Posted on 08/25/2014 9:24:18 PM PDT by WhiskeyX
Russia’s 98th paratroopers’ brigade moving to Mariupol
Zahar Lavrentiev, one of ‘Azov’ volunteer battalion servicemen, wrote in Facebook Aug. 25 that Russia’s 98th brigade of paratroopers is deploying to Mariupol.
“Putin has started the open war. The 98th brigade is marching toward Mariupol now.
We’ve taken two paratroopers prisoners. They were sure they are on a military exercise.
(Excerpt) Read more at zik.ua ...
I am puzzled.
Why would Putin do this apparently half assed intervention with handfuls of paratroopers? This has been going on for days without them getting anywhere.
Why haven’t they gone in all guns blazing with a couple of armored divisions? This by itself should outnumber the available Ukrainian armor by 3:1 or so. Russia should be able to annex those two republics in days.
Something doesn’t add up.
Could the Russians be much weaker than they’ve been letting on ?
“Why haven’t they gone in all guns blazing with a couple of armored divisions?”
Russia is hurting badly from a pre-existing recession, and the sanctions are greatly exacerbating this problem. The majority of Russia’s exports are oil and gas natural resources. The prices available for the sale of these resources had taken serious decisions threatening the entire funding of the Russian government and its system of corruption and bribery. Putin is therefore constrained in his choices for committing aggressions. He is currently trying to achieve his imperialist aims while asserting claims of implausible/plausible deniability his foreign supporters can use as a fictional excuse for Russia.
Putin, however, miscalculated the weakness of the Ukraine and its severely compromised internal security. He mistakenly assumed the reports that a small number of Russian military infiltrators would be capable of leading Russian-Ukrainian separatists in a relatively cheap and quick overthrow of the already heavily infiltrated Ukrainian government. So, Putin keeps trying to up the sizes of the forces he can put together using Russian mercenaries bolstered with a cadre of professional Russian soldiers. When that too failed, he trained and prepared Russian ground forces to supplement the Russian trained and equipped mercenary volunteers. Now that too is failing to be effective enough to outright overrun the Ukrainians.
It remains to be seen just how far Putin is willing to up the ante before he abandons the direct efforts to reconquer the Ukraine for Russian dominion. In the meantime, Putin is walking a dangerous personal tightrope, risking an overthrow other removal from power to be followed with his termination with extreme prejudice by the same people who are keeping him in power now.
>They were sure they are on a military exercise
No kidding.
Because the news is a lie. The whole article is based on a Facebook post by a person claiming he's a Ukrainian paramilitary.
So you deny any Russians are on Ukrainian territory involved in the fighting?
... Lysenko later added that two tanks in the column had been destroyed and several members of "an intelligence-sabotage group" had been seized.
"The area is now blocked by Ukrainian troops," he said.
This is a matter of personal freedom. A citizen may leave his state and the things he gets involved in another country are none of the business of his government.
If a government sends its military personnel on a mission abroad, that's a completely different case.
Just want you on record Moskal.
I missed the part where Ukraine was involved in a massive terrorist act against Russia. So your attempt at moral equivalency of Russia invading and annexing parts of its neighbors and fomenting civil war is somewhat lacking.
Hmm, yes, now that I see it your way, Russian government has no right to stop thousands of soldiers and columns of Russian tanks (built in average citizen's backyard) from invading a foreign country. But, since Russian government is so helpless to control their own border crossings and people (Russia can only rape and kill so many of its own people at a time, we cannot expect too much) really nothing that Czar Putin can do. Time to hit the vodka and ignore this mess! Ukraine isn't a real country anyway. /s
I didn't see them with my own eyes and you didn't either. I see no reason to beleive those who claim they saw. There isn't an independent source saying the same since I don't think the Western media is one of those.
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