In her book Voina s pervykh dnei (The War From Its First Days), she claims the forces occupying the SBU headquarters in the Eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk in late April 2014 "were dressed and equipped exactly as the fighters from Ramzan Kadyrov's Vostok Battalion I had seen in Crimea two months earlier." (21) She also contended "a highly placed representative of the local power structures [in Sloviansk] told me that about 150 instructors from GRU had been in place in the city for almost a month." (22) If this information is correct, Spetsnaz-GRU may have been on the ground in Eastern Ukraine as early as mid-March 2014.
These units have contained roughly 250 to 300 fighters each, and have been provided to the theater of operations on a rotational basis among the seven Russian Spetsnaz GRU brigades.
For example, one of the GRU officers identified in Donbas is an individual known as Krivko.
(30) In October 2015, however, according to Ukrainian sources, a joint coordination center was established between the GRU and FSB in Donetsk to deal with the problem.
(7) "Spetsnaz GRU i spetsnaz VDV: naidi desiat otlichii," http://1071g.ru/node/356 (accessed October 15, 2013).
