Ukraine's effective deception campaign on the battlefield with the Russians

 Business Insider:

Ukraine's army keeps outsmarting Russia on the battlefield, with cunning ruses and opportunistic attacks

Deception has been at the heart of some of history's most successful military campaigns, and it's an art Ukraine has excelled at in its battle to resist and drive out Russian forces.

In many ways, it's had to. At the outset of the full-scale invasion, Russia's vastly larger army and equipment reserves appeared ready to quash any resistance.

Ukraine therefore had to rely on its improvisational skill to offset the imbalance, exploiting Russian mistakes and using deception and cunning to inflict blows on the invaders.

As a report by the UK think tank the Royal United Services Institute found last year, Russian forces have been vulnerable to deception — not because its soldiers are stupid, but because of weaknesses in how they are organized and structured.

It said the Russian military lacked tactical commanders with the experience to spot dubious intelligence, or to sense when a situation contains a hidden danger.

"Deception has succeeded against Russian forces at all echelons and across all three service branches," the report said.

Ukraine, too, suffers from leadership failures, but it has been admired for its canny ability to adapt, innovate, and quickly seize the advantage on the ground.

Meanwhile, Russia frequently finds itself the agent of its own disasters.

Ivan Oleksii, a 25-year-old esports analyst, told Insider in December that he was buying old British farm trucks and refitting them for military use in Ukraine.

The trucks, he said, had a crucial feature enabling them to deceive Russian snipers — the driving seat was on the right-hand side, unlike other European vehicles where it's on the left.

Oleksii said his team often put dummies on the left side to aid the deception, saving the lives of Ukrainian troops driving the refitted vehicles.

The Russian military has had serious problems supplying troops with communications equipment during the war, meaning some have had to resort to using their own phones to communicate.

This has allowed Ukraine to detect their positions using cellphone data, and target them in missile strikes.

In January, Ukraine killed 89 Russian troops who had gathered in the east Ukrainian town of Makiivka in one of the single biggest losses of life during the conflict.

The Kremlin said Ukraine had been able to identify the location of the troops because some were using cell phones at the site.

Even top commanders in the early weeks of the conflict had to resort to using cell phones to communicate on the battlefield, with Ukraine successfully targeting one general and his staff in a March 2022 strike after detecting his unsecured phone signal.

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The wooden decoy Russians blew up with a $35,000 drone — and crowed over on social media
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Russians also celebrated taking out a radar array — which again turned out to be fake
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When a Russian journalist posted a picture of a Wagner Group base online and got it blasted to pieces
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When Ukraine made a big noise about a counteroffensive in the south — and surprised everyone by going east instead
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The US and its allies used ruses to throw off the Germans before the invasion of Europe in World War II. 

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Ukraine's attack on a costly Russian air-defense system on Thursday may have exposed tactical weaknesses in Russia's Crimean air defenses, experts said.

Using a combination of Neptune cruise missiles and drones, Ukrainian forces took out an advanced S-400 "Triumf" air-defense system in Yevpatoriya, on Crimea's western coast, a Ukrainian intelligence source told the BBC. The air-defense system is worth in excess of $500 million.
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