Russian and Ukrainian Presidents to Meet in Belarus
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who visited Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, over the weekend, dampened expectations for the Minsk meeting. It “certainly won’t result in the breakthrough” that Germany and others were hoping for, she told a German newspaper.
The videos released by Ukraine may make it more difficult for the Kremlin to stick to its approach of simply denying that it has any hand in the fighting.
“Everything was a lie. There were no drills here,” one of the captured Russians, who identified himself as Sergey A. Smirnov, told a Ukrainian interrogator. He said he and other Russians from an airborne unit in Kostroma, in central Russia, had been sent on what was described initially as a military training exercise but later turned into a mission into Ukraine. After having their cellphones and identity documents taken away, they were sent into Ukraine on vehicles stripped of all markings, Mr. Smirnov said.
In another video released by Ukraine, a Russian identified himself as Ivan Milchakov, a member of a paratroop regiment from Kostroma. “Everything is different here, not like they show it on television. We’ve come as cannon fodder,” he said, apparently referring to Russian television reports that the ouster of Viktor F. Yanukovych as Ukraine’s president in February had left Ukraine in the hands of fascist fanatics. He said he “did not see where we crossed the border” into Ukraine and had been told he was being sent on “a 70-kilometer march over three days.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/world/europe/ukraine.html
Uniforms and vehicles stripped of markings. Sounds like what happened in Crimea.