"The Russian military is using life-size decoy tanks, jets and missile launchers for disguise and deception."
“If you study the major battles of history, you see that trickery wins every time,” Aleksei A. Komarov, the military engineer in charge of this sleight of hand, said with a sly smile. “Nobody ever wins honestly.”
Mr. Komarov oversees army sales at Rusbal, a hot-air balloon company that also provides the Ministry of Defense with a growing arsenal of inflatable tanks, jets and missile launchers.
As Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin has muscled its way back onto the geopolitical stage, the Kremlin has employed a range of stealthy tactics: silencing critics abroad, hitching the Orthodox Church to its conservative counterrevolution, spreading false information to audiences in Europe and even, according to the Obama administration, meddling in American presidential politics by hacking the Democratic Party’s computers.
One of the newer entries to that list is maskirovka.