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Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On May 23 2023 06:21 JimmiC wrote: @zeo and Ardias if the Freedom for Russia Legion sets up a base in Russia and keeps fighting off the Russian army with equipment and man power from UA and NATO, are these just separatists?
They sacrificed over 100 men, a few tanks and armored vehicles in a PR campaign to shift focus away from Artemovsk. All followed with concentrated stuffing of networks with premade fake news, videos ect, even going so far as to allegedly show civilians being executed while sitting in their cars. Who knows the point of it all, just another thing that will be swept under the rug by next week like it never happened. Usually they just cross the border, kill a few civilians and then run back, something must have gone wrong for them? If this is their response to the fall of Artemovsk its not looking so good is it.
I mean, if Al-Qaida can be on your side in Syria and you have no problem with that why can't these neo-nazi larpers be there too. Its incredibly juvenile to think of this as some epic troll or whatever, like sending people to die with xD emotes.
On May 23 2023 06:26 KwarK wrote:
On May 23 2023 06:18 zeo wrote:
On May 23 2023 05:40 KwarK wrote: Found a court case regarding whether the contractor responsible for providing rations to the Russian army occupying the Donbas was guilty of bribery.
The court did not contest whether he provided rations to the Russian forces occupying the Donbas, as specified in the contract he was awarded. When this was pointed out the Kremlin clarified that the contract must be in error because everyone knows that there are no Russian troops in the Donbas and therefore there could not possibly be a Russian military rations contract to supply them.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, said Thursday there was a "mistake on the part of those who wrote the text" and that any food deliveries to the region would consist of humanitarian aid.
Peskov added the statement was an error "because it is not possible. There are no armed forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of the self-proclaimed republics at all."
Russian forces were most likely located inside the Donbass Republics at the end of 2021. We all know what happened a few months later. What does this have to do with 2014? Did Russia invade Belarus too in 2014?
If I came on here and said something like 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams', I'd at least bring up some articles about jet fuel. Not talk about why the Moon landings are fake.
That court case was in 2019, not 2021, about a contract that was performed before that. You should take the time to read the articles, not just look at the date it was published.
But I’m glad that you’re no longer contesting that the “insurgency” before 2019 was just Russian troops and that the Russian government was lying about it. It’s odd that you’re on board with Russia occupying the Donbas and lying about it in the years before 2019 but are absolutely certain that they were telling the truth in 2014 when they said that no Russian troops were there.
Do you have any explanation for the extremely well documented participation of Russian army units in battles in 2014 or the Russian army regulars who were taken as POWs in those battles?
2019 is still not 2014. I don't know why you are having so much trouble with dates
You did not come remotely close to answering my question. If this was successful and the fortified , continued to fight the Russian army with UA and NATO equipment. Would you consider them just separatatists?
They sacrificed 100 men? You have to be pretty naive to just gobble up russian news. This was a small group that's already out of there, just another raid like they did previously. Also, no one really calls it Artemovsk, even in Russia. Way to look stupid.
It's a way to tell people that they believe that what they read on pro russian telegram channels and russian propaganda channels as fact.
Like that list of units supposedly destroyed vs just the entire structure of Wagner. I made a point about this a few weeks ago of someone just posting the units fighting on the line vs just a picture of Wagner. It's the dumbest way to try and manipulate how many were on each side and is lying for no reason. We know russian paratroopers have been replacing wagner units for months now on the flanks, in the city and the head of wagner was complaining himself that they were bad.
He copy pasted that list from a random twitter post. I know that because it was on r/ncd a few days ago.
A small update on the events. It seems like the separatists went about 40km deep into Russia but will probably be returning to Ukraine since it didn't look like they had a lot of supplies with them to reinforce their positions and stay there.
On May 23 2023 05:36 zeo wrote: Anyone, anyone reading what you are writing can see that you have no evidence whatsoever to back up your claims, and when you are confronted your knee-jerk reaction is to keep doubling down and digging the hole deeper for yourself.
On May 23 2023 05:36 zeo wrote: Anyone, anyone reading what you are writing can see that you have no evidence whatsoever to back up your claims, and when you are confronted your knee-jerk reaction is to keep doubling down and digging the hole deeper for yourself.
