This was not a Russian military that most in Washington recognized. It had highly capable weapons, such as electronic warfare systems, communications jammers, air defenses, and long-range precision rocket artillery, much of which was better than anything the US military had.
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The Little Green Men could jam Ukrainian drones, causing them to fall out of the sky. They could also jam the fuses on Ukrainian warheads so they never exploded when they hit their targets, but instead landed on the ground with an inert thud. The Ukrainians talked about how the Little Green Men could detect any signal they emitted and use it to target them. Minutes after talking on the radio, their positions were wiped out by barrages of rocket artillery. Their armored vehicles were identified by unmanned spotter drones and immediately hit with special munitions that came down right on top of them, where the armor was weakest, killing everyone inside.
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The Ukrainians tried to dig themselves into bunkers and trenches, but the Little Green Men hit them with thermobaric warheads that sucked all of the oxygen out of those closed spaces, turning it into fuel that ignited everything and everyone inside. Entire columns of Ukrainian troops were annihilated by cluster munitions.
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One day during the conflict, the man’s mother received a call from someone claiming to be the Ukrainian authorities, who informed her that her son had been badly wounded in action in eastern Ukraine. She immediately did what any mother would do: she called her son’s mobile phone. Little did she know that the call she had received was from Russian operatives who had gotten a hold of her son’s cell phone number but knew that he rarely used the phone for operational security reasons. This Ukrainian commander, being a good son, quickly called his mother back, which enabled the Little Green Men to geolocate his position. Seconds later, while still on the phone, he was killed in a barrage of precision rocket artillery.
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What emerged in Ukraine in 2014 was more than just Little Green Men; it was a battle network of sensors and shooters that closed the kill chain with remarkable speed and lethality. It was a Russian reconnaissance-strike complex.
The Ukrainians are equipped with Western export electronics the Russians have collected examples of in South Ossetia, Ukraine, Syria, and most recently Afghanistan.