Little green men (Russo-Ukrainian war)
Based on Wikipedia: Little green men (Russo-Ukrainian war)
The Soldiers Without Flags
In late February 2014, something strange happened in Crimea. Armed men in pristine military uniforms appeared at airports, government buildings, and military bases across the peninsula. They moved with the precision of professional soldiers. They carried modern weapons. They spoke Russian.
But they had no insignia. No flags. No identifying marks of any kind.
The world would come to know them as the "little green men"—a darkly humorous name borrowed from science fiction, where little green men are aliens whose existence governments always deny. The comparison was apt. For weeks, the Russian government insisted these soldiers simply didn't exist, or if they did, they had nothing to do with Moscow.
The Art of Plausible Deniability
What unfolded in Crimea represented something genuinely new in modern warfare—or rather, something very old dressed up in new clothes. The concept is called plausible deniability: the ability to deny involvement in something while everyone knows you're responsible, but nobody can definitively prove it.
Nations have used unmarked forces throughout history. During medieval times, knights would sometimes cover their heraldic symbols—their insignia identifying their lord and allegiance—when conducting raids they didn't want traced back to their masters. These were called "black knights," and the little green men were their twenty-first century descendants.
But Russia added a modern twist. In an age of smartphones and social media, where every action can be photographed and uploaded within seconds, Moscow bet that simply removing patches and denying involvement would create enough ambiguity to paralyze the international response. If you can't prove soldiers are Russian, you can't formally accuse Russia. If you can't formally accuse Russia, you can't take formal action against them.
It was a gamble. And it worked.
Taking Crimea in Plain Sight
Between late February and March 2014, these unmarked soldiers executed a remarkably coordinated military operation. They seized Simferopol International Airport, the main gateway to Crimea. They surrounded and blockaded Ukrainian military bases across the peninsula, trapping Ukrainian forces inside. They occupied the Supreme Council of Crimea—the regional parliament—creating the conditions for a hastily organized referendum on joining Russia.
The operation was textbook military professionalism. Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin maintained that these were merely local "self-defense groups" who had spontaneously organized to protect ethnic Russians in Crimea. When asked about their military-grade equipment, Putin suggested they might have "acquired their Russian-looking uniforms from local military shops."
This explanation strained credulity. Ukrainian law doesn't allow civilians to buy or carry military firearms. And these weren't people in surplus clothing playing soldier—forensic analysis of photographs told a different story entirely.
The Equipment That Told the Truth
A Finnish military magazine called Suomen Sotilas, which translates to "Soldier of Finland," published a detailed analysis of what the little green men were wearing and carrying. Their findings were damning.
The soldiers wore brand-new EMR camouflage—a pattern issued only to Russian forces. Their tactical vests, designated 6Sh112 and 6Sh117, were current Russian military issue. Their composite helmets, the 6B27 and 6B7-1M, came straight from Russian military supply chains.
But the really telling details came from the specialized equipment. Some soldiers wore 6B26 helmets and 6Sh92-5 tactical vests—gear issued exclusively to Russian airborne troops, the elite parachute infantry known as the VDV. Others wore Gorka-3 combat uniforms, standard issue only for Russian special forces and mountain troops. The Smersh tactical vest, spotted on numerous little green men, is used only by Russian special operations units.
One photograph captured an unmarked soldier carrying a VSS Vintorez—a suppressed sniper rifle designed specifically for Russian special forces. It's not the kind of weapon you pick up at a surplus store.
The Finnish analysts concluded that these troops were, with very high probability, members of the 45th Guards Separate Reconnaissance Regiment—an elite VDV unit based in Kubinka, just outside Moscow.
The Polite Invaders
Russian state media, rather than denying the soldiers existed, took a different approach. They called them "polite people"—vezhlivye lyudi in Russian. The term caught on domestically as a kind of patriotic meme.
And there was some truth to it. Unlike invading forces in many conflicts, the little green men largely avoided harassing civilians. They kept to themselves. They didn't loot or intimidate locals. They refused to engage with journalists, but they did so politely. When not actively conducting operations, they simply waited, professional and patient.
This wasn't kindness—it was strategy. Russia wanted Crimea to appear calm, even peaceful, under its unmarked occupation. Any images of violence or chaos would have undermined the fiction that locals wanted Russian protection. The little green men's politeness was itself a form of information warfare.
The Confession Comes Slowly
The pretense began to crumble in April 2014. On April 17th, nearly two months after the first little green men appeared, Putin finally admitted that Russian military personnel had been operating in Crimea. He framed it as a protective mission—they were there to ensure the safety of ethnic Russians and to create conditions for the referendum that would formally annex Crimea to Russia.
