Prediction after reading the following: Putin will be backing down considerably not because of the Wesley Clark types, nor NATO and Obama, nor McCain types, but because his own citizens still have the fear-of-quagmire syndrome from Afghanistan and Chechnya. And these fears are now ramping up considerably. Selling this domestically is the main reason for all his silly tricks all along trying to make military ops look like civilian ops, and now he has to either figure out how to hide his use of troops even more or back down considerably:

Russian soldier: 'You're better clueless because the truth is horrible'
Despite Moscow denials, Ukrainian troops give accounts of fighting Russian army in Ilovaysk outside Donetsk

By Shaun Walker and Oksana Grytsenko in Komsomolske, Leonid Ragozin in Moscow
The Guardian, Wednesday 3 September 2014

[...] the evidence is mounting that an impending rebel defeat pushed Moscow to intervene more overtly in the past two weeks. There have been repeated sightings of Russian army ration packaging and of "green men" without insignia similar to those who took part in the annexation of Crimea, as well as satellite images which, Nato claims, show Russian armour inside Ukraine.

A video posted on YouTube this week showed a huge armoured column that appeared to be Russian moving well inside Ukrainian territory. Inside Russia, a regional newspaper has published a long transcript of what it alleges to be recorded conversations with two servicemen of the 76th Pskov airborne division who returned from Ukraine. In their answers, the soldiers relate the story of a company that was almost completely annihilated by Ukrainian artillery. The men say only 10 out of between 80 and 100 from the company survived the shelling.

Lev Schlossberg, a local Pskov politician who obtained the tapes, told the Guardian the soldiers were Russian servicemen but said he could not reveal the identities of the three men or explain how he got hold of the recordings. Schlossberg is recovering from a beating he links to his inquiries about the fate of Pskov soldiers. He said military authorities are coercing relatives of soldiers believed to be in Ukraine into silence, and only a handful are willing to talk.

The Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, a rights organisation, claims up to 15,000 soldiers have been sent over the border in recent weeks. The newspaper Novoya Gazeta published an interview with the mother of 20-year-old sapper Vadim Tumanov, alongside a photograph of an official notice informing the local military commissar of his death.

The last time she heard from her son, he told her he was near the Ukrainian border and "going to war".

The Guardian has found the social network account of a soldier who appears to be fighting in Ukraine. In a post on the Russian Vkontakte network, dated 31 August, Kirill Zdrok from Nizhny Novgorod said he was determined to fight on out of a sense of duty to his fallen comrades. "You know, I will stay here. I cannot sit idly and watch our guys being taken home as Cargo-200s [a Soviet codeword for coffins] … One day you say hello, talk to them, laugh with them, then the next day you find out it's all over – they are no longer alive, heading home in a metal box." He appears frustrated by the secrecy surrounding his mission and his close friends have no idea what is going on.

"You won't see it on TV, hear it on radio or read it in newspapers. You won't find anything on the internet that explains what is really happening where we are now. Honestly, you're better clueless, because the truth is horrible", Zdrok wrote in a post dated 26 August. He had earlier posted a newspaper article about Russian casualties on the border with Ukraine, remarking that they were reconnaissance soldiers from his 9th motor-rifle brigade, based in Nizhny Novgorod. [....]