What do you think of the Russians allegedly importing more foreign nationals?
That will go over with the locals. Apparently the Russians find enough local villagers and bus station drunks to fight for the glory of the Donetsk Republic.
“Apparently the Russians find enough local villagers and bus station drunks to fight for the glory of the Donetsk Republic.”
Several tweets this morning about a group of “Veterans of the Chechnya War” showing up last night in Slovyansk. Likely they are Russian volunteers. Slovansk is sitting on top of a huge Soviet-era Arsenal, so arming them shouldn’t be a problem.
The Odessa Massacre has upset the Russians, so crossing the border to volunteer wouldn’t be all that surprising.
The Ukrainian government needs to get people loyal to the Ukrainian state organized. In the typical revolution, only several % of the population are active participants, based mainly on organization, motivation and some kind of funding source, so the participants can feed their families. If that several % are secessionists funded by Putin who see Ukraine as a Russian province, it will be that much harder for the Ukrainian government to take control. Putin has agents on the ground. An organized anti-secessionist campaign that gets hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians enrolled in the east and south will deter Putin from invading. Because if he sees that Ukrainians are fired up about keeping the country whole, he will probably calculate that any initial conventional victories will be followed by a steady drip of casualties, just like Iraq, that will cost Russia large sums of money and tens of thousands of dead, not to mention overshadow his reputation as a president who revived the Russian economy (mainly because he was president during a 20-year Chinese economic boom during which Chinese motor vehicle sales went from 2m to 20m a year).