Phantom Retreats and Stolen Bones: The War of Deceit in Ukraine

Andrew E. Kramer

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KYIV, Ukraine — In a jerky cellphone video filmed last week through the window of a bus, the Russian checkpoint in Ukraine’s embattled Kherson region looked abandoned. “Empty,” somebody says in the background, as passengers begin to cheer.

Was this a sign that Russia was retreating from the area — or was it a ruse, meant to lure Ukrainian soldiers into a trap?

Then, on Wednesday, the Russian defense minister announced that his troops were pulling back from Kherson city — which would be a serious blow to Russia’s war effort and to his boss, President Vladimir V. Putin.

Ukrainian military officials said that they were seeing signs of some withdrawals in areas near the city, but that they were watching warily to see if Russian forces would fully retreat.

That caution is rooted in experience. Russia’s war in Ukraine is being fought with the blunt force of artillery bombardments, airstrikes and infantry assaults. But it is also a battle of wits — waged between generals sending signals intended to confuse and mislead their enemies — and a contest of feints, parries and continual efforts to set traps.

In recent weeks, Ukrainian officials had feared Russia was trying to trick them with a flurry of confusing messages in the Kherson region — including the disappearance of manned checkpoints like the one in the cellphone video, as well as the removal of Russian flags from administrative buildings.

“Trickery is as old as warfare,” said Tor Bukkvoll, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, a military think tank, and an authority on Russia’s special forces. All militaries practice it, he said, but the Russians have put a special emphasis on deception in their military doctrine.

And the Ukrainians themselves have engaged in their own bits of misleading messaging.

Russian rescuers helping to evacuate residents of a geriatric boarding house on the left bank of the Dnipro River, in Kherson, last week.Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock

Russia’s hold in the region of Kherson on the western side of the broad Dnipro River has been faltering for weeks. The Ukrainian military, using precision rockets provided by the West, has mostly destroyed the bridges over the river, setting the stage for a possible rout of any soldiers who remain on the west bank.

Russia’s military and civilian leadership has for a month been telegraphing an intention to retreat from Kherson. They have withdrawn military equipment, told civilians to leave the area and removed items perceived as culturally significant to Russians — like the bones of Prince Grigory Potemkin, a Russian noble and lover of Catherine the Great who had advocated joining this area to the empire.

If the Russians went through the trouble of evacuating Potemkin’s bones from a cathedral crypt in Kherson, the gesture seemed to suggest, the Russian army must truly believe the city would soon fall to the advancing Ukrainian army.

Nothing of the sort, Ukraine’s southern military command and military intelligence agency responded in public comments to those Russian moves, which also included evacuating two statues of Russian notables and wide-scale looting of homes and stores by Russian soldiers.

A portrait of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin. The bones of the prince were removed from Ukraine by Russia last month. Credit...Fine Art Images — Heritage Images, via Getty Images

In fact, Ukrainian military officials said, Russia had deployed additional forces to the western bank of the river in preparation for urban combat.

“They are very deliberately trying to convince us that they are withdrawing” to lure Ukraine into a premature offensive on the city, Natalia Humeniuk, the spokeswoman for the southern command, told a Ukrainian television news broadcast over the weekend.

“We see objective data they remain in place,” she said, in comments suggesting that an imminent Ukrainian attack was unlikely — yet another potential example of military misdirection, this time from the Ukrainian side. “Powerful defensive units are dug in, heavy weaponry remains and firing positions set up.”