Dead Russian Children and the Politics of Selective Outrage

On May 22, the government of Ukraine attacked a school dormitory where students ages 14 to 18 were housed. There were no military installations on or in the area. Ukraine targets a school dorm.

Sound familiar? Yes, we see it in Iran and in Palestine and other countries too numerous to add here to this post. I have written about them all before over many, many years, on this site and other sites I have since removed from the internet.

In Gaza alone, more than 65,000 Palestinian children have been reported killed or injured since October 2023, while people are still being bombed, buried under rubble, starved, displaced, orphaned, and slaughtered every day.

The pattern?

I listen to news both inside the U.S. bubble and outside of it. I understand the U.S. bubble even more now that pro-Israeli billionaires have gobbled up most of the bandwidth, because the “before and now” contrast is impossible for anyone to ignore. Outside of America.

Much of my country has already forgotten what corporations such as CNN — and MSNBC before the takeover — used to broadcast compared to what dominates today.

Truth and reality barely exist in the U.S. information environment today.

So, attention everyone outside of the U.S. bubble: Americans, everyday people, have waning electoral power over our own domestic problems, never mind foreign policy.

Americans who remain blindly entrenched in Democrat or Republican power structures have been conditioned to accept the killing of civilians as justified whenever their political representatives invoke war, national security, or geopolitical necessity.

My recommendation: do not waste your breath trying to bring it to my fellow Americans’ attention. As for morality, look elsewhere because I live in a country in the midst of post-totalitarianism led by a fascist regime.

Games of Power and Pretend Outrage

Russian President Putin has been extremely restrained in the Ukraine/U.S./NATO war against Russia, which Russia views as defending itself from the same forces it has warned about for decades.

The US and NATO/UK express outrage every time civilians in Ukraine are harmed or killed, yet silence or high fives when Russian children and families are targeted and attack.

• Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians have received repeated and highly visible condemnation from:
• the United Nations,
• NATO governments,
• G7 leaders,
• Western media,
• and international human rights bodies.  

By contrast:

Ukrainian attacks that reportedly killed Russian civilians or children — including drone strikes in Belgorod, Kursk, Crimea, Donbas, or the recent dormitory attack in Starobilsk — have generally received:

• less Western media attention,
• fewer condemnations from Western leaders,
• and far less sustained public outrage internationally.  

Even when civilian deaths inside Russia are acknowledged, coverage often frames them within:

• “retaliation,”
• “self-defense,”
• “military necessity,”
• or as consequences of war initiated by Russia.

Russia has repeatedly condemned U.S. involvement in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, and even before that, the continued encroachment of U.S./NATO influence toward Russian territory.

And now, with the weaponization of AI and it being unleashed globally without restraint, the U.S. and its allies need more resources than ever: the Arctic, strategic trade routes like the Suez Canal, and waterways influenced or controlled by Iran.

Modern AI is not just software. It depends on energy, minerals, semiconductor supply chains, shipping lanes, undersea cables, and geopolitical control over critical infrastructure. As AI expands, so does the global struggle over the physical systems that power it.

Selective Outrage

The asymmetry is not that only one side commits violations. The asymmetry is in scale, documentation, international framing, and media treatment. Western institutions heavily document Russian abuses while Ukrainian abuses receive far less sustained political and media attention unless they are impossible to ignore.

I was going to elaborate further on elites, heads of state, and their governments killing ordinary people in their games of power rather than each other. However…

…that changed when an emboldened Trump (an Israel-style MO, some would argue) started illegally kidnapping and then assassinating leaders from foreign countries in the midst of so-called negotiations.

Prior to that, there was at least an unspoken understanding among ruling powers not to directly target leaders and their families — a line the U.S. warmongering class largely appeared to observe, at least officially.

Sort of, anyway, if we exclude proxy assassinations and covert operations carried out through intelligence networks and allied states.

That unspoken rule among world powers has now been irreparably broken by Trump.

When leaders start losing their lives, when the families of leaders become targets, what can we expect?

1. Retaliatory targeting
States begin responding in kind: not only military targets, but political figures, intelligence officials, advisers, and families. The conflict becomes personal, not just strategic.

2. Leadership paranoia
Leaders become harder to reach, more isolated, and more dependent on security services. That often makes governments more authoritarian and less open to negotiation.

3. Collapse of diplomacy
If negotiations become cover for assassination, then diplomacy itself becomes dangerous. Leaders stop trusting talks, envoys, ceasefires, and backchannels.

4. Proxy escalation
Instead of direct attacks, states may use proxies, sabotage, cyberattacks, drones, covert operations, or “plausible deniability” strikes.

5. Civilian punishment increases
When a country is threatened from a more powerful, known bully, or their leaders feel personally threatened, they often close down their country. International humanitarian law — recognized by few and genuinely followed by even fewer — requires civilians to be protected. But as states begin to grow and prosper outside Western control structures, the U.S. and Israel often move to “mow the lawn,” forcing emerging sovereign governments to clamp down internally on narratives and movements perceived as destabilizing or threatening their country’s survival.

6. A darker global precedent
The old restraint around assassinating heads of state was partly about stability: powerful states avoided it because they feared the same method being used against them. Once that fear barrier breaks, politics moves closer to mafia logic: you hit mine, I hit yours.

Many historians and geopolitical analysts would agree that one of the most dangerous moments in international systems is when long-standing restraint mechanisms begin eroding simultaneously:

• diplomatic norms,
• civilian protections,
• trust between nuclear powers,
• limits on covert action,
• and shared rules around escalation.

What makes the current era uniquely volatile is that several pressures are converging at once:

• AI acceleration,
• autonomous weapons,
• economic fragmentation,
• information warfare,
• cyber conflict,
• resource competition,
• and declining public trust in institutions.

Historically, societies assume systems are far more stable than they actually are — until a threshold is crossed and escalation cycles begin feeding themselves. By the time the public understands what is happening, the damage is already done, the new norms already established, and the population already psychologically adapting to what it once considered unthinkable.

Then the people bow their heads and pray to their “God” for assistance.

To whom do they pray?

People around the world pray to imaginary beings/spirits that power and wealth constructed many thousands of years ago to domesticate humanity, pacify suffering, and keep populations waiting for salvation instead of confronting the systems consuming them in real time.