Russia's annexation of Crimea last year caught almost everyone off guard. The Russian military disguised its actions, and denied them - but those "little green men" who popped up in the Black Sea peninsula were a textbook case of the Russian practice of military deception - or maskirovka.
At a cadet school in the southern suburbs of Moscow, Maj Gen Alexander Vladimirov heaves two enormous red volumes off his bookcase and slams them down on the table. "My Theory and Science of Warfare," he says, beaming. "It's three times longer than Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace!"
Vladimirov, vice-president of Russia's Collegium of Military Experts, is an authority on maskirovka - the hallmark of Russian warfare and a word which translates as "something masked".
"As soon as man was born, he began to fight," he says. "When he began hunting, he had to paint himself different colours to avoid being eaten by a tiger. From that point on maskirovka was a part of his life. All human history can be portrayed as the history of deception."
Vladimirov quotes liberally from the Roman general Frontinus and the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu who described war as an eternal path of cunning.
But it's Russia, he tells me, with unmistakable pride, that has over the centuries really honed these techniques to perfection.
One of the most famous examples is the Battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380, when the young Muscovite, Prince Dmitry Donskoy, and 50,000 Russian warriors fought against 150,000 Tatar-Mongolian soldiers led by Khan Mamai. It was the first time the Slavs were fighting as a united army - Russia against the Golden Horde.
"The fighting was very tough, but we eventually triumphed thanks to one regiment hiding in the forest," says Vladimirov. "They attacked ferociously and unexpectedly and the ambushed Tatars ran away."
"They started brewing tea and distributing drinks. Some journalists, myself included, were allowed to take pictures," says Shelomovskiy, "and that was it for the night."
Or so he thought. But in the small hours, unmarked military trucks drove up filled with heavily armed men.
"They ordered those demonstrators to lie face down on the ground - until they realised they were on the same side," says Shelomovskiy. Then they made them carry ammunition into the parliament.
He was told this story by the activists the next morning. "They didn't really understand themselves what was going on," he says.
The troops which had arrived in the dark, as if by magic, with no insignia on their olive-coloured uniforms, were soon nicknamed "little green men".
"We know now these guys were Russian special forces," says Shelomovskiy. "But no-one said so at the time."
Maj Gen Gordon 'Skip' Davis, in charge of operations and intelligence at Nato's military HQ in Belgium, admits it took him and his colleagues some time to figure out the "size and the scale" of the troop reinforcement which was "continuously denied by the Russians".
But if Nato was taken by surprise, the historian and journalist Anne Applebaum was not.
"I knew immediately what it was because it reminded me of 1945. It looked so familiar," she says.
"With Crimea I got a bizarre sense of deja vu, because bringing in soldiers who weren't really soldiers - that was what the NKVD did in Poland after the war. They also created fake political entities which nobody had seen before, with fake ideologies already attached to them… It's a game of smoke and mirrors."
After Crimea came the war in eastern Ukraine. Officially there are no Russian troops or little green men fighting there either - only patriotic volunteers who have gone to the region on holiday.
But there is growing evidence of Moscow's intervention in the separatist conflict including a mounting toll of Russian soldiers killed in action.
In August Russian TV showed footage of water and baby food being loaded on to lorries heading for Ukraine's war zone. The Russian government called this humanitarian aid but many were more than a little suspicious. Nato already had plenty of intelligence about Russian air defence and artillery forces moving into Ukraine.
Maj Gen Davis calls the first convoy "a wonderful example of maskirovka" because it created something of a media storm. TV crews breathlessly followed the convoy, trying to find out what was really inside the green army trucks which had been hastily repainted white. Was this a classic Trojan horse operation to smuggle weapons to rebel militias? And would the Ukrainian authorities allow the convoy in?
TV and the digital world are awash with similar reports. A group of Kiev journalism students who set up a website, external to expose fake stories say some approaches are more sophisticated than this, mixing truth and falsehood to produce a report that appears credible. But even an incredible story may serve to confuse, and create uncertainty.
Peter Pomerantsev, who recently spent several years working on documentaries and reality shows for Russian TV, argues that Russian state media are not just distorting truth in Ukraine, they go much further, promoting a seductive nihilism.
"The Russian strategy, both at home and abroad, is to say there is no such thing as truth," he says.
"I mean, you know, 'The Americans are bad, we're bad, and everyone's bad, so what's the big deal about us being a bit corrupt? You know our democracy's a sham, their democracy's a sham.'
"It's a sort of cynicism that actually resonates very powerfully in the West nowadays with this lack of self-confidence after the Iraq War, after the financial crash - and that's what the Russians are hoping for, just to take that cynicism and then use that in a military environment."
Of course, every country uses strategies of deception. Churchill famously said: "In wartime, truth is so precious she should always be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies." The Americans call such tactics CC&D - concealment, camouflage and deception.
So what sets Russia apart? Maj Gen Skip Davis argues Western forces are sometimes economical with the truth but says they don't tell outright lies: "We are talking about denial of information - in other words, not confirming facts - versus blatantly denying. Saying, 'No that's not us invading, that's not our forces there, that's someone else's.'"
But what about the false information that propelled Britain and the US into war with Iraq? Few would now deny that the facts on WMD were massaged in a maskirovka-type way. The word Davis keeps coming back to is "mindset". He insists maskirovka has become a modus operandi for Russia itself.
"I think that there is an alignment between what probably started out as military doctrine, but now is much more a part of state policy and there's an alignment between the strategic down to the tactical level in terms of the mindset of maskirovka."
This perception is nothing new for Russia's neighbours. A decade ago Andrei Kurkov predicted recent events in Ukraine in his book, The President's Last Love. He writes in Russian and most of his books are on sale there but this one was stopped at the border.