Oh, the irony!
Every accusation a confession. Gaslight, gaslight, gaslight. Altough in this case I don't think they're doing it on purpose. They really just seem that indoctrinated, that they refuse to believe the lies even Russia has given up pretending on
Misinformation sticks around in people's heads without them realizing it. I know this phenomenon personally from when I left the right-wing bubble and it took me years to clean up many of my leftover beliefs from years of misinformation. There might still be a few left in the back of my mind. And I wasn't even radical, I was only sitting in the right-wing information bubble more or less as a neutral participant and observer, never clearly favoring them over the left. Just the simple fact of being solely exposed to a one-sided source of information is very damaging. I can't imagine how extremely distorted my worldview would be if I had at some point decided that the right-wingers were "the good ones".
There is scientific research backing this phenomenon up. What information people are exposed to on a consistent basis shapes their views, often for the rest of their lives, even if they don't agree with it, let alone when they do.
On May 23 2023 17:08 Magic Powers wrote: Misinformation sticks around in people's heads without them realizing it. I know this phenomenon personally from when I left the right-wing bubble and it took me years to clean up many of my leftover beliefs from years of misinformation. There might still be a few left in the back of my mind. And I wasn't even radical, I was only sitting in the right-wing information bubble more or less as a neutral participant and observer, never clearly favoring them over the left. Just the simple fact of being solely exposed to a one-sided source of information is very damaging. I can't imagine how extremely distorted my worldview would be if I had at some point decided that the right-wingers were "the good ones".
There is scientific research backing this phenomenon up. What information people are exposed to on a consistent basis shapes their views, often for the rest of their lives, even if they don't agree with it, let alone when they do.
I feel you. I haven't been there personally, but I had a dad who was. Not radical either by any means, but would sit on Facebook all day and stew in the same old misinformation. Then he would whine about it every time we met, which got old real quick. Proper victim complex. It's weird too, because the cognitive dissonance is on proper display; he's not racist, he employs and treats his black employees well, even if they're immigrants who can barely speak the language, and he has never (to my knowledge) had a bad experience with an immigrant or a person of color. Yet he would repeat these right wing xenophobic views that he in no way actually has any experience with himself. He also cares about his kids a lot, yet simultaneously has no issues condemning the world and the next generation at large if it means some politician half the world away has to be slightly inconvenienced. It's bizarre to say the least
Took me completely blowing up in his face about it and ruining a weekend at the cabin for him to realize his views weren't ok. I'm not sure if he still believes them, but at least he doesn't constantly whine about them any more.
On May 23 2023 05:40 KwarK wrote: Found a court case regarding whether the contractor responsible for providing rations to the Russian army occupying the Donbas was guilty of bribery.
The court did not contest whether he provided rations to the Russian forces occupying the Donbas, as specified in the contract he was awarded. When this was pointed out the Kremlin clarified that the contract must be in error because everyone knows that there are no Russian troops in the Donbas and therefore there could not possibly be a Russian military rations contract to supply them.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, said Thursday there was a "mistake on the part of those who wrote the text" and that any food deliveries to the region would consist of humanitarian aid.
Peskov added the statement was an error "because it is not possible. There are no armed forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of the self-proclaimed republics at all."
Russian forces were most likely located inside the Donbass Republics at the end of 2021. We all know what happened a few months later. What does this have to do with 2014? Did Russia invade Belarus too in 2014?
If I came on here and said something like 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams', I'd at least bring up some articles about jet fuel. Not talk about why the Moon landings are fake.
On May 23 2023 06:11 food wrote: Although Kwark allowed himself some leeway in claiming those forces were strictly russian, the fact is that the "uprising" was not possible without direct russian involvement. As we all know, Girkin famously stated that his group's incursion started it. It doesn't really make sense to argue much further - an FSB agent meddled in other country's affairs with the purpose of starting a separatist movement and eventually annexing the territory. This much is known.
