Bulletpoint

Updated information of civilian victims after yesterday strike:
39 killed, 159 wounded. 
Number of dead in Kyiv increased to 16 (because of the 16th body was found about a hour ago, total number of death in Ukriane can be 40 so far). This is largest number of death in Kyiv throughout the war. 
Some photos and videos of yesterday strikes
Kyiv (16 dead). Burning fragments of shot down missile hit the tall building. It like a God's hand - the building still under construction
Zaporizhzhia (9 dead)

Dnipro (6 dead)
Shopping mall hit directly

... and maternity hospital (fortunately close impact, only four light wounded)

Odesa (4 dead)

Kharkiv (3 dead). This city got a sad record - Total a dozen of S-300 missiles from Belgorod and several Kh-22/Iskander-M hit multiple zones, mostly industrual areas. 

Konotop, Sumy oblast (2 dead)

L'viv (1 dead)

Kyiv, Odesa and Dnipro cities announced a day of mourning.

I would say it depends heavily on the news outlet. The internet has made it much easier for anybody to set up shop and pretend to be a journalist, but that's not the same as actually being a journalist. It's often near impossible for the average media user to tell the difference though.

On that I will grant you full points.  IDPs and refugees can number in the millions - just as we are seeing in Gaza.  What is unfortunate is that the casualties caused by those displacements are factored out - starvation and disease etc.
Unfortunately the IDF and Israel do not seem to be doing better than anyone else on this front either.
We can argue legalities all day, but there is a point when this whole thing smacks of revenge against those who do not deserve it.  All those Hamas fighters deserve to die, straight up.  Anyone directly supporting them is also fair game.  But mass destruction with intent to make uninhabitable, and widespread obvious non-combatant killing is not what a modern western military is supposed to be about.
They are making up all sorts of stuff about "AI-enabled targeting"...this is horsesh#t in my opinion.  Right now the US has the most advanced complex targeting enterprise on the planet and I do not think they could sustain up to 200 righteous strikes per day in a complex human and urban environment.  The IDF, despite pushing this line, do not have a corp of magic wizards able to cleanly target at that rate in this environment.  No one does.  They are the same boat we all were over the last 20 years.  What has changed are the error-bars and ROEs.    

The only thing I would add is that Israel has pretty much abandoned any high ground it had on the subject of “equality under the law” in prosecution of this war.  Those Palestinians non-combatants current being dozed under are definitely not being afforded “equality of citizenship”, hell, they are not being afforded the basic tenants of universal human rights at this point:
https://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf
This war is entirely  ethnic-centric to the point it is beginning to resemble an ethnic cleansing.  Again allegations are unproven by an international investigation but the circumstantial evidence is becoming overwhelming.  For example, someone is going to need to explain to me the difference between an IDF “power target” and Russian military “terror strike”.
 

All media has always been biased. There's nothing wrong with a particular point of view informing journalism as long as you're not pretending otherwise. Much better to be upfront about it and take biases into consideration instead of pretending to be "Fair and Balanced."

Dude…c’mon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGO_Monitor
I applaud fact checking but check your checks.
I mean the head of this thing worked directly for the Israeli government. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_M._Steinberg
 

Read the article @Chudacabra just posted.  Gives a very good break down of what is happening.  A veneer of defence is just that, under scrutiny it becomes pretty evident very quickly that laws of armed conflict are being violated.  For example, blowing up a high rise full of civilians because “Hamas met there once” is well outside the LOAC.  The power targets, which are an admitted IDF target set, are also no more legitimate under the LOAC than Russian cruise missile strikes on Ukrainian high rises.
Finally, you are clearly a civilian and do not understand just how dangerous the scenario you paint is for a military organization.  Beyond moral injury and exposing your own troops to war criminality, this sort of “painting over” is how really bad things happen.  It creates a level of acceptability that erodes military discipline.
 “Ok guys, we all know higher is playing cover up so shoot who you want.”  “Hey Sarge, can we rape Palestinian women too?”  Civilians have just about zero understanding about just how slippery a slope warfare is.  They think it is all “drama”.  In reality “killing” is among the easiest things to do.  Morally a military organization can find itself upside down very fast.  Officers and NCOs spend an inordinate amount of time making sure scared heavily armed teenagers don’t get out of hand in fighting the enemy.  They do this primarily to ensure things don’t get so bad that those teenagers don’t start shooting each other.
If the IDF keeps going the way they are it will be nearly impossible to tell them apart from the RA in a few months.  

Israel is not a democracy. It is an ethnostate with some democratic institutions within its 1967 borders, but it lacks equality of citizenship, which is a basic tenet of democracy. Judicial oversight of the legislature was also greatly weakened recently, although I suspect that will be reversed once Netanyahu is ejected from office. Palestinians citizens of Israel do enjoy far more political rights than Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.

