Mike E wrote:The rebels are not trained directly by Russian forces, but by people in Russian forces or former Russian forces etc.kvs wrote:We should consider the performance of the rebels in the Donbas. They are getting whipped into shape by Russian advisers and have become very effective on the battlefield even though they are outgunned and face Kiev regime forces at least twice in number. The Kiev regime is getting similar levels of support from NATO. It's hard to swallow for some and they make up stories about a Russian invasion every other day. NATO thinks there are 1,000 Russian troops in Ukraine right now. This is a silly number for a force deployment and would make more sense as some rounded-to-the-nearest-thousand number of advisers.
I have red rebel stories about effective use of EM warfare against Kiev regime forces. This does not seem like something a rag tag collection of rebels could achieve after a few months of fighting. The current state of the Russian army appears to be quite advanced. The modernization program will take another 10 years, but the training is there and paying off.
Both NATO and Russia have advisers in Ukraine. Following the evolution of the combat in the Donbas there was a clear transition from July onward towards high effectiveness of rebel forces. It is popular to extoll Strelkov as some military genius. He was very good but he was not responsible for every success especially the ones in August and September when he was absent from the field. It is quite a feat to organize a collection of rebels composed of mostly civilians into an effective fighting force. The pace of the transition was just too fast for it to have been the result of volunteers and trial and error. The rebels are following a detailed organizational plan. This sort of "technology" is more important than equipment (as long as the difference in the equipment compared to the enemy is not too great).
But it is true that ex-forces volunteers from Russian, France, Serbia and likely elsewhere are contributing to the quality of the rebels. According to a post on mp.net some Serb volunteers got rejected because they were not qualified enough. So the rebels are not just grabbing any green recruit like the desperate Kiev regime. These green recruits are a risk to themselves and to others. It seems that the ceasefire has not given the Kiev regime forces any serious boost in terms of performance and they are still being encircled.