Read this until you feel like you understand the other side of the argument. Everything else is pointless, every single detail you manage to point out as wrong, every single source you manage to point out as biased, as unreliable. Just read this. And read it again.
On May 23 2023 06:21 JimmiC wrote: @zeo and Ardias if the Freedom for Russia Legion sets up a base in Russia and keeps fighting off the Russian army with equipment and man power from UA and NATO, are these just separatists?
So Belgorod situation is confused.... Russia claims the anti-terrorist operation was successful but no photos or video. There are social media posts but those are of recut old videos. Then there is the "Volunteers" vids showing them just cruising down the roads in captured equipment...
On May 23 2023 06:21 JimmiC wrote: @zeo and Ardias if the Freedom for Russia Legion sets up a base in Russia and keeps fighting off the Russian army with equipment and man power from UA and NATO, are these just separatists?
They sacrificed over 100 men, a few tanks and armored vehicles in a PR campaign to shift focus away from Artemovsk. All followed with concentrated stuffing of networks with premade fake news, videos ect, even going so far as to allegedly show civilians being executed while sitting in their cars. Who knows the point of it all, just another thing that will be swept under the rug by next week like it never happened. Usually they just cross the border, kill a few civilians and then run back, something must have gone wrong for them? If this is their response to the fall of Artemovsk its not looking so good is it.
I mean, if Al-Qaida can be on your side in Syria and you have no problem with that why can't these neo-nazi larpers be there too. Its incredibly juvenile to think of this as some epic troll or whatever, like sending people to die with xD emotes.
On May 23 2023 06:26 KwarK wrote:
On May 23 2023 06:18 zeo wrote:
On May 23 2023 05:40 KwarK wrote: Found a court case regarding whether the contractor responsible for providing rations to the Russian army occupying the Donbas was guilty of bribery.
The court did not contest whether he provided rations to the Russian forces occupying the Donbas, as specified in the contract he was awarded. When this was pointed out the Kremlin clarified that the contract must be in error because everyone knows that there are no Russian troops in the Donbas and therefore there could not possibly be a Russian military rations contract to supply them.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, said Thursday there was a "mistake on the part of those who wrote the text" and that any food deliveries to the region would consist of humanitarian aid.
Peskov added the statement was an error "because it is not possible. There are no armed forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of the self-proclaimed republics at all."
Russian forces were most likely located inside the Donbass Republics at the end of 2021. We all know what happened a few months later. What does this have to do with 2014? Did Russia invade Belarus too in 2014?
If I came on here and said something like 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams', I'd at least bring up some articles about jet fuel. Not talk about why the Moon landings are fake.
That court case was in 2019, not 2021, about a contract that was performed before that. You should take the time to read the articles, not just look at the date it was published.
But I’m glad that you’re no longer contesting that the “insurgency” before 2019 was just Russian troops and that the Russian government was lying about it. It’s odd that you’re on board with Russia occupying the Donbas and lying about it in the years before 2019 but are absolutely certain that they were telling the truth in 2014 when they said that no Russian troops were there.
Do you have any explanation for the extremely well documented participation of Russian army units in battles in 2014 or the Russian army regulars who were taken as POWs in those battles?
2019 is still not 2014. I don't know why you are having so much trouble with dates
You did not come remotely close to answering my question. If this was successful and the fortified , continued to fight the Russian army with UA and NATO equipment. Would you consider them just separatatists?
Separatists or an insurgency would need a power base among the population so that they could form any kind of control. Something that is just not present here, unlike say Chechnya during the 90's. One of the reasons training and arming Jihadists and Wahhabi-Salafists in the Syrian countryside was so potent during the Arab Spring was because there was a power base among the local population who supported Sharia Law and the like. In this case its just a useful pretext to incite media lies and hearsay, trying to shift attention away from their failures in Artemovsk/Bahmut and towards whatever lunacy they thought that they could achieve with this.
These kinds of media actions provide a plausible denial of accountability for NATO and a push for the narrative that there is some kind of civil instability inside Russia. On the other hand, the LARP being so shoddily executed is one of the pitfalls of using people who are one step away from being psychopaths. The MO in these types of operations is to simply arm the people most likely of inflicting mayhem, and when they are killed, just arm more. Find useful idiots that don't think they will die. For warfare, it effective of course, undeniably. But Western political society can only keep its head in the sand for so long before the internal monologue they've not been listening to the past decades starts getting louder.
