One of the reasons Reuters manages to make news some others cannot is their ability to get to stories in places other reporters would want to go. It landed two of its reporters in Myanmar in jail, and likely will do so in other cases as well. In the meantime, they have exclusive stories like the one they did today that contains video of Russians returning from Syria and being hauled off in busses to a nearby Molkino, Russia, home to the 10th Special Forces Brigade. They even followed the busses from the airport to their destination, and the videos are great additions to the text.
The significance, of course, is that the Russians deny having these troops in Syria (though they don’t deny having uniformed troops in Syria). These are covert forces, the same ones that went into the Ukraine as “volunteers on vacation from the armed forces”, about as farcical as one gets in an explanation. Some of them got killed in various Syrian combat operations against forces supported by the US and others in the area where they served. [see my previous post ]
This is the lot of covert forces, killed but not ever recognized as having been in combat. As I noted in The New Cyberwar, some of these forces die without their parents even knowing they are dead. The Russians never tell them. They just disappear, never being heard from again. This is kind of the ultimate in “We will disavow any knowledge of your or your team” that we saw in the Mission Impossible series, and pretty cruel if you asked me. Of course it does keep people from holding funerals for people killed in Syria. In the Ukraine, deaths of some Russians and their subsequent funerals made denial of their loss more difficult. They have solved that problem.
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