MOSCOW, June 4 (RIA Novosti) — The fact that Kiev involves mercenaries to crack down on independence supporters in Ukraine's southeast points to the non-effectiveness of the Ukrainian army, former Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service Officer Leonid Reshetnikov said Wednesday.
"There is nothing surprising in this fact, given that the Ukrainian army is in a pitiful condition and is practically not combat-ready," Reshetnikov, the retired officer and now director of the Russan Institute of Strategic Studies, told RIA Novosti.
He said that was not the first time mercinaries had been used on the post-Soviet territory.
"They fought in the Chechen campaign, and the mercinaries there were not only Muslim, but some were from the Baltics, Ukraine," he said, adding that a similar situation arose in 2008, when Ukrainian soldiers fought on Georgian side in the war with Russia.
Alexander Khodakovsky, one of the chief commanders with self-defense forces of Ukraine’s breakaway Donetsk Republic and former chief of Ukraine’s special forces unit Alfa in Donetsk, said foreign pilots were fighting on Kiev’s side in eastern Ukraine earlier this week.