It is interesting though to see how the structures of damage control have been activated after the staggering losses of Artemovsk. On one hand, now no one is talking about that battle in the Western media and they can slowly try to act like nothing happened and they never officially left the town. Absurd that something like that could be swept under the rug but the average follower can barely recollect what happened more than a month ago without cherrypicked bulletpoints On the other you have this tiktok suicide mission gone very wrong. A lot of the pre made media being circulated has already been geolocated to Ukraine, like the second Tweet Stealthblue posted, or a few hundred meters from the border like the first Tweet.
This information stuffing isn't really meant to prove anything, you debunk three of them they are already onto three other one, which get debunked but low and behold, there are 10 more, each with less effort put into it than the last. Just ignore the dead bodies and captured Maxxpro's with arial footage of missile hits. Listen to the bots with dogo profile pictures and news articles that begin with 'XYZ news has not been able to independently verify this information but...', talk about it in your echo chamber. When in doubt just start projecting the fallacies you are committing onto the other side.
It all won't matter in a week anyway. The cycle will start all over again with the next media circus.
On May 23 2023 06:21 JimmiC wrote: @zeo and Ardias if the Freedom for Russia Legion sets up a base in Russia and keeps fighting off the Russian army with equipment and man power from UA and NATO, are these just separatists?
They sacrificed over 100 men, a few tanks and armored vehicles in a PR campaign to shift focus away from Artemovsk. All followed with concentrated stuffing of networks with premade fake news, videos ect, even going so far as to allegedly show civilians being executed while sitting in their cars. Who knows the point of it all, just another thing that will be swept under the rug by next week like it never happened. Usually they just cross the border, kill a few civilians and then run back, something must have gone wrong for them? If this is their response to the fall of Artemovsk its not looking so good is it.
I mean, if Al-Qaida can be on your side in Syria and you have no problem with that why can't these neo-nazi larpers be there too. Its incredibly juvenile to think of this as some epic troll or whatever, like sending people to die with xD emotes.
On May 23 2023 06:26 KwarK wrote:
On May 23 2023 06:18 zeo wrote:
On May 23 2023 05:40 KwarK wrote: Found a court case regarding whether the contractor responsible for providing rations to the Russian army occupying the Donbas was guilty of bribery.
The court did not contest whether he provided rations to the Russian forces occupying the Donbas, as specified in the contract he was awarded. When this was pointed out the Kremlin clarified that the contract must be in error because everyone knows that there are no Russian troops in the Donbas and therefore there could not possibly be a Russian military rations contract to supply them.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, said Thursday there was a "mistake on the part of those who wrote the text" and that any food deliveries to the region would consist of humanitarian aid.
Peskov added the statement was an error "because it is not possible. There are no armed forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of the self-proclaimed republics at all."
Russian forces were most likely located inside the Donbass Republics at the end of 2021. We all know what happened a few months later. What does this have to do with 2014? Did Russia invade Belarus too in 2014?
If I came on here and said something like 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams', I'd at least bring up some articles about jet fuel. Not talk about why the Moon landings are fake.
That court case was in 2019, not 2021, about a contract that was performed before that. You should take the time to read the articles, not just look at the date it was published.
But I’m glad that you’re no longer contesting that the “insurgency” before 2019 was just Russian troops and that the Russian government was lying about it. It’s odd that you’re on board with Russia occupying the Donbas and lying about it in the years before 2019 but are absolutely certain that they were telling the truth in 2014 when they said that no Russian troops were there.
Do you have any explanation for the extremely well documented participation of Russian army units in battles in 2014 or the Russian army regulars who were taken as POWs in those battles?
2019 is still not 2014. I don't know why you are having so much trouble with dates
You did not come remotely close to answering my question. If this was successful and the fortified , continued to fight the Russian army with UA and NATO equipment. Would you consider them just separatatists?
