Among those who died fighting in Donetsk this week were Russian citizens — at least eight, according to the city's mayor. With that revelation, Russia's involvement in the violence in eastern Ukraine is no longer in question.
The confirmed presence of foreign fighters exposes as untrue repeated claims by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that they are merely horrified bystanders to events in eastern Ukraine. Those claims were never plausible, given Russia's record in Crimea and thin popular support for the secessionist rebels in the east.
Lavrov recently challenged those who insisted Russia was backing the rebels to produce a single captured Russian agent. Of course, he can maintain that the Russian citizens killed in Donetsk were simply volunteers motivated by attacks on their ethnic kin in Ukraine. The eight, however, included Chechens, who by no stretch of the imagination are Russian nationalists.
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