Excluding something like the suspiciously-timed Bucha Massacre, how would I deal with the regular atrocity propaganda? Maybe some comparison to other attacks by Ukraine would be fine.
Note- hopefully I don’t sound like I’m acting in bad faith intentionally.
The problem is that you still take their claims at face value. The vast majority of what the western media writes about this conflict is complete and total bullshit. Most of the time they just repeat whatever new lie of the day that the Kiev Nazis have decided to invent. The rest of the time they cite “anonymous western officials”. These propaganda campaigns are co-ordinated and the same lie will be spread using virtually identical language across the entire media.
In this specific case for instance they neglect to mention that the actual strike was conducted on a gathering of high ranking Ukrainian commanders and NATO “advisors”. They literally posted pictures and video of this place full of soldiers both before and after. It is also not the restaurant that was struck but the hotel right next to it where the meeting was taking place. And the fact that the Kiev regime regularly uses civilians as human shields is nothing new. But really you don’t need to bother to get into this much detail. The fact is that the Nazis still regularly shell purely civilian areas in the Donbass - now with western weapons - for no other reason than impotent rage over the fact they are losing. As long as the supporters of the Kiev regime refuse to acknowledge and condemn this there is no reason to take any of their complaints about what Russia may or may not be doing seriously.
Of course we could also get into how the pro Kiev propagandists regularly fabricate civilians deaths where there were none or much fewer, they will try to pass off their soldiers or intelligence agents as civilians, they will claim something was done by Russia when in fact it was Ukraine (as with the Ukrainian AD rockets failing and hitting their own buildings), and in general simply projecting their own losses, their own crimes and their own twisted mentality onto the Russians. A good rule of thumb is to simply invert whatever they say about Russia because it will usually be true about Ukraine. But as i said, there is no need to engage in this level of depth for the most part. Don’t allow dishonest propagandists to put you in a position where you have to be the one defending and apologizing.
You know they are bullshitting so why accept their framing of the events? Of course it’s good to do your own investigations and try and find out what really happened but sometimes this may not be possible, and in this case it is easy to fall into the trap of accepting the “facts” offered by the other side. This is a fallacy. Their track record of dishonesty is well documented. Assume they are lying until proven otherwise.
And also, i’m sorry but where was this level of care for civilian lives in ANY of the conflicts waged by the West? Can you imagine if there had been an article like this every time US bombs killed civilians in Yugoslavia, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or Lybia? In fact what this shows more than anything else is the incredibly low level of civilian casualties in this conflict, the fact that incidents where the western propagandists even have a chance to twist into an accusation against Russia are so rare that a story like this is even noteworthy.
We have no idea how many or even whether civilians were killed at all in this specific incident, and i’m not saying that there weren’t and that if it happened it’s not tragic. But if we take a broader look at the overall statistics of this war, even by the count of the most biased anti-Russian western organizations the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties is incredibly low, especially for a conflict of this intensity. They are so low they are historically unprecedented. In no modern conflict have civilian casualties been orders of magnitude lower than combatant ones like they are in this one.
In every war waged by the US on some hapless developing nation they have always killed way more civilians than actual enemy combatants. And they would have killed even more if they were suffering the kinds of soldier losses that Russia is (which while vastly lower than Ukraine’s are still significant). We have seen in Vietnam and Korea what the US does to civilians when their armed forces start to feel some actual pain and are not just steamrolling over vastly technologically and organizationally inferior enemies.
Of course we can’t reduce everything to statistics. Human beings are dying and that’s awful. Even many of Ukraine’s soldiers were either dragooned/force conscripted or induced to join with a torrent of lies and propaganda (much of Ukraine’s population has been immersed in a media and political environment dominated by Nazi propaganda and demonization of Russia for years now, and many who are now fighting grew up being brainwashed every day with this ideological poison). So to the people who are claiming to have true humanitarian intentions, tell them this:
The best thing to do if you want to save lives is to stop this conflict as soon as possible, for which there is only one realistic option: the West needs to stop arming and funding Ukraine. If that happens the war will be over in a couple of months if not weeks. Ukraine government insiders even confirmed that they probably would have capitulated in March 2022 if the West had not essentially given them a blank check for unlimited support and promised them that they could still win. Ukraine has been duped and is being destroyed for the West’s own futile geopolitical games against Russia, none of which have succeeded and most have severely backfired.