But Israel has adopted a one state solution for the lands of historic Palestine. Israel exercises full sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea in three very distinct ways. There is 1967 Israel, which is perhaps best described as an illiberal democracy. There is the West Bank where Palestinian control has been reduced to about 18% of the territory and is heavily bisected by Israeli settlements and areas under full Israeli military control. This is similar to the bantustans of apartheid South Africa. What kind of democracy has roads only for certain ethnicities or subjects some citizens to military justice and others to civil justice? 

Then there is Gaza, which is besieged by Israel aided by Egypt. While it was not actively occupied or colonized , it is effectively part of Israel as Israel has full control over its external affairs and borders. It has now been subject to one of the most intense bombardment campaigns in history, which is framed as a war, but is really a counter-insurgency against a domestic force.
Ultimately, Israel will need to reckon with its foundation as a colonial project that emerged in the 1890s largely as a response to European anti-Semitism and that was established at the expense of Palestinian Arabs of Muslim and Christian backgrounds with somewhat mixed support from Palestinian Jews. It is imperfect as an example, but the reconciliation process in Canada is at least an acknowledgement of past harms towards indigenous people and could serve as a model. What if instead of spending billions upon billions to destroy Gaza, that money and resources were distributed as compensation in lieu of a right to return for Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948? An imperfect option, but an imperfect compromise to address past harms is a far better solution than a worsening status quo.

I feel like people often get distracted with inane discussions of whether Israel has a right to exist. Israel will continue to exist unless it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. It is a nuclear power with a lavishly equipped conventional military that has an absolutely overwhelming amount of power in the region. As it has shown in Gaza, it can do more or less whatever it wants. The real question is what will happen to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? Any political solution would be better than the status quo, be it one secular state for all its citizens, two federated states (something like the A Land For All proposal - https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr) or two separate, fully sovereign states. If there is one lesson to be learned from October 7th, it is that the safety of Jewish Israelis cannot be predicated on the continued oppression and dispossession of Palestinians. There are lots of examples of multi-religious or multi-ethnic states or of neighbouring states of different religions or ethnicities living beside each other, often for the better. There is no inherent reason why this place should be any different.

Call me crazy, but I usually blame the party committing flagrant war crimes (like ransacking hospitals on the basis of transparent lies, murdering women sheltering in a church, shooting a man with a developmental disability for the crime of carrying lollipops, killing their own hostages who they thought were civilians, assassinating journalists on a mass scale, permanently settling civilians in occupied territory, and so on and so on...). I find it very strange that supporting Israel seems to translate to supporting a very particular course of action designed for maximum cruelty and collective punishment. Israel's political and military establishment has been incapable of articulating a clear or achievable goal, and also has no long-term plans for a peaceful future. 

https://www.972mag.com/israel-political-weakness-military-hamas/

I thought this was a great piece highlighting that despite Israel's military might, it is politically weak and immensely unimaginative. Netanyahu's successive governments have proved incapable of articulating anything beyond a worsening of the status quo, not to mention their strategy of supporting Hamas as a means to divide and discredit the Palestinians backfired spectacularly. October 7th was a classic case of blowback, where actions taken to weaken your enemy end up coming back to bite you in horrible ways.

The world is what we make it.  That is kinda the point of international laws of armed conflict in the first place.  The major point of disagreement we seem to have is that if one side is not following the rules then it is acceptable for the other side to toss them out the window as well - this is simply not true.  Israel has to live in this world once this war is over.  
Hamas is not and never was an existential threat to then state of Israel anymore than AQ was to the US.  They are capable of horrible behaviours and doing terrible things to Israeli citizens - I do not dispute the atrocities one wit.  But Israel is not on some edge of existence that justifies this behaviour.  In fact the only group who fits that description is Hamas and I am pretty sure we can agree their behaviour is not acceptable either.  Their warcrimes are also crimes.  Any Hamas PoWs need to be investigated and prosecuted for their part as well.  This is going to be pretty damned hard to do righteously if the IDF is also conducting illegal wartime activities.  Or are you basically saying “how things are” is to simply execute them all?
However, Israel is a modern democracy.  A member of the international community.  It does not get to toss out the rule ok anymore than Russia.  Interestingly, no one has responded to this point on Russian warcrimes in Ukraine.  Are we just going to let those slide?  I mean Russia likely can come up with all sorts of “human shields” and “legitimate military targets” as well.  Russia will claim that it “had to deal with the world as it was, not how they wanted it to be” at Bucha.  This is what I mean by application.  We cannot go after Russian warcrimes, or whoever does this stuff next, if we simply shrug when the IDF is straying “terrorists-watcha gonna do?”
 We had restrictive ROEs in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  We had them in the Gulf War.  We had them in Kosovo.  I am not sure where the myth came that we somehow simply ignore the LOAC in conflict but it is simply not true.  I have been part of a killchain and targeting prices and the LOAC is a primary consideration all the time.  We do not “wink and nod” at it because “lawyers”.  Every commander on ops knows the ROEs and is held responsible to enforce them…no matter who we are fighting.
Finally, things are getting so bad that even Israel is beginning to doubt itself:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/the-death-toll-from-an-israeli-airstrike-in-central-gaza-rises-to-106-palestinian-officials-say-1.6700908
So for context in this case the IDF will need to show that the target they hit was worth 106 civilian dead…in a refugee camp…that they directed civilians to move to.  Was this a rocket system?  Was it the Hamas leader?  There are scenarios where this would be acceptable but that bar is very high.  If this was a dozen Hamas shleps with rifles…this was an unrighteous shoot.  Now we cannot say definitely what this was or was not but we can sure as hell question it.  We do have that right and responsibility.  
 
