Originally Posted by
Omegstrat6
I think that the heat and fog of war means that innocents are killed either by mistake or deliberately in all wars and by all sides.
Historically, of course Britain has taken actions that would now be described as war crimes or human rights violations whether that be participating in the slave trade, the setting up of concentration camps during the Boer War, the bombing of Dresden, the government's response to the famine in Ireland in 1847 or India in 1943 or the actions of the British Army during the Mao Mao uprising. All countries have been guilty of this at some point in their history and a quick check under "Africa", as an example, on the BBC news site will soon inform you that it still goes on in many beside Ukraine.
The point is that there is a difference between what can happen on the battlefield in individual circumstances and a country's formal policies regarding how they wage war. In Afghanistan, as an example, the Rules of engagement and guerrilla tactics used by Taliban as well as the number of insurgents (who dressed and looked like civilians rather than wear uniforms) made individual cases where innocents got killed almost inevitable. But the formal policy was not to target civilians. By contrast, Putin's playbook is clearly to deliberately target civilians as well as military ones and this includes shelling, medieval siege tactics and -probably-chemical warfare.That, to me, is the difference.