> mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain

The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.

The way I'd do it if I was in Kremlin is something close to make up a list of targets, rank them by (Ukraine's cost to maintain)/(Russia's cost of missiles), pick the top 3-5 and hit them. Also continuously update the cost estimates and reevaluate those 3-5 targets.

In this vocabulary, Ukraine moving to decentralized is a cost in itself, so if it does pay that cost to move "energy grid" item down Russia's list, Russia can celebrate it and move on to the next target. If this happens, Ukraine will have paid the cost of moving to decentralized, and will be continuously paying a penalty for it, while Russia's coat of incurring that on Ukraine goes to zero (since the new missiles are hitting different targets).

And critically, if we assume moving to decentralized will make it pointless for Russia to hit the grid, deciding how much will it help requires knowing what target they will aim those newly freed missiles at, and how much cost that is going to incur.

> you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.

These are all hypotheticals, I assumed we're on the same page about it. We don't really know here in this forum what's going to work. Considering two contradicting hypotheticals in different threads is alright.

My comments are not about what is true, what's going to actually happen on the ground. They're about how one should go about arguing whatever they're arguing for, what reservations they're missing, and what assumptions they made they're not aware of.

> Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.

This is not true - they’ve regularly targeted and hit kindergartens, supermarkets, gas stations, town squares/markets, residential buildings, etc. None of these targets are “budget draining” but instead are intended to terrify and hurt civilians. Russia isn’t calculating or being strategic at the level you suggest - instead its actions are often simply cruel, inhumane and vindictive even at the cost of its own strategic interests.

>The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.

Again there's an integral relation between those two things. Insofar as that distinction reinforces any point, it would seem to be the decentralization is a cost in and of itself and that Russia would consider that objective achieved once the cost of decentralization was incurred. As you point out there wouldn't be motivation to attack individual PV systems, yet you keep insisting there's a vulnerability to attack even though the whole point of your inflict pain/drain budget distinction is that such an attack wouldn't have a motivation.

>These are all hypotheticals

Why does them being hypothetical make having contradictory positions on them more defensible? One thing hypotheticals test is whether the totality of your explanations hang together without contradicting each other. And these aren't even distinct hypotheticals that are isolated from each other. They're contemplating basically the same scenario.

If talking about Russia not attacking decentralized system because being decentralized was the inflicted cost is the goal, then individual residential PVs aren't a really target after all. If they are a target, then Russia either wasn't satisfied that the switch inflicted damage that met a strategic goal, or you were wrong that they're distinguishing between inflicting pain and meeting some higher level strategic objective. I don't see that the hypotheticals are actually quarantined off from each other, they're about the same thing, so the contradiction can't be explained away by insisting each part of the contradiction was quarantined off from each other in separate hypotheticals.

>Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain"

Oh but it is, there is no other explanation why civilian heating facilities are being targeted during winter otherwise, they don't cost much to fix, and actually cost a lot to target, but they do bring a lot of pain to the civilian population (winters in Ukraine are brutal).

And as if it wasn't obvious enough, the anti-ukrainian government bot campaigns that always coincide with the attacks make it obvious beyond belief.