[Robert Urbanek]

The Russian bombardment of apartment buildings, schools and hospitals and the mass slaughter of civilians has helped mobilize sympathy and military support on behalf of Ukraine. But in the long run, the emphasis on war crimes poses a dilemma.

All the global lecturing and lawyer posturing will likely have little effect on Putin and his coterie of psychopathic minions who will most likely never face justice in court. Plus, they have the strategic advantage of essentially telling the Ukrainians, “We can bomb your cities. but you can’t bomb ours.” It’s like Hitler being able to bomb London with no fear that bombs would fall on Berlin.

In the worst-case scenario, a delusional Putin may put the war crimes standard to the ultimate test: He can nuke London, but the British won’t commit the war crime of nuking Moscow.

Related thread:
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=182324&p=15237436#p15237436

[Mike12]

Mustard gas has a long history of being used as a blister agent in warfare and is one of the most well-studied of such agents. It can form large blisters on exposed skin and in the lungs, often resulting in prolonged illness ending in death.[5] Sulfur mustards are viscous liquids at room temperature and have an odor resembling mustard plants, garlic, or horseradish, hence the name.[4] When pure, they are colorless, but when used in impure forms, such as in warfare, they are usually yellow-brown.

As a chemical weapon, mustard gas was first used in World War I, and has been used in several armed conflicts since then, including the Iran–Iraq War, resulting in more than 100,000 casualties.?

White phosphorus munitions are weapons that use one of the common allotropes of the chemical element phosphorus. White phosphorus is used in smoke, illumination, and incendiary munitions, and is commonly the burning element of tracer ammunition.
Smoke-producing white phosphorus munitions are very common, particularly as smoke grenades for infantry, loaded in defensive grenade launchers on tanks and other armoured vehicles, and in the ammunition allotment for artillery and mortars. These create smoke screens to mask friendly forces' movement...

US forces had used white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon while "never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused". Embedded with the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, Mortenson described a Marine mortar team using a mixture of white phosphorus and high explosives to shell a cluster of buildings where Iraqi insurgents had been spotted throughout the week.
On 22 November 2005, the Iraqi government stated it would investigate the use of white phosphorus in the battle of Fallujah.
During the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict, Israel said that it had used phosphorus shells "against military targets in open ground" in south Lebanon. Israel said that its use of these munitions was permitted under international conventions.

"USAAF planners began assessing the feasibility of a firebombing campaign against Japanese cities in 1943. Japan's main industrial facilities were vulnerable to such attacks as they were concentrated in several large cities and a high proportion of production took place in homes and small factories in urban areas. The planners estimated that incendiary bomb attacks on Japan's six largest cities could cause physical damage to almost 40 percent of industrial facilities and result in the loss of 7.6 million man-months of labor. It was also estimated that these attacks would kill over 500,000 people, render about 7.75 million homeless...The first firebombing attack in this campaign—codenamed Operation Meetinghouse—was carried out against Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March, and proved to be the single most destructive air raid of the war."

In Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, "the areas leveled (almost 100 square miles (260 km2)) exceeded the areas destroyed in all German cities by both the American and British air forces...

-Postwar estimates of casualties from the attack on Hiroshima range from 66,000 to 80,000 fatalities and 69,000 to 151,000 injured.
it has been estimated that 140,000 people had died as a result of the atomic bomb by the end of 1945.

-The air attacks on Japan caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, though estimates of the number who were killed and wounded vary considerably. The strategic attacks by the Twentieth Air Force caused most of the casualties and damage.
The figures most frequently cited in the literature on the campaign are sourced from the USSBS report The Effects of Bombing on Health and Medical Services in Japan which estimated that 333,000 Japanese were killed and 473,000 wounded.

which recorded 94,225 fatalities during the Great Tokyo Air Raid on March 10, 1945 and other raids, Nagasaki in southwestern Japan with a death toll of 74,228 by the end of 1945 from the atomic bombing and other raids,
387,000 deaths confirmed in WWII air raids in Japan
(point is more destruction in firebombing)

What is the mass slaughter of civilians and war crimes? I saw what one would hesitate to call a "mass grave" on TV.