 

Yes.
Yes. In war, there will be casualties, even with the best planning.
No.
But I understand it can be really frustrating. In the beginning, I also reloaded every time something bad happened, like an unexpected barrage, or friendly fire. But then I realised that it's much more enjoyable to take these things in my stride and try my best to continue with what I have left, trying not to lose my cool.
So I began only reloading when something bad happened that wasn't due to my own decisions. For example, a tank refusing to go straight from A to B through good terrain but making some long weird detour for no reason and getting destroyed. Or troops refusing to enter a house through the back door, instead running all the way through streets and getting cut down.
I also found this way of playing made me better at the game. Which is an advantage against a human player where you can't just reload. I played several PBEM games where my opponent started out very sensible, but then there would be some mass casualty event on his side, and all of a sudden, it was clear that he got frustrated and started giving all kinds of risky orders that just made things worse. It's easy to fall into the trap of "oh man, I just lost a half platoon to that barrage, so the game is over.. I better gamble now".
But what he doesn't know is that I also took lots of losses. So we're actually still equally matched, but it's his rash decisions that end up costing him the game.

I think the reason is more that the US political system and leadership seems more and more dysfunctional and unpredictable, and that their economy is unsustainable because it is based on an ever increasing mountain of debt.
As seen from the EU, that is way more worrying than whether Russia takes over eastern Ukraine. This is also why the level of support has dwindled after it became clear that Putin couldn't take Kyiv. The people in power are probably quite ok about where the front line goes at the moment.

Looking back at history, I don't think he really has to worry much about that. Stalin killed untold millions without anyone able to stand up to him, Hitler kept feeding Germans into the grinder until the enemy was knocking on the door of his bunker, and then there was also WW1 where there was a bit of a protest brewing in the trenches at one point, but then that was cracked down on and the war continued.
When it comes to Putin's war, I think many of the guys in the meat waves don't even realise just how suicidal it is until it is too late. They probably know it's going to be dangerous, but they still have some kind of idea that they are regular soldiers fighting in a regular war, where you go to attack positions and have at least some chance of surviving. But when they see what it's really like, it's too late - they don't get back to tell the tale, and then the next wave is formed up behind them using fresh meat. So morale is kept going and there's never any substantial buildup of disgruntled troops in Russian lines.

Looking back at history, I don't think he really has to worry much about that. Stalin killed untold millions without anyone able to stand up to him, Hitler kept feeding Germans into the grinder until the enemy was knocking on the door of his bunker, and then there was also WW1 where there was a bit of a protest brewing in the trenches at one point, but then that was cracked down on and the war continued.
When it comes to Putin's war, I think many of the guys in the meat waves don't even realise just how suicidal it is until it is too late. They probably know it's going to be dangerous, but they still have some kind of idea that they are regular soldiers fighting in a regular war, where you go to attack positions and have at least some chance of surviving. But when they see what it's really like, it's too late - they don't get back to tell the tale, and then the next wave is formed up behind them using fresh meat. So morale is kept going and there's never any substantial buildup of disgruntled troops in Russian lines.

Looking back at history, I don't think he really has to worry much about that. Stalin killed untold millions without anyone able to stand up to him, Hitler kept feeding Germans into the grinder until the enemy was knocking on the door of his bunker, and then there was also WW1 where there was a bit of a protest brewing in the trenches at one point, but then that was cracked down on and the war continued.
When it comes to Putin's war, I think many of the guys in the meat waves don't even realise just how suicidal it is until it is too late. They probably know it's going to be dangerous, but they still have some kind of idea that they are regular soldiers fighting in a regular war, where you go to attack positions and have at least some chance of surviving. But when they see what it's really like, it's too late - they don't get back to tell the tale, and then the next wave is formed up behind them using fresh meat. So morale is kept going and there's never any substantial buildup of disgruntled troops in Russian lines.

