Some of the civilians may have been combatants, perhaps not. Depends how the nationalists spin the figures, to a large extent. Do they want Russians to know the size of the losses they've suffered on the pro-Russian side or not? They don't like admitting that they get help, even as they boast that they get help: Girkin out of the right side of his mouth says he gets reinforcements at least every day or two, that the Ukrainian army is puny if it can't take Slavyansk, then says that if Russia doesn't pony up men and materiel they'll fold in a month against the tank onslaught that is the all-powerful Ukrainian army. What he says depends on his audience. It pays to remember that Borodai was a PR man, not just a nationalist ideologue that proudly belonged to an immigrant-bashing "Russia for Russians" organization.
Take Bolotov (LNR bigwig), for instance, and the media. Originally the Russian story was that Ukr soldiers shot down the plane. Then Bolotov himself took credit, through a spokesman, who said the first reason for shooting down the plane was "they killed us" (that's the entirety of it, oni ubili nas) and then droned on how the second reason was that Bolotov had decreed that the airport was closed and that the Natsguard was violating his orders and his orders must not be ignored or violated. Sort of an emphasis problem, then again Bolotov is authoritarian and nationalist.
When the media there started to make a big deal out of the loss of 40 paratroopers + 9 crew, the countermedia revved up. There couldn't have been 9 crew, the standard crew is 8. And given that it would take a crew of experts days during daylight hours to find all the bits of body, how was it that a couple of LNR folk couldn't find any--there was no way to remove 49 bodies or all the bits of bodies. Therefore the plane couldn't really have had that many troops on it, so that downing of a plane wasn't really all that significant after all. Kiev was obviously attributing battlefield losses to the plane crash to cover its butt.
The two unregistered Russian reporters at a LNR checkpoint (hiding under APCs, with some troop trucks in the background) are of more importance than the 30+ Russian citizens transported back or others killed anonymously. It's an inforwar. Yesterday the central government banned a few Russian channels from being broadcasted. While the DNR and LNR-sited teletowers haven't stopped transmitting them, the one in Mariupol did. And early this morning the main transformer that provided power to the cable and broadcast centers blew up.
= new reply since forum marked as read
