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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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This is what international law has to say about incendiary weapons:
This treeline is clearly not located within a concentration of civilians and it is concealing (or plausibly believed to be concealing) enemy combatants and therefore the use of incendiary weapons is unambiguously legal.
The United States and the UK successfully blocked attempts to outlaw all use of incendiary weapons, and all use of incendiary weapons against personnel, and all use of incendiary weapons against forests and plant cover.
This is an area where it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with how the US watered down this convention, to push for stricter rules on this, and to condemn the use of thermite as an anti-personnel weapon and the use of incendiary weapons on plants that are being used for cover and concealment of military objectives.
So pointing out that this might technically be legal isn't enough for me to personally be OK with this. I think it's morally reprehensible, and I'd prefer for Ukraine to keep the moral high ground in this war.
Why is it even morally reprehensible? If you you blow the guts out and faces off Russian soldiers by more traditional means they are just as dead and if dozens of Ukrainians die in the course of digging the Russians out of cover do you account that a superior outcome? If so how?
If a burglar strode into your home with a gun and you believed that conflict was inevitable how much risk and or suffering would you tolerate from your wife and children in order to decrease the chance of harm or suffering by the burglar? Would you accept a 3% chance of a dead kid in order to harm instead of kill the burglar? Would you take a 1% in order to decrease his suffering substantially?
My accounting is that there is no amount of risk or harm I would accept for me and mine to preserve the burglar's life because he made his choice when he chose to harm me and mine. I wouldn't risk a broken finger to preserve his entire life nor should I. That said should he surrender I would turn him over to the police. I should never take opportunity to hurt him let alone execute him. Should I do this I would be the villain no matter what had transpired before because I would be doing so out of emotional reaction I wouldn't be acting any longer to preserve me or mine.
We should expect Ukrainians to take any possible advantage for in doing so they preserve innocent life. Preserving the lifes or preventing the suffering of active enemies presently actively trying to do harm is nonsensical.
I (and all the people and organizations that have worked throughout the last century to get incendiary weapons banned as anti-personnel weapons) generally feel that the method of killing matters, and that some methods are excessively cruel or represent excessive risk of long term suffering.
The existing protocol on incendiary weapons recognizes the difference, by requiring signatory nations to go out of their way to avoid using incendiary weapons in places where civilian harm might occur. Even in contexts where a barrage of artillery near civilians might not violate the law, airborne flame throwers are forbidden. Because incendiary weapons are different, and a line is drawn there, knowing that there actually is a difference between negligently killing civilians with shrapnel versus negligently killing civilians with burning.
There are degrees of morality and ethics, even in war, and incendiary weapons intentionally targeting personnel crosses a line that I would draw.
Getting Ukrainian troops defending their homes killed in order to ensure that the rapists and murderers invading their homes don't suffer is a moral abomination.