> Could this really be true?
The shear amount of large-scale artillery barrages going on is large enough to be picked up by NASA's FIRMS satellite. And there seems to be many Twitter threads where people collect information from that FIRMS / Forest Fire satellite to document the artillery strikes in realtime.
Not even in the earlier wars of Russian aggression (Second Chechen War or Georgia War) seem to have this level of artillery.
That being said: a fair amount of it is Ukrainians counter-artillery striking Russians and fighting back (which Chechnya and Georgia were largely unable to do effectively). So perhaps your point is that Ukraine isn't a one-sided massacre and has mounted at least some effective means of defense?
Ukraine would be suffering more if Russia managed to get within Artillery Strike of Kyiv for example, but the Ukrainian forces have stalled out that advance... largely keeping Kyiv safe from destruction (well... to a greater degree than we've seen so far anyway). Mariupol on the other hand isn't as lucky, and widespread artillery is clearly being used upon that city.
With humanitarian corridors closed, its clear that Mariupol is being sieged, Leningrad style, and there's widespread reports of starvation to death. There's also reports of many civilians being transferred to Russian camps. Then there are also the famous "hospital strikes" and "theater strikes" have have killed hundreds alone.
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But I guess you're right. Things could be worse for some other cities / areas who were unable to fight back against their oppressors. Most of the genocide events of the past decades are pretty horrible as well.
But there needs to be something to be said about the huge, large-scale use of artillery that really hasn't been seen since WW2-era mass combat.