Russia is painting dark stripes on its warships to make them look smaller and confuse Ukrainian drones, says expert

• Russia is painting some of its warships with camouflage stripes, an open-source analyst said.
• Satellite images appear to show warships, which carry Kalibr cruise missiles, sporting the paint job.

Russian warships are being painted with dark stripes at either end in an apparent attempt to confuse Ukrainian attacks, a naval analyst said.

Open-source naval researcher HI Sutton spotted what appeared to be the paint job on the Russian frigate Admiral Essen via satellite imagery at the Crimean port of Sevastopol on June 22, as well as on three further warships in the following days.

According to Sutton, the four ships carry Kalibr cruise missiles, which have been used in devastating strikes across Ukraine.

On June 29, KCHF.ru — a website dedicated to sharing news about Russia's Black Sea fleet — also shared an image of the Ivan Golubets, a Soviet-era minesweeper, which appeared to have been painted with thick dark bands at either end.

It said the image, which Insider was unable to independently verify, was taken around a month earlier.

Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow in sea power at London's Royal United Services Institute, told Insider that the reported attempt at camouflage would be "entirely consistent with the sort of things the state would do to mitigate an uncrewed surface vessel threat."

And he described how the operator of an uncrewed surface vessel (USV, or maritime drone) could be deceived by it.

Ukraine's USVs are guided through video feed by a remote human operator. They travel at high speeds, giving the operator only a short time to pick out a target.

"It would appear that in this case, the camouflage is primarily geared towards ensuring that at very long distances, a low quality electro-optical sensor might not distinguish the vessel from background clutter," Kaushal said. The ship might also appear smaller thanks to the dark paint against the water.

In this way the paint would be a "relatively cheap mitigation" against the drones, he said.

The tactic might be even more effective against airborne drones and in the case of commercial satellite imagery, he added. In his own analysis, Sutton noted how dark the water often appears in such imagery, making it an effective camouflage for dark paint.

Ukraine has long used USVs as a "cheap and cheerful" way to harass the Russian fleet, particularly around Sevastopol, Kaushal said.

Russian vessels have sustained damage, and the country has had to erect new barriers around the port and keep its fleet closer to the coast, he said. "It's certainly been an additional headache for them."

In early June, the Russian Ministry of Defense said that its Priazovye warship had repelled six drones.

The Russian Ministry of Defense did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on this latest apparent move.

The use of naval camouflage would be an interesting return for a tactic more associated with World War 1 and World War 2.

The British navy pioneered the use of "dazzle" stripes and patterns in World War 1, as seen below on the USS Minneapolis, which were intended to confuse onlookers as to the speed and direction of vessels.

Later, deceptive camouflage was used instead — most famously by the German battleship the Bismarck, whose bow and stern were painted darker to confuse the naked eye.

It's unclear exactly how successful these tactics were, and they largely died out with the advent of radar, sonar, and, later, infra-red detection systems.