Maskirovka - Russian Deception
Is the war going like they say it is? Is it all a trick?
Matryoshka also known as nesting dolls are a set of dolls that are smaller than the previous placed inside another. What if one day you opened one these dolls and there was an AK-74? Today we’re talking Russian Deception, strap your boots.
Maskirovka is a Russian word for camouflage. Ok thanks for reading.
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No for real, but out here in the west we like to spice things up. So out here Maskirovka means Russian Military Deception! My goal in this article is to try to see how real this “Deception” is in 2022.
Russian Disinformation
Russia has some of the most capable intelligence agencies in the world and they participate in lots of disinformation. Their campaigns on social media have been very successful. What they like to do is find the points of friction in a society and pour gasoline on it. For example they realized in the United States there was some friction on whether the vaccine was effective or not and they poured gasoline on that topic in an attempt to keep the US “unbalanced” also to promote their own vaccine. So on the disinformation front they’re still strong and active. Another huge reason for disinformation is interference.
Interference is when you’re trying to deceive an opponent into making the wrong decisions. Let’s say hypothetically I have radar system and something appears on it, if in reality that signal was false and planted by someone else for the purpose of deceit that’s interference.
Battle Plans
Let’s take a look at the beginning of the Ukraine war. The Ukrainians found battle plans from Russia.
This is where they “discovered” the “Russia planned to take Ukraine in 2 weeks” thing. Randomly finding these things are interesting because part of Russian military disinformation is planting fake battle plans to affect your decision making. Finding something like this means you have to take it with a HUGE grain of salt. Typically these things would be sent to intel people to filter out what’s intelligence and throw away what’s garbage. Were these battle plans actually real? We probably won’t know until a few years from now.
Freezing out Odessa
Russia kept landing ships off the coast of Odessa, Ukraine. Everyone was thinking an attack was eminent but that was the point. This was clear deception, they never actually had to attack. Keeping the landing ships there meant the threat of an amphibious assault was there and troops had to stay in Odessa to defend. But they never attacked so those troops just got frozen out of the war. It was a good way to relieve some pressure from the other fronts.
The Great Pincer Feint
I spoke about this one before in one of my “Ukraine war updates”. Basically at the beginning of the war Russia decided to sprint towards Kyiv from both sides of the Dnieper river. Remember that “40 mile convoy” yeah that was it. After suffering some casualties Russia then pulled back and claimed it was a “feint”. Now this is interesting because in order for a feint to work it has to look real and sometimes even the soldiers on the ground don’t know that they’re participating in a feint. So anyone that say’s “the captured soldiers said this or that” is ignorant to that fact. The reason for not telling the ground troops is to increase operational security. You can’t tell what you don’t know.
Was this a feint or was it real? The truth is we may never know unless we talk to the guys who planned it and they for some reason decide to tell the truth. But even if they did tell the truth, who would believe them?
Conclusion
We know for sure some Maskirovka is happening on social media and traditional media. On the battlefield things are a bit different, It’s very difficult to tell what decisions were intentional and who’s telling the truth. All you can really do is look at decisions and judge them from your perspective. A big problem with military deception nowadays is that we have amazing satellites, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and more. Unless you’re amazing at camouflage (very very difficult to maintain) or you can knock out every eye in the sky. A lot of old deception tricks like ‘hiding your numbers’ doesn’t work and the element of surprise is off the table. To really deceive a modern military you have to really sell it by actually attacking and taking casualties like it’s real, paper tigers don’t work anymore. This is why I’m very hesitant to call the “feint pincer” a lie even after most people have. Maybe they know what they’re up against.
As always, thanks for reading.
If you want to read more about Maskirovka: https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4013coll3/id/3507