Its coming along nicely... I still think its a bit on the hard side.
I hosted with 4 others playing, for 5 total by the time we were en route to the airport. The beginning worked well. One friend was surprised to find himself off in the woods (he was the hunter), but we all had good spirit about starting as civilians, despite (or benefited by) the confusion of trying to regroup to attack Lopatino.
I agree with Hoz about the mission difficulty, but only slightly. The difficulty is fun, we all enjoyed being forced to scrounge from dead enemies, but taking back Lopatino took too long in the end, only picking up the pace once two others joined the game. As a side note, the JIP seemed to work fine. They all appeared, gathered equipment from enemies, and joined the fight no problem.
We had so much fun with the town, and as a stand alone mission I might suggest to leave the difficulty as-is, but as part of a larger campaign, I suggest toning it down a bit at Lopatino (more on the airport in a moment). Perhaps sizing the occupying force to one platoon (25 or so soldiers, for lack of a reliable source on Russian military organization). Keep the vehicles as is in the town, they make for good sport. I wouldn't put an ammo crate in lopatino, we can get ammo from the civil ural by the warehouse, the farm, another near our spawn in south Lopatino, and also the ammo truck and dead enemies.
We finally cleared the town, searching a bit to find the last couple soldiers crawling off on a hill. We definitely used our share of respawns this time. Once on the way to the airport in two vehicles we took from the roadblock to the west, we found another soldier crawling, and then I received the text about trying the radio. immediately after, I crashed to desktop. It was a clean crash, no lag, no apparent hangups, but my hosting of the mission simply quit, leaving the rest of the guys stuck for a minute or two.
As it stands, we never saw the airport, but from reading hoz's review, I would probably suggest the same.