Ghost soldiers: the Russians secretly dying for the Kremlin in Syria

Officially, Russia is participating only in an air war over Syria with a small number of special forces on the ground. Moscow denies that its troops are involved in regular ground combat operations.
However, in interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of these deployments, Reuters has established that Russian fighters are playing a more substantial role in ground combat than that the role the Kremlin says is being played by the regular Russian military.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-insight-idUSKBN12Y0M6