JonS

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

Truly worded in a genuine and generous way... or is this another embarrassing gaffe of mine? And half a dozen others who interpreted your post just the same way?
Something something an alligator named Dorothy, something something killing Russians in Kansas.

He really ... isn't

Moral Combat: A History of World War II by Michael Burleigh
An interesiting take on WW2 and why the (western) Allies won ... because their moral choices in prosecuting the war were far less immoral than those of the Axis powers.
 
No, their choices weren't whiter than the driven snow, but they were generally more moral ... so, for example, German troops may have followed Hitlerian orders for brutality on the eastern front but they knew deep down that retribution was coming ... hence their much stiffer resistance in the east than in the west and why German troops desperately tried to surrender to the Western Allies rather than to the Russians.

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

No. It will not lead to the eventual end of international law. International law might come to an end eventually, but it will not be because we stayed high. If anything, it might come to an end because we went low.
I think you are missing some very basic fundamentals about this war, the relative strength of modern day Russia and the west, how the modern world works in general, and a few realities of warfare.
1. It isn't about going high or low. Russia is making gains in Ukraine right now because there was a gap in western aid, not because the west is sticking to the high road. Now that fresh aid is on the way Russia's window to make significant gains is going to come to a close, even if they keep going low. It will not reopen unless there is another gap in western aid. It has absolutely nothing to do with going high or low. Russia going low is not giving them an advantage on the battlefield, the gap in western aid is. Us going high is not putting Ukraine at a disadvantage on the battlefield, the gap in western aid is.
2. The west is massively more powerful than Russia. The US GDP in 2022 was ten times the Russian GDP. The combined members of NATO (including the US) have twenty times the Russian GDP. If you add in our Pacific and Asian allies it comes out to thirty times the Russian GDP. Now, as we have been painfully learning over the last two years, overwhelming economic superiority does not instantly or automatically translate to a superiority in military industrial production. But, as I expect Russia to very painfully learn over the next (I'm throwing out a guess here, based largely on the mediocrity principle, that we're right smack dab in the middle of this thing) two years, it does translate to a greater potential to expand military industrial production. And it translates to greater economic endurance. Russia cannot keep up current levels of spending forever. The west can keep up current levels of aid to Ukraine (or even many times the current levels of aid in monetary terms) pretty much forever. So the west absolutely has the capability to enable Ukraine to win. The only factor is western will to continue supporting Ukraine, and to hopefully expand support for Ukraine. Provided that western will to support Ukraine doesn't break, it is impossible for Russia to win even if they go low and we stay high. Going low or high isn't even a factor.
3. Going high isn't just about principle, it's where our strength comes from. I mean that literally, not in the vague feel-good sense in which the power of love somehow enables the heroes of a story to overcome impossible odds. Our strength (both military and economic) is literally derived from our alliances, our credibility, and the rules based international order. The United States has a massive network of alliances. You may notice that China and Russia, both of which are far more willing to go low, come up a little short on allies.
4. Going low doesn't actually work. This may be a bit difficult to grasp, particularly since we've been inundated with pessimists who think they're realists for so many years. But just because something is dirty or unethical doesn't make it effective. As one example, Russian assassinations on British soil were probably a factor in why the British have been so enthusiastic in providing support for Ukraine (the small amount of material they've provided has more to do with a lack of material to provide than with a lack of will to provide it). As another example, I have been reading about increasing use by the Russians of chemical weapons in Ukraine. These are outlawed in warfare under international law, so is about as clear a case of going low as you could imagine. But there are reasons why it was so much easier to outlaw the use of chemical weapons in warfare than it was to outlaw the use of, for example, cluster munitions. Chief among them is that cluster munitions are extremely effective, while chemical weapons aren't particularly effective. It was easy to outlaw chemical weapons because their cruelty is far out of proportion to their battlefield utility. They're better than nothing, but they're difficult to maintain and generally less effective than an equivalent amount of HE would have been. The fact that Russia has resorted to using chemical weapons is a sign of desperation, not a sign that these are actually effective weapons. So far I believe all of the recent Russian advances have been credited to artillery and local air superiority, not to their use of chemical weapons.

