Right above Rostov na Donu, down where the Don River debouches into the Black Sea, there's a mass of infantry.
Most of it's shown as being in Ukraine, in the renegade satrapies that style themselves as independent republics (even with "international relations" with such international players as the "Republic of South Ossetia–the State of Alania", a wholly owned subsidiary of Putin, Inc.
Are they asserting that all the forces of the DNR are fully integrated Russian infantry units, that there are a lot that the MSM typically doesn't admit, or did the map maker just put them a bit too far too the left?
In any event, most of the Russian troops down there were put near Ukraine for military exercises that served as exercises and a threat to Ukraine (plus some 'hooray for our side!"-ism), were formally withdrawn to much celebration in the western media, but oddly didn't actually leave as some rather dismally but gloatingly said.
Belorus' isn't the stalwart Russian ally that some think. But Lukashanko's not stupid: He's had his own problems even just trying to make Belorussian a required class in schools. It's like in Russia these days: If you're a member of an ethnic group with a local language, yeah, you can study it in school when you're also studying the required Russian. But if you're area is mostly non-Russian speaking, Russians who live there cannot be required study the local language. It's guaranteed forced language shift, and it's really only a bit worse than the old Soviet policy that made Belorussian a small minority language in the territory originally set up as Belarus' in the early days of the USSR entirely on the basis of where Belorusian was spoken as the majority language. Almost all ethnic Russians now in Belarus' have Russian as their home language, but nearly 70% of ethnic Belarusians use Russian as their home language. They're mostly less educated, rural, and peripheral to the country in pretty much every way.
Otherwise, it pays to remember that the exercises in the east and west of Russia have very often gone by the name "East" (Vostok) and West (Zapad). The first such Russian (as opposed to Soviet) exercise occurred in 1999, pre-Putin. The West has always been seen by a fair-sized portion of Russia as hostile and predatory, esp. the US government. That includes Clinton and Obama.
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