[imagesource: Tony Overman / Olympian / AP]

We are more than six months into the war in Ukraine.

You only need to look at the staggering numbers involved to see that no matter what happens from here on out, Ukraine will never be the same.

On the ground and across social media, the battle rages on. All’s fair in love and war, they say, so props to Ukraine’s latest effort to outwit and outlast its would-be conquerors.

The Washington Post reports that decoys, which resemble advanced US rocket systems, have been used to trick the Russian military into wasting expensive cruise missiles:

The Ukrainian decoys are made out of wood but can be indistinguishable from an artillery battery through the lens of Russian drones, which transmit their locations to naval cruise-missile carriers in the Black Sea.

“When the UAVs see the battery, it’s like a VIP target,” said a senior Ukrainian official, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, encountering long-range artillery replicas.

The decoys have been in use for a few weeks and have already led to Russia wasting at least 10 Kalibr cruise missiles, according to a senior Ukrainian official.

Russia is reportedly running low on precision-guided ammunition and Russian operatives aren’t keen to admit that they’ve been taken for fools:

The destruction of Ukrainian replicas may partly account for Russia’s unusually boastful battle damage assessments on Western artillery, particularly the U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS.

Image: Corey Dickstein / AP

“They’ve claimed to have hit more HIMARS than we have even sent,” one U.S. diplomat observed.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has been touting his country’s success in laying waste to HIMARS. Senior Pentagon officials refute this, saying all of their HIMARS are accounted for and it’s another example of Russian disinformation.

In addition to wasting precious Russian resources, the decoys help protect Ukraine’s actual rocket systems, most of which have been supplied by Western allies.

Russian supply lines, as well as arms depots and logistic and support hubs, have been targeted in attacks from as far away as 80 kilometres.

The idea of using decoys is actually one the Russian military is familiar with, having used them in previous conflicts. They call this art of deception “maskirovka”.

[source:washpost]