just brush off the results of those attacks as minor inconveniences such as losing power for a bit in a country that isn't in the middle of a war for its survival.

@JoeW, I'm suggesting that the attacks on energy infrastructure cannot be having the effect on civilian morale that you contend - at least if they see it as a "war for survival" rather than a fuss imposed upon them. I have conceded that the Russian purpose might be depopulation of those areas - not through predominantly psychological means, but by making those areas uninhabitable as a practical matter - but you then suggest its somehow impractical for them to evacuated so the Ukrainian state leaves them to fend in place. (1/2)

I concede that the behaviour of the Ukrainian state could be such that, through abnormal management of the consequences of these attacks, civilian morale is undermined because they feel utterly abandoned by their own side at the frontlines. But the effect on morale would be through the prolonged and unexplained failure of the Ukrainian state to organise a remedy to the adverse circumstances (i.e. ultimately, an evacuation to temporary housing in the west of Ukraine), rather than a necessary and direct consequence of living without power for a short period or occasionally. (2/2)

@Steve And I am suggesting that repairing/replacing damaged destroyed power plants in the middle of a war isn't as easy as you think and that Russia has attacked civilians as they have fled from conflict areas. Russia wouldn't be attacking the infrastructure if it wasn't going to be having an impact on the war and they would be focusing their efforts elsewhere.

@JoeW, and yet (as already mentioned) the Ukrainians do often succeed in getting the power back on quickly. They don't need to repair the existing big generating plants in order to relieve the civilian population, they just need transmission lines and transformers back online, or the distribution of small portable generators and natural gas/diesel fuel supply (which under conditions of total war, distribution could and would be performed by the civilians themselves, and pre-emptively before a mains outage). I'm not convinced you're engaging with the detail of these things. (1/3)

As for Russia attacking fleeing civilians, I don't see why this would be of such frequency and intensity that a civilian would sooner sit in cold and pitch black for a month or more than accept an offer from their state to evacuate from a warzone. It just doesn't ring true about how civilians behave under real threat, and it doesn't ring true why Russia would want to secure enemy civilians in place, or why it would be able to target only fleeing civilians but not remaining ones, so that it was safer to remain. (2/3)

The most likely explanation for remaining population, is that either (a) they are not suffering enough fear and hardship to consider evacuation yet; (b) they are actually a "home guard" force of militants with sufficient morale, holding out as long as circumstances allow or to the bitter end; or (c) the state is not permitting or facilitating civilian evacuation (perhaps to maintain civilian cover for military activity at the fronts). Only the latter could be consistent with demoralisation, and the cause would be the Ukrainian state choosing to keep civilians in harm's way. (3/3)

@Steve it isn’t helping your case to be arguing so hard for the angle that it isn’t having an impact.

@JoeW, that's fortunate because only the first heading of the three, (a), implied a lack of impact. In (b) I imply the impact is to promote the dislodgement of disguised/latent militants by making the area completely inhospitable to continued civilian activity, and in (c) I imply the impact is to force the Ukrainian state to either facilitate the area clearance/distillation of civilians from militants, or face backlash from civilians whose commitment to the war doesn't extend to them and their families being used as unarmed human shields and camouflage at the war front.

@Steve It is almost as if there can be something in the middle of that extreme and that it is having no impact because they can live without the lights for a bit.

@JoeW, that is essentially my position, that a community of people prepared and organised for the hardships of a total war to defend themselves from an oppressor, would not be upset by the modest hardship of lights going out transiently (as I'm led to believe it usually is), nor by the need to evacuate to safer territory if the lights stayed off indefinitely and could not be restored by any reasonable means of a competent state (including distribution of handheld generators and jerry cans of diesel fuel, and the mobilisation of the civilians to do the work of distribution and retrieval).

@Steve Again, there is a larger impact when people lose power in a war zone then the "loss of lighting". Your repeated claims talking about just a loss of lighting shows that you are asking this in bad faith.

@JoeW, you're getting repetitive and pursuing this same point in two separate comment blocks. I want to bookend this: I don't accept your argument that civilians prepared to wage total war for national independence lose morale due to a transient loss of electric power, which is a ridiculous and insulting allegation to anyone willing to give their lives and limbs in struggle, and I don't even see the logic of how this shows "bad faith" on my part.

@Steve You keep making claims that an invader attacking a countries power sources is just a simple electoral loss or loss of lighting which isn't the case and you seem to refuse to accept that it isn't just that simple

@JoeW, see the other comment block.