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The razing of Mosul alone seems to have a median estimate of around 10k civilian deaths, with the entire Iraq war estimated at around 300k in 10 years - and let's not get started on Vietnam. Wikipedia stats on Afghanistan seem to amount to 3k in three months of American bombing, up to some guessing 20k in a year, which is a very close rate to the 18k in 1.5 years being bandied around for Ukraine.
You are talking direct deaths which I haven’t seen data on but won’t disagree with. I’m talking indirect deaths (either starvation dying or births that didn’t happen).
If you look at population charts for Iraq you get this.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066952/population-iraq-historical/
You can’t look at a population chart and ever known a war happened. That’s not true for Russian invasion. This very clearly indicates Russian wars harm civilians in ways that US wars have close to zero effect. There is an ethnic cleansing that happens in Russian wars.
Surely the only things that you could detect from such a chart are births that didn't happen and generations that had an unusually high death rate (presumably military deaths, which you'd expect to be concentrated in draftable males). Neither is an indicator of ethnic cleansing, and in the case of Ukraine it is not even clear how Russia would be in a position to do that or how you would detect it (since they didn't manage to actually capture any predominantly Ukrainian part of Ukraine).
What would you consider sufficient evidence that US wars are no less harmful to civilians than Russian wars?
You would damage civilian infrastructure, run more brutal bombing campaigns and basically do things that turn people into refugees and depopulate the area. You would do things that make people not have the resources to raise a family.
You are basically just arguing that Russia isn’t running death camps. But they would make the Jews all leave the area and depopulate the area of Jews. Which America hasn’t done in their recent wars. It’s ethnic cleansing because the hypothetical Jews no longer exists in the region.
You haven't answered the question about what you would consider sufficient evidence. If you can't conceive of any evidence that would change your mind, what you have is an article of faith rather than rational belief.
Meanwhile, RIA Novosti is reporting that about 46% of students in the annexed part of Zaporozhiya region (Melitopol etc.) have indicated that they want to be taught in Ukrainian rather than Russian in the coming school year (apparently they were given a choice). Commenters and Russian milbloggers seem to be absolutely up in arms about this, and I don't see any reasonable grounds to assume it's made up (it doesn't even seem to be reported for a global audience in English?). Does that sound like a successful depopulation campaign to you?
(For reference, 2004 polls indicated that the entire region, including the unannexed parts further north that light up as less russophone on Wikipedia's map, had about 52% Ukrainian speakers. On the balance the map makes it seem like their numbers might have actually increased.)
Sufficient evidence would be to see a Ukranian population chart that looks the same as pre-war.
I was considering making you one in mspaint, which sounds silly until you realise nobody else is really in a position to compile an accurate chart either, with an unknown number estimated around 4 million having left the country, and drafts and combat losses being kept secret by the government. It doesn't seem particularly fruitful to continue this discussion either way, since it seems to me that you don't want to be persuaded otherwise. (What is even the notion of "looking the same" you are using? Can you not conceive of a scenario where a country commits more atrocities than another while producing less of whatever signal you claim to see in population charts?)
Being curious doesn’t mean you can form beliefs. And in this case yes I think the evidence here is that Russia is in fact genocidal. Their war aims were in fact genocidal if you read Russian Nationalist in the fact the goal was to make Ukranians into Russians and not let them be for lack of a better word playable characters or Ukranians. Being that there war aims were to not let Ukranian culture exists and feel quite confident that the population chart would never look the same under a Russian victory.
Even minority cultures thrive under American power. Perhaps the best example is even in all our slavery and Jim Crow the black population went from 400k imported slave to close to 50 million while developing a lot of their own culture.
I would not say Ukrainians are noticeably more "playable characters" than Russians, sure Ukraine is the plucky underdog protagonist of the current story as a whole but I haven't heard of the people having much better lives on average. They do have the luxury of more compelling official narrative, so maybe that's enough.
Being a forcibly assimilated former Ukrainian would probably be objectively worse than a native Russian, though.
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And if someone disputes this and has no preference in getting invaded by Russia and USA: I am curious are they also claiming that during WW II they would have no preference in choice:
(I definitely would prefer to be invaded by USA in both cases)
Notably in 1945 there were a bunch of documented cases of Germans fleeing west with the deliberate goal of surrendering to non-Soviet Allied forces.
Including some rocket scientists to take an example.
And there were cases of some military units fighting to be able to surrender to USA (or protecting fleeing civilians). Rare case of Third Reich military doing something praiseworthy.
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The data just wins. I can get bogged down looking at a picture of Fallujah versus Grozny and questioning whether they look the same. Or some missile attack was same as some Russian missile attack. And probably write some thousand page book comparing all incidents to try and get to a conclusion, but I’m fairly sure the demographic data in one chart is strong evidence for my belief.
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