Armies are re-learning how to fight in cities

the known number of civilian deaths from various direct or indirect war actions (i.e. bombing etc.) is around 200.000, with around 10-20k being attributed to the U.S by most estimates.

russia is getting closer every day but they'll take a while to reach it yet. but they are comparable numbers.

You are forgetting what happened to Fallujah in retaliation for the deaths of 4 Blackwater mercenaries.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/22/usa.iraq1

> On 17 May 2011, AFP reported that twenty-one bodies, in black body-bags marked with letters and numbers in Latin script had been recovered from a mass grave in al-Maadhidi cemetery in the center of the city. Fallujah police chief Brigadier General Mahmud al-Essawi said that they had been blindfolded, their legs had been tied and they had suffered gunshot wounds. The Mayor, Adnan Husseini said that the manner of their killing, as well as the body bags, indicated that US forces had been responsible. Both al-Essawi and Husseini agreed that the dead had been killed in 2004. The US military declined to comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah

> The assault was preceded by eight weeks of aerial bombardment. US troops cut off the city's water, power and food supplies, condemned as a violation of the Geneva convention by a UN special rapporteur, who accused occupying forces of "using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population". Two-thirds of the city's 300,000 residents fled, many to squatters' camps without basic facilities.

> As the siege tightened, the Red Cross, Red Crescent and the media were kept out, while males between the ages of 15 and 55 were kept in. US sources claimed between 600 and 6,000 insurgents were holed up inside the city - which means that the vast majority of the remaining inhabitants were non-combatants.

> The city's main hospital was selected as the first target, the New York Times reported, "because the US military believed it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties". An AP photographer described US helicopters killing a family of five trying to ford a river to safety. "There were American snipers on top of the hospital shooting everyone," said Burhan Fasa'am, a photographer with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. "With no medical supplies, people died from their wounds. Everyone in the street was a target for the Americans."

> The US also deployed incendiary weapons, including white phosphorous. "Usually we keep the gloves on," Captain Erik Krivda said, but "for this operation, we took the gloves off". By the end of operations, the city lay in ruins. Falluja's compensation commissioner has reported that 36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines.

> The collective punishment inflicted on Falluja - with logistical and political support from Britain - was largely masked by the US and British media, which relied on reporters embedded with US troops. The BBC, in particular, offered a sanitised version of the assault: civilian suffering was minimised and the ethics and strategic logic of the attack largely unscrutinised.

> Falluja proved to be yet another of the war's phantom turning points. Violent resistance spread to other cities. In the last two months, Tal-Afar, Haditha, Husaybah - all alleged terrorist havens heavily populated by civilians - have come under the hammer. Falluja is still so heavily patrolled that visitors have described it as "a giant prison". Only a fraction of the promised reconstruction and compensation has materialised.

> Like Jallianwallah Bagh, Guernica, My Lai, Halabja and Grozny, Falluja is a place name that has become a symbol of unconscionable brutality. As the war in Iraq claims more lives, we need to ensure that this atrocity - so recent, so easily erased from public memory - is recognised as an example of the barbarism of nations that call themselves civilised.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/10/usa.iraq

It was very important then, as well as today, for pro-US media to whitewash and ignore what We The People have done to Iraq.

That is true, but those towns are mostly far smaller in comparison to a city like Kyiv, with known enemy forces in or within very close proximity. If combatants are in current occupation of an area, it's a legitimate target. Longer range bombings not associated with active combat were generally at targeted buildings or infrastructure. This is not reasonably comparable to continuous mass bombardment of civilian areas with no relevant military objective.

If there's anything I've learned from the conflict in Ukraine, as well as 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, it is that small-explosives drone usage has become a first-class citizen weaponry / tactic against ground troops. There's a daily stream of footage from Ukraine, where you see Russian ground troops getting bombed by DIY drones dropping grenades / mortar rounds / etc.

Drones are also becoming invaluable tools as forward observers for artillery and mortar fire.

I'm in the National Guard, and I feel that in any modern combat - we'd just be sitting ducks.

> The problem is that russia is carrying out conventional warfare tactics against a civilian population rather than an opposing army.

What does it do to the opposing army then? And what does that army do in the meantime?