Separatists or an insurgency would need a power base among the population so that they could form any kind of control. Something that is just not present here, unlike say Chechnya during the 90's. One of the reasons training and arming Jihadists and Wahhabi-Salafists in the Syrian countryside was so potent during the Arab Spring was because there was a power base among the local population who supported Sharia Law and the like. In this case its just a useful pretext to incite media lies and hearsay, trying to shift attention away from their failures in Artemovsk/Bahmut and towards whatever lunacy they thought that they could achieve with this.
These kinds of media actions provide a plausible denial of accountability for NATO and a push for the narrative that there is some kind of civil instability inside Russia. On the other hand, the LARP being so shoddily executed is one of the pitfalls of using people who are one step away from being psychopaths. The MO in these types of operations is to simply arm the people most likely of inflicting mayhem, and when they are killed, just arm more. Find useful idiots that don't think they will die. For warfare, it effective of course, undeniably. But Western political society can only keep its head in the sand for so long before the internal monologue they've not been listening to the past decades starts getting louder.
It is interesting though to see how the structures of damage control have been activated after the staggering losses of Artemovsk. On one hand, now no one is talking about that battle in the Western media and they can slowly try to act like nothing happened and they never officially left the town. Absurd that something like that could be swept under the rug but the average follower can barely recollect what happened more than a month ago without cherrypicked bulletpoints On the other you have this tiktok suicide mission gone very wrong. A lot of the pre made media being circulated has already been geolocated to Ukraine, like the second Tweet Stealthblue posted, or a few hundred meters from the border like the first Tweet.
This information stuffing isn't really meant to prove anything, you debunk three of them they are already onto three other one, which get debunked but low and behold, there are 10 more, each with less effort put into it than the last. Just ignore the dead bodies and captured Maxxpro's with arial footage of missile hits. Listen to the bots with dogo profile pictures and news articles that begin with 'XYZ news has not been able to independently verify this information but...', talk about it in your echo chamber. Everything is fine.
It all won't matter in a week anyway. The cycle will start all over again with the next media circus.
Lots of information there but still no answer to my question. My guess is your answer would have been, no you would not treat them as legitimate separatists but as less than arms length of UA and NATO.
I answered you in the first sentence. Please read again carefully
There was a pretty good Vice News video on the Russian regular soldiers in the Donbas in 2015 called "Selfie Soldiers: Russia Checks in to Ukraine" in which they followed the digital footprints of regular Russian soldiers posting selfies from within the Donbas region. During the investigation they tracked the locations where those Russian soldiers took the photos and even tracked one of them down all the way in Siberia.
The evidence is overwhelming on this. At this point the only people who are not openly admitting it are those that have seriously bought into the Russian propaganda without an ounce of critical thought, and those who deliberately try to derail and mislead any kind of honest discussion of this topic. zeo is clearly in that second camp and has been since the initial invasion of Ukraine. He is one of the most odious pro-Russian trolls and I just wish that people would not give him the time of day. Unfortunately this is the society we live in now, where spreading misinformation is easier than correcting it and this is a viable way of conduction information warfare.
And for those who haven't watched it yet, I can recommend the whole "Russian Roulette" series of videos. The first one was posted on March 2014 and it gives a great insight of how things developed on the ground.
On May 23 2023 01:08 [Phantom] wrote: What does "Volunteer" means here? Basically a terrosits in favor of Ukraine atacking the Russia city from within?
Technically, these are russian volunteers in favor of Russia without Putin. Not unlike russian-propped separatists in Donbass in 2014. The only difference is this isn't meant to become a permanent conflict zone, this is to confuse and stretch the enemy before the offensive. If they use Russian territory to flank russians in Ukraine, it would be absolutely amazing.
There were materially no separatists in 2014. The Russian army has subsequently admitted it was literally just Russian troops, exactly as Ukraine asserted for years.
I'm sorry but this is the most off-the-wall, pants-on-head take I've seen in years. Plausibly, you can claim that at some point the Russian state sent aid like military instructors, missiles, spare parts, before the August offensive in 2014 though how much and to what extent is still up for debate. All actors at the beginning basically shat on Moscow for not coming to their aid and leaving them to fight the 'new government' in Kiev with whatever they could scavenge from the military bases in the area, while Moscow only cared about their precious Crimea.
