Let's hope this operation works better than the first effort that resulted in losing some of 25th Airborne Brigade's armored vehicles:
The Ukrainian Interior Ministry posted a statement saying "antiterrorist" operations in the Slovyansk region of Donetsk had cleared and destroyed three illegal armed checkpoints and killed five "terrorists." One Ukrainian counterterrorism troop was reportedly wounded.
I've seen pictures of BMD airborne vehicles, so this may mean that at least elements of the 25th are still intact, despite earlier reports that the unit would be disbanded because of those failures.
Putin is upset and warns he will react if the operations threaten ethnic Russians.
Which is interesting given that Russia defends its own troop concentrations as simply being within Russia where they can be deployed freely; and considering that Russia has in the past attacked the notion of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries to support human rights as nobody's business--bad precedent for a wannabe tsar, don't you know.
Anyway, let's hope the Ukrainians can move through with some skill to defeat the subliminal invasion with as low a level of force as possible. Pity we haven't sent "non-lethal" (really just "less lethal") weapons for the Ukrainians to use.
