Ukraine crisis: Crimea airports occupied

[Igel]

50. Then again, Russia is doing what it does from time to time.

It's hastening to give Russian passports to Berkutovtsy that fled the country.

So you could have Russian Ukrainian Russians.

And, in fact, to a large extent that's how the Berkutovtsy were perceived--as a kind of ethnic-Russian praetorian guard doing Yanukovich's wishes, separate from both the Army and the police.

Not Russian military.

Few here will qualify them as "mercenaries." That's a term reserved for Western contractors, most of whom are in construction. Then again, the Berkutovtsy were the ones doing the sniping and killing of Ukrainians, so you could consider them to be "intraethnically hostile" in a warped sort of way, since we play with "Ukrainian" and "Russian" now as ethnonyms and now as citizenship status and, if necessary, to describe linguistic affiliation. (Classic set-up for a fallacy: Fail to define your terms and let them shift meanings between and within sentences.)