Looking back at history, I don't think he really has to worry much about that. Stalin killed untold millions without anyone able to stand up to him, Hitler kept feeding Germans into the grinder until the enemy was knocking on the door of his bunker, and then there was also WW1 where there was a bit of a protest brewing in the trenches at one point, but then that was cracked down on and the war continued.
When it comes to Putin's war, I think many of the guys in the meat waves don't even realise just how suicidal it is until it is too late. They probably know it's going to be dangerous, but they still have some kind of idea that they are regular soldiers fighting in a regular war, where you go to attack positions and have at least some chance of surviving. But when they see what it's really like, it's too late - they don't get back to tell the tale, and then the next wave is formed up behind them using fresh meat. So morale is kept going and there's never any substantial buildup of disgruntled troops in Russian lines.

Looking back at history, I don't think he really has to worry much about that. Stalin killed untold millions without anyone able to stand up to him, Hitler kept feeding Germans into the grinder until the enemy was knocking on the door of his bunker, and then there was also WW1 where there was a bit of a protest brewing in the trenches at one point, but then that was cracked down on and the war continued.
When it comes to Putin's war, I think many of the guys in the meat waves don't even realise just how suicidal it is until it is too late. They probably know it's going to be dangerous, but they still have some kind of idea that they are regular soldiers fighting in a regular war, where you go to attack positions and have at least some chance of surviving. But when they see what it's really like, it's too late - they don't get back to tell the tale, and then the next wave is formed up behind them using fresh meat. So morale is kept going and there's never any substantial buildup of disgruntled troops in Russian lines.

Looking back at history, I don't think he really has to worry much about that. Stalin killed untold millions without anyone able to stand up to him, Hitler kept feeding Germans into the grinder until the enemy was knocking on the door of his bunker, and then there was also WW1 where there was a bit of a protest brewing in the trenches at one point, but then that was cracked down on and the war continued.
When it comes to Putin's war, I think many of the guys in the meat waves don't even realise just how suicidal it is until it is too late. They probably know it's going to be dangerous, but they still have some kind of idea that they are regular soldiers fighting in a regular war, where you go to attack positions and have at least some chance of surviving. But when they see what it's really like, it's too late - they don't get back to tell the tale, and then the next wave is formed up behind them using fresh meat. So morale is kept going and there's never any substantial buildup of disgruntled troops in Russian lines.

In general, in my opinion, missile attacks on Ukrainian cities today play a negative role for the Russians. Russia today is conducting one of the most successful information and psychological campaigns against the Ukrainian state. The Kremlin has successfully undermined Ukrainians' faith in its leadership and is quite successful in countering the mobilization of Ukrainians, pitting them against military officials.
However, massive attacks on rear cities reduce the effectiveness of these informational and psychological actions, returning Ukrainians to reality and indicating who their true enemy is.

Id start by not reading the NYT. Their UA coverage is anything but impartial and neither are the russians working there.
Besides that note, manpower is an issue and also likely the reason russians stopped prisoner exchanges, leading to orcs gunning down surrendering troops at a noticibly higher rate than before.
Morale is definitively at the lowest it has ever been, with failing western support and a clearly in it to win it russia, that will not coup and surrender or revolt as everyone here keeps dreaming about.
They'll take another 300000 dead and the same sites will claim 'imminent collapse', 'mass surrenders', while the frontline edges further and further inland.
 

Ukrainian soldiers began to receive Tsukorok (sugar) drone detectors. This detector scans the radio air and, based on the characteristic frequency at which a certain type of drone is controlled, determines that there is a drone nearby and you need to hide.
Allegedly, this device is inexpensive, and its effectiveness has already been tested by soldiers on the front line.

Abolished by the ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Declaration_Respecting_Maritime_Law
... since 1856,
We've had discusssions about why Ukraine needs to adhere to International Law even when Russia flouts it. So not gonna happen.

Rats - this was meant for the Engine 5 Wishlist topic!  Wish I knew how to delete this.
There are times when planning fire support I would want the off-map tubes (artillery/mortars) to expend all their HE/cluster munitions to soften up a target then place smoke in an area to provide cover for my attacking units.  As it stands now if your off-map assets expend all HE/cluster munitions smoke is not available as a final fire mission.  Could use on-map tubes to provide smoke but some scenarios have little to no on-map tubes.  Would be great to have smoke available after HE/cluster is expended.

If it's this guy, then I think you're selling him a bit short
https://militaryhallofhonor.com/honoree-record.php?id=216819
Do you know if he was of Danish descent? His name sounds like it.