The Ukrainian police, firefighters and army personal in the region openly refusing orders from Kiev, standing on the side of the protesters/people and forming their own parallel institutions were actually Russian troops born, raised and working in those areas for decades? This is what you are saying? You are claiming unironically that the entire anti-Maidan uprising was just Russian MoD personal? No locals, not one of the 45,000 troops the Donbass Republics had at the beginning of February 2022 was ever involved in 2014 or none of them were locals to the area or Ukraine as a whole? Not one Ukrainian passport?
Like, I get the revisionism and propaganda stuffing since 2022. But there should be some limit when you want to write a QAnon tier conspiracy theory and your mind tells you 'wait, what the fuck did I just write?' This is genuinely less realistic than the posters on here that claimed that more civilians died in Mariupol than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Is this actually being pushed as even remotely passable anywhere? You have to be extremally detached from any information from the area before 2022 and even then it sounds crazy.
Read a comment about Artemovsk yesterday, something about 50 Ukrainian helicopters being shot down. I mean sure, quite a few were shot down, but 50? Thats like double the helicopters Ukraine had before the war. Again, not as off the wall as your comment but if you want to stuff propaganda down everybody's throat, at least put in minimal effort when you know its not just the peanut gallery reading.
EDIT: On second thought its satire right?
It was Russian troops.
Which one of those would be Donetsk' "Berkut" or "Alpha" units? Or elements of Ukrainian 25th Airborne brigade? Or where did people such as Aleksandr Khodakovsky, Artyom Zhoga, Vladimir Zhoga, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, Olga Kachura, Aleksandr Dikiy, Mikhail Tolstyh (aka "Givi"), Pavel Dremov, Aleksandr Bednov, Aleksey Mozgovoi, Pavel Gubarev were born and lived, and which citizenship they had? Of renowned field commanders of Donbass War only Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), Arsen Pavlov (aka Motorola) and Nikolay Kozitsyn were completely Russian, and Igor' Bezler and Aleksandr Timofeev lived in Ukraine during USSR times, and for some times after its collapse lived in Russia, but they returned to Ukraine in late 90s. Every other person in the list was born in Ukraine, lived in Ukraine, and (for those with prior military experience) served in the army of Ukraine.
And presumably they made their own tanks, missiles, artillery barrels and so forth in their houses in the evenings.
And presumably they weren’t under the direct command of Russia.
The 8th CAA was reestablished in Rostov region at the end of 2016 with the 150th Motor Rifle Division and two corps in occupied parts of Donbas under its control.
I know you’re Russian Ardias and so your access to news is limited but use your head a little.
Said a person who, while trying to prove his statement, quote: "There were no separatists in 2014, only Russian troops" and then gives an article about late 2016. With your wide-access range of sources you may probably find that most people in the list above were either dead or removed from commanding positions by that time. With their deaths being generally attributed to non-compliance with governance from Russian state. Also if you were actually checking the war situation you would learn that until the late 2014 separatists had, well, a little trouble with "tanks, missiles and artillery barrels". You could also wonder, how did other small wars on post-Soviet territory, or in former Yugoslavia were fought without wide external flow of armaments or developed domestic production.
Also you may wonder, who comprised the rank and file in these LDPR corps' and why mobilization before 21st September was issued only in their territory.
Are you from the timeline where Russia didn’t subsequently openly invade Ukraine in 2022? Because if not I’m somewhat confused by the doublethink. Do you disbelieve that they would send Russian troops into Ukraine or do you just disbelieve in 2014? What do you believe about the Russian army regulars literally captured by the Ukrainian military in 2014?
I don’t understand how you can both see the lies of your government today and be blind to them a few years earlier. Putin swore in January 2022 that he had no plans to invade and he swore in the years preceding that there were no Russian troops there, despite everyone involved asserting that there were, including the Russian troops themselves.
