Are The Masked Men In East Ukraine From Russia?

*The Kremlin insists that Russian forces are in no way involved, and that Mr. Strelkov does not even exist, at least not as a Russian operative sent to Ukraine with orders to stir up trouble. "It's all nonsense," President Vladimir V. Putin said Thursday during a four-hour question-and-answer session on Russian television. "There are no Russian units, special services or instructors in the east of Ukraine." Pro-Russian activists who have seized government buildings in at least 10 towns across eastern Ukraine also deny getting help from professional Russian soldiers or intelligence agents. But masking the identity of its forces, and clouding the possibilities for international denunciation, is a central part of the Russian strategy, developed over years of conflict in the former Soviet sphere, Ukrainian and American officials say. John R. Schindler, a former National Security Agency counterintelligence officer who now teaches at the Naval War College, calls it "special war": "an amalgam of espionage, subversion, even forms of terrorism to attain political ends without actually going to war in any conventional sense."* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

*Read more here from ANDREW HIGGINS, MICHAEL R. GORDON and ANDREW E. KRAMER at The New York Times: