RFE/RL shows pro-Russian elements with Ukrainian BMD infantry fighting vehicles. These are made for airborne troops. So it seems as if the Spetsnaz got Ukraine's 25th paratrooper brigade to give up some.
It could be from sympathies. I'll bet that the vehicles were purchased from Ukrainian troops. Corruption is high in Ukraine, just as it is in Russia.
Russia calls this a civil war. But it is Russian aggression.
UPDATE: Austin Bay has it just about right:
For the past month, the Russian government, with Vladimir Putin its spotlight propagandist, has repeatedly declared that brutal anti-Russian ethnic violence as a prelude to ethnic-based civil war is imminent in Eastern Ukraine.
That's a lie. What Eastern Ukraine really faces is a Russian military invasion -- and more on that in a moment.
Kremlin claims of anti-Russian ethnic violence in Eastern Ukraine reprise the false accusations Putin made in February to provide media camouflage for the Russian seizure of the Crimean peninsula.
I don't think Slovensk is a central point as an initial objective for follow-up thrusts either north to Kharkov, south to Donetsk, or west to the Dnepropetrovsk. I think that the road net would mean a direct attack on Kharkov from the north and a march on Donetsk from the southeast, with fake uprisings between the cities assisting Russian forces in linking a new western border along the north-south road between the bigger cities.
But the key is that this R2P mission has nothing to do with responsibility to protect ethnic Russians. This is just responsibility to Putin for creating a crisis.
If Ukraine will fight a prolonged war even after Russia occupies their east, Russia could be made to pay a price.
I hope Ukrainian special forces are deploying as stay-behind forces to organize resistance they way our special forces did during the Cold War for NATO defense.
Get Ukraine's artillery, air, and long-range missiles to target military assets in occupied Crimea, use Ukraine's conventional military to take Transdniestria, and deploy to mount raids and support the infiltration of irregular National Guard into occupied Ukraine.
UPDATE: More on Ukraine's difficulties resisting the Russians:
“We even have an agreement on the books that forbids our [military intelligence] agencies from working against each other,” says Igor Smeshko, who served as head of Ukraine’s State Security Service from 2003 to 2005. “We could never have imagined that our Russian brothers would ever fight a war against us,” he says. “We could never have thought that just when we’d been bloodied from fighting our own tyranny here at home, that we would get a knife in the back from the Russians.”
Good grief. Is John Kerry their foreign minister, too?
Ukraine must resist the Russian invasion. Finland and Crimea should be contrasting lessons. Fail to fight, as Ukraine failed in Crimea, and Russia keeps pushing for more. Fight and lose, as Finland did in the 1939-1940 Winter War, and you can live even if you lose territory.
UPDATE: Ukrainian mechanized infantry of unknown size took up positions at Izyum, which lies north of the recent cities where pro-Russian building takeovers have happened, along the Kharkov-to-Donetsk road. Per RFE/RL live blog today.
UPDATE: Yes, the vehicles are from the 25th brigade:
The Associated Press reports that one of the men on the APCs, "who identified himself only as Andrei, said the unit was part of Ukraine's 25th Brigade of Airborne Forces and that they have switched to the side of the pro-Russian forces."
Switched sides? Maybe bribed. But maybe switched sides. Just because there are relatively few in the east who want to join Russia doesn't mean there are none.
But I tend to think Russia is simply working hard to simulate a civil war to justify invasion.
