More about the Little Green Men

As John Kerry and Vladimir Putin pledged to work together to solve the problem of Ukraine--a comical  notion, given that the country's major problem is Vladimir Putin--the intellectual heirs of murdered Russian activist Boris Nemtsov have published his findings on the Little Green Men who were so active in Crimea and southeastern Ukraine. It seems there were no fewer than 220 deaths among the Russian soldiers who went to fight in those supposedly spontaneous uprisings. Given what we know about the level of fighting, and the casualties, that means there were thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of Russian soldiers inside Ukraine's borders.

According to Mr Nemstov's findings, the soldiers were told to resign before crossing into Ukraine, to maintain the fiction that, well, if there are any Russians among the rebels, they must be civilian volunteers. Among the 220 fatalities, some families received the standard death payment of about $39,000, but most apparently did not.

Mr Nemstov was shot down in Moscow, one of many such murders of independent-minded Russian journalists and politicians. Mr Putin's government got a double benefit from the murder, silencing a critic while blaming the shooting on Chechen nationalists, the better to prosecute another war that the post-Communist regime has been waging since 1994.