If you abandon your principles whenever it gets a bit hard, you don't have any principles.

If I mistook your intent that gravely, keep in mind that so did at least 6 others based on posted reactions. That might say more about what you wrote and how you wrote it than about it being poorly interpreted.

I'm completely with you there. Refineries are obviously legitimate military targets, and I am struggling to understand why there is any controversy in Ukraine attacking them. I have never understood our prohibition on Ukraine using western weapons to attack targets inside internationally-recognized Russian territory (we don't care about what Russia thinks is Russian territory). But that isn't what Carolus was suggesting.

Even if this approach didn't backfire, which it almost certainly would, we would be winning by defeating the whole point of winning. I think most people here, myself included, want Ukraine to win for Ukraine's sake. But from the West's perspective the whole point of supporting Ukraine is to uphold international law. You can't uphold international law by breaking international law. We would be "winning" by maximizing the defeat of our own political objectives, giving us an outcome even worse for us than if we had lost.

This isn't a "they go low, we go high" scenario.
This is a "Russia is a dictatorship which doesn't respect international laws; we are democracies which do respect and uphold international law" scenario, where the idea is raised that "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we did away with all the democracy and human rights so we can do monstruous, unspeakably evil things against not just Russia, but also against neutral, uninvolved countries and even our own allies?" as part of some strange, unexplained idea that this would somehow bring about the collapse of Russia.
It's like a completely backwards version of being a war hawk. They're keen on discussing notions such as liberalising rules of engagement to produce results because they don't believe that doing so would neccesarily be wrong. This reasoning though sets out with the idea of "let's just be ridiculously evil, because along the way of being to human decency what Bernie Madoff was to the stock market, we might come upon something that will be effective".

How about "because it's not within limits?" There's nothing morally defensible about the idea of subverting Georgia into going to war with Russia on "Ukraine's behalf" (quotation marks, because it sounds a lot more like the West/NATO using Georgia as a pawn).
By that logic the DNC might as well have reacted to Pizza-gate by ordering a bunch of child sized traps from the ACME Corporation or Amazon since they'd already been accused of child trafficking. It's clearly morally wrong as well as just completely non-sensical.
 
Edit: Just re-reading your post in detail... what the cr*p? The half of the examples you proposed which wouldn't justify Russia declaring WW3 are just cartoon villain evil-doing for the sake of nothing more than proving the worst Russian propagandist right. I'm almost surprised that you didn't include "let's re-open the concentration camps" to your list of ideas.

Sometimes i wonder how much you even think through your suggestions.
One of the issues for aps you bring up is the stadoff ability of newer atgm/drones and yet you now suggest weapons for it that have dramatically less range than what is currently being used and also needs a direct hit rather than hit anywhere within a few meters.
And asking for a miniaturized proximity fuse against a almost fully plastic target that actually works and doesnt cost several times the drones cost itself.

Murphy's Laws of Combat
#12: there's always more targets than there is ammunition, so try to look unimportant.

Murphy's Laws of Combat
#12: there's always more targets than there is ammunition, so try to look unimportant.

Murphy's Laws of Combat
#12: there's always more targets than there is ammunition, so try to look unimportant.

Murphy's Laws of Combat
#12: there's always more targets than there is ammunition, so try to look unimportant.

Even with tiny patch antennas you're going to be a beacon for a much longer range than you have a functional radar.
Radar depends on reflectivity, so the radar has a detector that's sensing something like (signal)*(reflectance)*(1/4r^2)ish, where reflectance is some number less than 1.  Probably significantly less than 1.  I don't even need a better detector than the radar - if I'm using the exact same detector, I get the signal without the reflectivity term and without the 4.  
Realistically, if you're generating any kind of periodic signal I can detect it and triangulate on it at a *much* larger range than you can usefully use it as a radar.  All I need is a lock-in amplifier and a couple good clocks and I can work down at the background noise limit.