I don't have a link to the article, but the Russians were posting in their own news about their people being all over Syria and they frequently mix humanitarian and military assistance just like US forces got well known for in the 1980s and 1990s.

Lots of reserve type units going in and servicing internal refugee populations and carrying weapons for self protection, but the units tend to be vulnerable to long range strikes from outright combat type units. It's like a lot of the Balkans deployments in reverse. If one of those lightly armed aid distribution type units gets hit from the air, there is nothing they can do about it except call in to headquarters for a retaliatory strike and mass medivac. The problem is that "winning" means explaining the bodies and why beautiful young Katya who was in a photo op earlier in the day handing out bottled water to children is splattered all over the wreckage of a cargo truck that got hit by a laser guided US bomb and every swinging dick in her unit who wished he could have fucked her is out to lynch the SF types who they know damn well are in the area and guided the strike in.

The Russians start arresting these guys for war crimes, or say, some SF advisers who are not really in control of some rebel group they are advising and the rebels decide they are going to massacre the family of some former government officials who did it to their families earlier, it's not a question of who is elite, but who has the most powerful conventional force on the ground and pipeline to the UN and ICC.

A lot of scenarios in this thing could look really bad really quick and the only ones i envision kind of working all involve relatively conventional support for a sovereign Kurdish nation which ends up with some formerly Syrian territory.