Re: Best of luck with that mate
I think your casualty estimate is a tad optimistic. But such is war. You don't get the real butchers bill until after the shooting stops. The bill will also be an estimate because you have to account for IDPs, refugees, locating grave sites, searching and recovering bodies from destroyed buildings etc etc.
Plus investigating how those bodies came to be, or just identifying them. Not exactly a pleasant task, but sadly one where the investigators have gained plenty of experience given all the conflicts over the last 50yrs. I've read a couple of books by investigators working in the former Yugoslavia, and they're very grim tales.
Ukraine has some experience though given their civil war since 2014. They've been less good at prosecuting crimes though. The MSM can also create a distortion effect by reporting exaggerated figures, or being rather one sided. March 14th something exploded in the centre of Donetsk, killing 28 civilians. Ukraine claims it was a car bomb, Donetsk a Tochka-U, and an OSI group reckons it was fired from Russia by the position of the tail fin.
So one single incident where the truth is TBC. The presence of missile fragments rather contradicts Ukraine's car bomb claim though. But I'm curious about the legal aspects though. DPR claims it was a missile, which they'd shot down. That's a problem with ABM and theatre defence systems, which have been used extensively & effectively in this conflict. Unless the warhead and detonators are disrupted by the interceptor, the missile may just drop short and still detonate. So who's liable when that kills civilians?
That's a challenge Israel's had. It's Iron Dome system has been effective, but still has to be careful where it tries to intercept. Plus the interceptor missiles have frag warheads, so potentially lethal. AFAIK a lot of interceptors are designed to detonate if they miss.
As for the economic effects, they're also harming the West. Rouble has recovered since Russia announced unfriendly nations would have to pay in roubles. Which means customers would need to buy roubles with dollars or euros, boosting Russia's foreign currency reserves.
So Germany's said 'nein' to that, and warned of impending gas shortages. BASF's warned that if it's gas supplies stop, so does BASF. So potentially 40-50,000 job losses, plus the loss of all the products it currently produces in Germany.
But such is politics. Especially the ecofreaks that want to ban fossil fuels. It's kinda hard for companies like BASF to produce all the stuff they do, without using fossil fuels & derivatives as feedstocks.