Putin Charges ‘NATO Foreign Legion’ in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin dropped a bombshell, when asked yesterday by students at St. Petersburg’s Mining University how Russia could help students at their partners in the Donestsk Technical University.

NATO officials rushed to dismiss the charge as “nonsense,” but the “so-called volunteer nationalist battalions” identified by Putin are precisely the explicitly Nazi, Stepan Bandera followers, modern-day SS battalions which EIR documented in its explosive Feb. 7, 2014 dossier as having been trained in camps being held in NATO countries such as Poland and Estonia. Those brigades form the backbone of the “National Guard” units for which Commanding General U.S. Army Europe Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges reported last week the U.S. will officially provide military training come this Spring.

Putin added, in his discussion with the students, that many Ukrainians are trying to flee the country to avoid
“being called up for duty. Some are trying to come here to Russia and wait things out a while here, and they are right to do this because there, they are simply being sent as cannon fodder to face the bullets.”
Current law, which allows Ukrainians to stay only 50 days at a time in Russia, should be changed, Putin said, in order to allow Ukrainians “of conscript age,” to stay longer in Russia.