Moon of AlabamaSecretary of State Kerry on Face the Nation:
Russia chose this brazen act aggression and moved in with its forces on a completely trumped set of pre-texts claiming that people were threatened …
Kerry should watch the following videos.
This one is of interest. The (auto-translated from Russian) subtitle:
Compilation with video surveillance cameras installed in the building of the Council of Ministers of Crimea on 27.02.2014, during the capture.
The video shows a group of 20 to 30 armed people, soldier like, well armed but not full professionals, storming and then searching a building with the help of flash-bang grenades. The time marks in the the CCTV are between 0400 and 0700 on the 27th of February. The last pictures to be seen are when the intruders smash the CCTV cams one by one. To mark themselves the men wear white ribbons on their left arms. This is a longer CCTV video from only one camera uploaded by the same account, Редактор Новостей (newsmaker), on February 28. It shows the group storming and securing one of the entrances to the building.
This is a video uploaded on March 1 by a French TV station. The (auto-translated from French) subtitle:
Latest news on http://www.bfmtv.com/ A group of twenty armed as professional men shot Saturday on the government building in Simferopol in Crimea. “It was weapons of professionals,” says special envoy BFMTV Patrick Sauce. Russian soldiers who protect the site did not respond. The attackers withdrew in a bus a few minutes later.
The video shows a group of some 30+ armed men – again soldier like, well armed but not full professionals – in daylight trying to storm some building. They retreat to a civilian bus and seem to depart. The men are again marked with white ribbons on their left arms. What was this about?
Here is another snippet (at 1:20) of the situation from a different perspective by a Russian TV station.
Someone has done a photo analysis of hand weapons Russian troops in the Crimea carry. But the second photo is not of Russian soldiers but is from the same scene than the video above. It shows armed men with white ribbons and in partly civilian cloth. One of their weapons is identified as a Russian grenade launcher but with a U.S. made holographic sight.
Unfortunately no “western” media have yet asked who these white-ribbon guys are and what they are doing. To me it seems possible that they are some kind of half trained gang send from Kiev to takeover government buildings in the Crimea. The presences of these groups, starting early on February 27, could be the reason why Russia decided it needed to take control of the Crimea. Fear that these groups would receive reinforcement through other groups arriving by plane led to the temporary guarding of the Crimean airports by (unmarked) Russian troops.
Please let me know of other media occurrences of such white-ribbon marked persons and of their background.