A coordinated online campaign has reportedly encouraged users to alter fuel station information on digital maps across Russia, creating confusion among drivers.
The activity involves changing station statuses by marking locations with available fuel as empty or showing closed stations as operational.
Supporters of the campaign claim the effort is designed to disrupt travel decisions, increase uncertainty, and create additional pressure around fuel availability.
In this conflict, it would appear that Ukraine is demonstrating more polite restraint than Russia. Targeting energy to erode political support for the war - in the Summer as opposed to the past 4 winters where Russia has done the same to Ukraine.
“Polite restraint” here is a political tool. It signals to outside observers that you’re not out for blood and brutality, which isn’t just a moral point but also an economic calculation: If you’re interested in long-term trade with a given economic area, a brutal and destructive government just doesn’t instill as much confidence in stable and reliable agreements. Brutality is more likely to galvanise resistance and lead to future instability, trade disruptions etc.
A party that makes a point of demonstrating adherence to some international standards of “polite” warfare, no matter how performative those standards are, is just a more attractive trading partner. If they’ll abide by those norms and (partially unwritten) agreements, that is an indicator they’ll also abide by whatever contracts and agreements you make in the future.
In a way, it’s circular: they show polite restraint to demonstrate their willingness to prioritise the values it signals over petty vengeance.
There is also strategic value, both in avoiding the type of galvanised resistance I alluded to above by taking it slow and in gradually building up a “new (worse) normal” for the opponent’s populace, such that the relief of peace will feel like an improvement and thereby make that peace more popular.
Of course, moral considerations will also play a part, but international relations unfortunately don’t often indulge in the luxury of morality for it’s own sake. It just happens to be a desirable byproduct sometimes.
The images and stories coming out of Ukraine seem hard to view as anything other than brutal. Blowing up houses while people sleep?
Definitely. Russia was calculating from the assumption that brutality would accelerate their victory. If you have the power to just take the land, whether you’ve got the moral high ground doesn’t matter: the others will have to do business with you anyway. If they had indeed won quickly, the whole thing would have been swept under the rug. But they haven’t, their assumption was proven wrong, their brutality hasn’t had the intended effect and now they’re stuck in a prolonged conflict of their own making while giving the international community plenty of reasons to condemn and impose sanctions and all that.
So Russia’s brutality is a gamble that the dynamic laid out in the previous comment won’t apply to them.
Ukraine never had that illusion. They never had the power to plan from a position of such strength. To play it “safe” is strategically critical for them. They have to be circumspect. It’s good they are, of course.