President Vladimir Putin and his principal international mouthpiece, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov continue to mouth the demonstrably blatant lie that units of the Russian Ministry of Defense have not been active in Ukraine. Not only have regular army forces been deployed, the Kremlin continues to be the principal paymaster for the separatist thugs who front the two ersatz republics.
By vasgri for Inform Napalm, Aug 28, 2017 In this feature, the InformNapalm volunteer intelligence community will make an attempt to present a coherent account of the invasion of the artillerymen of the 136th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (MRB) of the Russian Armed Forces into Ukraine in August 2014. This is a synthetic project which involved open-source intelligence (OSINT), hacktivism and IT. We have collected, aggregated and analyzed data from open sources, we used special software to build social graphs of the identified Russian soldiers, we also received and used the materials retrieved by the hacktivists of the Ukrainian Cyber-Alliance (UCA). This investigation proves that Russian soldiers were deployed for combat duty at the Ukrainian border in several stages on the orders of the Russian Army’s command. Later the same soldiers were detected in the occupied territory of Ukraine. Dozens of soldiers’ and officers’ last names previously detected by InformNapalm and individual bloggers through OSINT were authenticated. Full-scale invasion of Russian military units into Donbas in summer 2014 The so-called Anti-Terror Operation or the ATO in Ukraine could have been successfully completed in summer 2014, but Russian Federation made a number of cross-border artillery strikes and then deployed to the territory of Ukraine three battalion tactical groups, reinforced with armored and artillery units. This move thwarted the advance of the Ukrainian troops towards the border and enabled the counter-offensive of the Russian hybrid army. The most significant were the battles of the Luhansk airport and of Ilovaysk. The InformNapalm database of identified Russian military personnel and regular units contains information on at least 28 (twenty-eight) Russian military units whose servicemen participated in the aggression against Ukraine during this period of time. The lists of the servicemen of the 136th MRB (military unit #63354, Buinaksk, Dagestan, Russian Federation) sent by combat order of the headquarters of the Southern Military District (SMD) of Russian Federation to the borderline area with Ukraine proves that the aggression was sanctioned at the top governmental level and was centrally coordinated. The military men who took part in it were no volunteers or even mercenaries, they were soldiers and officers of the Russian Army on active duty and carrying out the order of their command. The analysis of the personal email of the Russian Captain Oleg Doroshenko helped us identify almost 500 conscript and contract soldiers of this military unit who were sent to Rostov oblast as part of the Southern Group of Forces. Since 2013, Colonel Mikhail Lebedko has been in command of the military unit #63354. The Rostov deployment of the 136th MRB (which was called in the orders “fulfilling tasks within the Southern Group of Forces”) started with a phased redeployment of the units from Buinaksk. The soldiers of the logistics battalion were the first to come. They were sent to the borderline area on July 25, 2014 by the telegrams from the Southern Military District headquarters. Drivers of the company responsible for delivering fuel, ammunition, food, clothing and military equipment were among the first to leave the home station. The signallers were transferred on July 28, 2014, self-propelled artillery battalion and evacuation platoon followed on August 16, 2014, armored battalion – on August 17, 2014, servicemen of the reconnaissance battalion – on August 25, 2014. […] https://informnapalm.org/en/invasion-t ... ian-136th-mrb-in-ukraine/ Photo courtesy Inform Napalm
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