Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[Fuchs]

Fuchs---check your OCSE dates and Yes Russia is a signatory of the various OCSE treaties and thus required to meet disarmament compliance numbers as was the rest of NATO.

Check this link---you do not have to believe it or not but it is the current Russian Army Order of Battle of the forces arrayed on the Ukrainian and Crimea border regions
(...)
If the Russian OB is correct and the forces arrayed are accurately portrayed THEN all current NATO countries would have problems countering the current Russian force composition (...)

I doubt it makes sense to discuss whether "all current NATO countries" actually "would have problems countering" a few ten thousand troops. There are always problems in warfare, but the meaning of "problems" in the strategic context is absurd here.


About the OSCE dates:

CFE treaty signed November 19, 1990

Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty signed November 19, 1999. Ratified by Russia (suspended 2007), Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine. Too few ratifications, thus not in force and not requiring Russia to do anything.

I wrote "1990" and "1999", so I see no problem with the dates.
I do see a problem with your counterfactual assertion that Russia violates a treaty which is actually not in force for lack of Western ratifications.

My "not a member" choice of words was maybe inaccurate, as they merely suspended their membership, but I was broadly correct even therewith.


BTW, AWACS is a specific system. The category of these systems is AEW&C (airborne early warning and control), a confusion similar to the widespread MLRS/MRL confusion.

[kaur]

I speculate that those Tigrs that start with 78 belong to this 10th GRU brigade, because here is one that ends with 51.

http://www.yuga.ru/photo/polosa/1126.html

Little history http://www.ww2.dk/new/army/gru/10obrsn.htm

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aOWpormfMI8

[kaur]

Article in Russian about cossacks joint exercise with spetsnaz in Southern military district in 2012.

http://www.vestikavkaza.ru/news/Spet...-kazakami.html

Cossacks in 2. Chechen war.

Cossack Detachment

Closer to January, on the initiative of Albastov, the Ataman of the Grozny department of the Tersk Cossack Division, the GRU leadershup agreed the formation of a parallel Cossack spetsnaz detachment. But in its first stages it acted independently from its Chechen counterpart.

Karl Andreevich Gerter, an atamann of Yakutsk Stanitsa was one of the first to join the division. An excellent hunter and mountaineer, he first served in the First Chechen War, as a Serjeant, when the reserve officers hadn't been called up. Keen to fight, he hid his officer's rank from the recruitment office. In the second campaign, this time in the Spetsnaz, he again became a senior lieutenant, deputy group commander.

Later, when he was 46 years old, he gained the rank of captain and special forces group commander. He also brought with him the Cossacks who were part of his group. These units were usually composed of the ataman of a stanitsa, and a group of between 9-12 men. They would come from all across Russia and even Belarus. Many Cossacks had no military special military training. They acted in ways deemed unusual, non-traditional, even by the GRU special forces.

http://www.agentura.ru/english/spetsnaz/gru1998-2010/