There seems nothing covert about hundreds of white trucks trundling along major roads with reporters and cameramen in tow, but Russia's vast aid convoy is suspected of being the latest subterfuge in its shadow war with Ukraine.
Russia's military and intelligence services have long been proud of their maskirovka: the use of deception and misdirection to befuddle an enemy and disguise one's own intentions, strength and disposition; its aim is to catch an adversary by surprise, so helping one's forces to take the initiative in battle, and to triumph.
On February 26th in Simferopol, Crimean Tatars who largely supported Ukraine’s revolution faced down a smaller group of pro-Russian opponents and prevented the local parliament from debating Crimea’s possible split from Ukraine.
The Tatars went home in celebratory mood, feeling that they had won the battle and given Crimea’s secessionists a bloody nose; local anti-Maidan – pro-Russian – activists made defiant noises, but most left the square outside the assembly with a dejected air.
The few hardy souls who stayed on to set up a protest camp witnessed the arrival that night of mysterious characters who would come to be known as “little green men”. Well equipped and well drilled, they swept security guards aside and seized the building in minutes. Crimea, Kiev and the rest of Ukraine awoke hours later to a fait accompli: “pro-Russian gunmen” controlled the parliament.
Similarly professional units quickly secured Crimea’s airports, administrative buildings, and major roads and other access points to the peninsula, and besieged Ukrainian military bases with the help of armed locals.
A few months earlier, as President Viktor Yanukovich of Ukraine sought to ride out swelling protests, Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin leader, had scoffed at the idea that Russian troops might take over Crimea. "That's complete rubbish," he said. "Nothing of the kind is the case or can be."
In March, as units with the latest weapons and military fatigues – but without identifying insignia – fanned out across the peninsula, Putin insisted they were not members of Moscow’s armed forces but Crimean “self-defence” groups. “There are many military uniforms,” he explained. “Go into any local shop and you can find one.”
Six weeks later, after formally annexing Crimea, Putin made a confession. “Of course our troops stood behind Crimea’s self-defence forces,” he said. “We had to take unavoidable steps so that events did not develop as they are currently developing in southeast Ukraine.”
Coming clean Since Putin came clean about Crimea in mid April, more than 2,000 people have been killed in southeast Ukraine, and almost a million have fled their homes amid fighting between government forces and rebels who want the region to join Russia.
Just as in Crimea, Putin insists that Russia and its military are playing no part in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – despite the presence of Russian citizens throughout the rebel ranks, including among its leaders, and the insurgents’ use of Russian tanks, armoured personnel carriers, rocket launchers and surface-to-air missiles.
Maskirovka must adapt to modern technology, and Moscow's cloak of secrecy has been torn by social-media posts from Russian servicemen claiming to be firing artillery over the border into Ukraine and operating mobile missile systems inside the country. Kiev and the United States believe the rebels mistakenly fired one such system, called Buk, at Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 as it flew over Donetsk en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur last month.
Video footage and photographs show a Buk system in rebel-controlled territory on the day of the disaster, and at least one militant leader has admitted that it was part of the separatists’ armoury.
Perhaps most damningly, a social-media site used by the Russian insurgent leader Igor Girkin – also known by his nom de guerre, Strelkov – carried posts boasting about the downing of a military plane at the time and place that the airliner was hit. The messages were swiftly deleted when the crashed aircraft was properly identified.
Bizarre theories Moscow and the rebels blamed Ukraine for the disaster, however, and Russian state media flooded the airwaves with often-bizarre theories, including that the airliner had been carrying a cargo of dead bodies, had been spying on rebel territory or had been hit by Ukrainian forces targeting Putin's presidential jet. The day after the plane came down, people living around the crash site were already convinced of Ukraine's guilt and avidly discussed these wild theories.
Similarly, many residents of Crimea and eastern Ukraine believe Russian media claims that Kiev’s pro-EU leaders are “fascists” who want to ban Russian from being spoken in public – even though it is the most commonly used language in the capital itself – and think anti-Yanukovich protesters stayed on the streets for months because the free borscht they were given was laced with addictive drugs.
Independent media exploded in 1990s Russia, but during 15 years in power Putin has made all major television stations slavish regurgitators of the Kremlin line, where loyalty, rather than accuracy or independence, is the crucial virtue.
Those channels never asked if Ukraine’s revolutionaries were really “fascists”, queried the identity of Crimea’s “little green men”, wondered aloud whether the rebels could have shot down flight MH17 or questioned how many Crimeans really wanted to join Russia, or if most people in Donetsk and Luhansk genuinely support the militants.
This adoring coverage is a major factor in polls that show Putin has an 87 per cent approval rating and that 63 per cent of Russians think his policies are helping to peacefully resolve Ukraine’s crisis.
Putin’s latest initiative on Ukraine was, at the time of writing, parked in fields about 30km from the country’s eastern border. The 300 or so trucks arrived there on Thursday night, without receiving clearance from Kiev to enter Ukraine, or agreement from the Red Cross to distribute aid to people in urgent need in the battle-scarred Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Ukraine, its US and EU allies, and international organisations ranging from the Red Cross to Nato all had pressing questions for Moscow about those military trucks – hurriedly repainted white from army green – that were waiting in massed ranks near the frontier, the kind of questions that Russian state media dare not ask.
Without agreement It was not clear, for example, why Russia sent the cargo without agreement from Kiev and the Red Cross. And why could the aid not be inspected on the frontier and transferred to Red Cross trucks, as Ukraine demanded? Why are so many of the trucks empty? And why did the convoy divert to a rebel-held stretch of border rather than seek a compromise with Kiev?
There were also questions about why Russia’s emergencies ministry, which usually handles aid and humanitarian-relief matters, was not involved, and instead the vehicles came from a military base hundreds of kilometres from Ukraine.
Putin still insists on calling Russia and Ukraine “brotherly nations”, but millions of residents of the smaller nation have lost all trust in the Kremlin. Even an aid convoy of freshly painted white trucks, they think, could be a trick.
They worry that the lorries, which Russia is determined to push into Ukraine, could be a “Trojan horse” carrying supplies to the rebels. Or they could be caught in a real or staged attack that would give Putin a pretext for military intervention. Russian armoured vehicles now cross the border at will, and some spotted in the area already carry “peacekeeper” livery.
Ukrainians don’t know what to expect as they slip deeper into war. But they fear the worst. After all, six months ago they didn’t believe in little green men.
