Defense One has a great piece on unmasking the Russians in the Ukraine
The Science of Unmasking Russian Forces in Ukraine
“Every day, the scene playing out along the Ukrainian border with Russia seems like an act of costumed theater. Russian protestors wearing
balaclavas, or ski masks, armed with military-grade weapons, attempt to take over government buildings by force. The question of who is behind the masks has risen to a level of critical international importance. If the protestors are affiliated with the Russian military, Putin’sgovernment is in violation of international treaties and laws. It’s a nearly impossible challenge, but one that the United States military, within its own sphere of operations, is also trying to solve.
An armed man gestures in front of the police headquarters in Slaviansk, April 12, 2014. At least 20 armed militants wearing mismatched camouflage outfits took over the police and security services headquarters in the eastern city of Slaviansk seizing hundreds of handguns. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich
(Jazz hands?)
Many Western observers now take as fact that groups raiding buildings in places like Donetsk and Kharkiv are, in fact, Russian and not
simply Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Consider the recent example of Kharkiv, where pro-Russian protestors first attempted to occupy the
city’s opera theater before realizing that it wasn’t City Hall. “Presumably, the local citizens of Kharkiv, if they wanted to take over City Hall,
they would have gotten the right building to begin with,” Steven Pifer, director of the Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative and a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine said. ”