Later, Putin went further, acknowledging that Russian forces had actively blocked Ukrainian military units in Crimea during the takeover. The fiction of spontaneous local self-defense groups evaporated.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, when asked about Russian special forces in Ukraine, offered a cryptic response that captured the Kremlin's approach perfectly. "It's hard to search for a black cat in a dark room," he said, "especially if it's not there." Then he added, with what must have been a knowing smile, that searching would be particularly "stupid" if the cat happened to be "intelligent, brave, and polite."
By 2015, retired Russian Admiral Igor Kasatonov was openly discussing the operation's details. The little green men, he confirmed, were members of Russian Spetsnaz special forces units. Their deployment had included six helicopter landings and three transport aircraft—massive Ilyushin Il-76 cargo planes—carrying five hundred troops.
The Shadow War Spreads East
The little green men didn't stay in Crimea. As conflict erupted in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region—the industrial heartland bordering Russia—similar unmarked soldiers appeared alongside local separatist militias.
This time, Russia maintained the denial for longer. The Kremlin insisted no Russian troops were active in Donbas, even as evidence mounted. The unmarked soldiers fought alongside self-proclaimed "separatist republics" in Donetsk and Luhansk, bringing military expertise and equipment that local militias couldn't have acquired on their own.
The situation created a strange bureaucratic limbo for the soldiers themselves. Alexander Borodai, who led the unrecognized Donetsk People's Republic, claimed that fifty thousand Russian citizens had fought in Donbas by August 2015. He argued these veterans deserved the same benefits as Russia's other war veterans—medical care, pensions, recognition. But officially, they hadn't been sent by the Russian government. Officially, they didn't exist.
These men had fought for their country in a war their country claimed wasn't happening.
A Template for Modern Conflict
The little green men represented a new template—or perhaps a very old one, modernized. Military strategists call it "hybrid warfare": the combination of conventional military force with irregular tactics, information operations, and plausible deniability.
Russia wasn't the first to use such methods, and it won't be the last. China has developed its own version with the People's Armed Forces Maritime Militia—fishing boats crewed by trained military personnel who harass foreign vessels in disputed waters while Beijing maintains they're just civilian fishermen. Analysts have taken to calling them "little blue men," a deliberate echo of their green Russian counterparts.
The appeal is obvious. Unmarked forces allow nations to take aggressive action while avoiding the formal consequences of war. They create space for diplomatic maneuvering, for negotiations, for face-saving retreats if things go wrong. They exploit the international community's reliance on clear evidence and formal processes.
The danger is equally obvious. When nations can deny military action even as they're conducting it, the rules that prevent wars from escalating begin to break down. How do you respond to an invasion that isn't officially happening? How do you defend against soldiers who officially don't exist?
The Wagner Connection
In the years since Crimea, we've learned more about who the little green men actually were. Many came from the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, and its various Spetsnaz special operations units. These are among Russia's most elite and secretive soldiers, trained for exactly the kind of deniable operations that unfolded in Crimea.
But some came from somewhere else entirely: the Wagner Group.
Wagner is what's called a private military company—essentially a mercenary organization, though Russian law officially prohibits mercenary activity. It's funded through murky channels connected to the Russian state and has operated in Syria, Libya, Central African Republic, Mali, and numerous other conflict zones. Its soldiers provide Russia with even more deniability than regular military units.
If a Russian special forces soldier dies in Ukraine, it's an international incident. If a Wagner contractor dies, officially he was just a private citizen who happened to be in a war zone. The Russian government bears no formal responsibility.
Wagner's presence among the little green men showed how Russia was already developing multiple layers of deniability—official military units with patches removed, plus private contractors with no official connection to the state at all.
Why "Little Green Men"?
The name deserves a moment's consideration. In American and European popular culture, "little green men" are extraterrestrials—the stereotypical aliens from science fiction, whose existence governments always deny despite mounting evidence. The phrase evokes conspiracy theories about crashed UFOs and secret facilities where the truth is hidden from the public.
Applying this name to Russian soldiers in Ukraine captured something essential about the situation. Everyone could see what was happening. The evidence was overwhelming. Yet officially, according to the Russian government, these soldiers weren't there. The parallel to government denials of alien contact wasn't just clever wordplay—it highlighted how absurd the official Russian position had become.
The phrase also carried a note of dark humor appropriate to the surreal nature of the conflict. Ukrainians were watching their country be invaded by soldiers from a nation that claimed not to be invading. What could you do but give them an absurdist name?
The Long Shadow
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—eight years after the little green men first appeared—there were no unmarked uniforms. Russian tanks rolled across the border with their flags flying. The era of plausible deniability was over.
But the little green men had served their purpose. They had shown that a modern nation could seize territory through force while the international community debated whether it was really happening. They had demonstrated that removing insignia and denying involvement, however implausibly, could create enough diplomatic fog to prevent unified response. They had bought Russia time to consolidate its hold on Crimea before the world fully understood what had occurred.
The little green men were an experiment in twenty-first century conquest. And for Russia, at least in Crimea, the experiment succeeded.
The lessons of that success—and its limits—continue to shape conflicts around the world.