It’d make more sense if you still denied that there were any Russian troops in Ukraine. At least that would be consistent. What you’re doing is being willfully blind to all the evidence to the contrary because you’re putting your faith in a man you know to lie about this exact subject.
Matters of beliefs I prefer to delegate to religion. Thankfully maybenexttime, being a credible source for this thread for his zealous defence of the Western values here, saved me a lot of time with his reply:
On May 23 2023 05:34 maybenexttime wrote: I think both of you are partially wrong. While the separatists were in large part made up of Ukrainian citizens from Donbas (predominantly ethnic Russians), they were taking orders directly from Moscow. For that there is ample evidence. At the same time, the separatists had considerable help from the Russian military. At first, mostly in terms of manpower. According to DPR's Alexander Borodai, Russia provided some 50k "volunteers" in the first five months of the conflict. From August 2014, Russia also started to send heavy equipment.
Though I could say that a lot of volunteers were indeed such, not an army personnel (like infamous critique of the Russian army Andrey Morozov aka "Murz", being even quoted by ISW, who worked as simple elictrician in Moscow before the May 2014) and a lot of field commanders had their own plans for the separatist movement and were often in quarell with each other and Russian politic for the region (for which many of them were killed or stripped of position). But in general I agree with this assessment.
Also people seemed to miss latter part of my post, since you replied to me before the edit, which contained this (and basically says the same as maybenexttime did:
On May 23 2023 04:42 Ardias wrote: Russian troops of course saved LDPR during Ukraine's August 2014 offensive. And of course supplied separatists with weapons (but certainly not in astronomic quantities) as well as allowed for the flow of volunteers. But basically any regular participant in the LDPR militia circa 2014 would say that they felt abandoned and betrayed by the Russian government for not supporting them and basicaly giving them on a plate to Ukrainians with Minsk agreements. Good thing that their accounts from that time are available now since there were a lot of bloggers among them.
Also if you would indulge yourself in reading the sources from the time I've mentioned, you would understand that there was no streamlined military operation from March to August of 2014, but a chaos akin to Russian Civil War situation in the same region 95 years prior (there is a separate term in Russian from that time called "makhnovtschina", basically meaning anarchy and disorder caused by different militia and rebel groups, named after Nestor Makhno - infamous anarchist with his personal army).
On May 23 2023 06:21 JimmiC wrote: @zeo and Ardias if the Freedom for Russia Legion sets up a base in Russia and keeps fighting off the Russian army with equipment and man power from UA and NATO, are these just separatists?
First of all you misunderstanding the terms. Freedom for Russia Legion is a) Not fighting for separatism, it's fighting for the change of regime in country b) Is an actual Ukrainian military unit, in particular being the part of International Legion of Ukraine, which is in turn is a part of Ukraine's Territorial Defence Forces. If you want to make parallels with Strelkov's group - it's not an exactly correct example.
But technicalities aside, I understood your point. So let's assume, that some group of such people captured Belgorod's administration and claimed Belgorod National Republic allied with Ukraine. Then, if people of Belgorod would rally en masse with white-blue-white flags, start taking up said equipment and form volunteer militia units, placing in charge of this units local entrepreneurs, retired policemen and front loader drivers together with Ukrainian car washers - then yeah, I would consider them separatists, even though they have western equipment, Ukrainian volunteers in their ranks and some CIA/MDI personnel in charge.
It's rank and file that matters in this case. not partial leadership, overall guidance and military support. Because it's people, who voluntary want to be armed and guided in such a way. If they wouldn't want, they wouldn't do it. And point such as "well, they are guided/lead by country X, directly aided in battle by forces of country X, and armed by country X hence they are simply soldiers of country X" is completely moot. Because I can continue that logic with the following: 1) There were no Free French forces in WW2, they were US soldiers. 2) There were no South Korean forces in Korean war, they were US soldiers 3) There were no ARVN in Vietnam war, they were US soldiers 4) There were no SDF in Syria, they were US soldiers and etc. etc.
I'm confused what does "Israeli-style protection" even mean? Also to be even remotely credible France would have to deploy troops somewhere in Ukraine.
EPT
