Popularized by the excellent “Red Storm” by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond, the author of the equally excellent naval war simulation Harpoon, Maskirovka is an intelligence operation aimed at creating from scratch a casus belli justifying the legitimate commitment of forces. The novel, which describes a hypothetical conflict between the Soviet Union and NATO against the backdrop of an energy crisis, presents an evolved scenario concerning this Soviet Maskirovka, intended to mobilize the population around an attack against NATO following an attack targeting the elites of the Communist Party supposedly carried out by the German secret services, while at the same time, the armies underwent intensive preparation, and the population was conditioned with a lot of propaganda, in order to increase its distrust of screw the Federal Republic of Germany presented as the depositary of the order of the Teutonic Knights as well as of Nazism.
It was only a novel, of course. However, the mechanisms described resemble, in many points, the dynamics underway in Russia today regarding Ukraine. While thePresident Zelensky and the Ukrainian General Staff stubbornly refuse to respond to provocations led by the independence forces of Donbass, the discourse of the Kremlin, but also of its offices, is now more offensive. This is how Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Russian National Security Council, declared that kyiv and its secret services were preparing to carry out sabotage operations and attacks in Crimea by relying on the Tatar minority of the peninsula to carry out these destabilizing operations. Can it be, therefore, that the Ukrainian authorities have become, after 6 years of resilience, completely stupid and suicidal to the point of deciding to carry out such operations in Crimea even though an eighth of the Russian Army is massed there? its borders?
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