>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.

A hypothetical is not a position. They are a logical/rhetorical tool that let's you see what are the implications of X being true without saying that X is true. The point of a hypothetical is seeing where something leads without making that something your position.

One reason to do hypotheticals is to see if X being true leads to any valuable, surprising implications. So that after that you can go back to talking about whether X is true, this time knowing why you need to know it (or skip talking about it if it doesn't lead anywhere interesting).

Making two hypothetical that contradict each other is extremely useful and common way to use them. One typical example is case matching. If you show that some Y holds under the assumption that X is true, then you show that Y also holds under the assumption that X is not true; this allows you to conclude that Y is true, no matter whether X is true.

In don't know if Ukraine moving to decentralized will make attacks on its grid useless. In two differs branches here I consider what happens if it does and what happens if it doesn't. In response to whatever the other commenters seem to believe in. When someone states X as their position, sometimes I prefer to see what are the implications of it, and if any are interesting come back to talking about whether their position is true. If no implications are surprising, I won't even approach the costlier task of trying to understand if the commenters position is true.

You seemed to believe that decentralizing will make grid attacks not viable, and from there try to go to saying decentralization helps. My point to you was that there's a few variables (decentralization penalty, Russia's next best target after grid) that must be taken into account if you were to conduct an argument like that. I'm saying that without stating (or even having) a position on whether decentralization will stop grid attcks.

In the other thread the discussion was about whether grid attcks will stop. And my point was that I don't find it obvious that they won't.

Strictly speaking, none of this was stating my position. There's so much more to logic and rhetorics than stating positions and defending them.