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Most glaring of all, experts say, is the timeline that would have been required to establish a separatist fighting force as effective as the one that’s fighting Ukrainian government troops now.

The so-called Donetsk republic didn’t exist even as a movement before April 7, and yet it was fighting, and fighting effectively, before summer. That means that within a couple of weeks, the separatists not only had managed to recruit a sizable force, but also had armed it and trained it.

As Canadian army Lt. Col. Jay Janzen, the chief of media operations for NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, noted, that isn’t possible.

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