the 2nd Ukrainian Front from July 1943 (later further the 1st Ukrainian Front) until May 1945. He participated in the Battle of Kursk, commanding the southern part of the Soviet counter-offensive, the Steppe Front, where he actively and energetically promoted maskirovka (the use of military camouflage and deception). Among the maskirovka measures he adopted to achieve tactical surprise were the camouflaging of defense lines and depots; dummy units and supply points; a dummy air-defense network; and the use of reconnaissance units to verify the quality of his army's camouflage and deception works. In David Glantz's view, Konev's forces "generated a major portion of the element of surprise". As a result, the Germans seriously underestimated the strength of the Soviet defenses. The commander of the 19th Panzer division of the Wehrmacht, General G. Schmidt, wrote that "We did not assume that there was even one fourth [of the Russian strength] of what we had to encounter". After the Soviet victory (August 1943) at Kursk, Konev's armies retook Belgorod, Odessa, Kharkiv and Kyiv. The subsequent Korsun–Shevchenkovsky Offensive led to the Battle of the Korsun–Cherkassy Pocket which took place from 24 January to 16 February 1944. The offensive was part of the Dnieper–Carpathian Offensive. In it, the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, commanded, respectively, by Nikolai Vatutin and by Konev, trapped German forces of Army Group South in a pocket or "cauldron" west of the Dnieper river. During weeks of fighting, the two Red Army Fronts tried to eradicate the pocket; the subsequent Korsun battle eliminated the cauldron. According to Milovan Djilas, Konev openly boasted of his killing of thousands of German prisoners of war: "The cavalry finally finished them off. 'We let the Cossacks cut up as long as they wished. They even hacked off the hands of those who raised them to surrender' the Marshal recounted with a smile." For Konev's achievements in Ukraine, the Presidium promoted him to Marshal of the Soviet Union in February 1944. Konev was one of Stalin's favorite generals and one of the few senior commanders whom even Stalin admired for his ruthlessness. During 1944 Konev's armies advanced from Ukraine and Belarus into Poland and later into Czechoslovakia. In May 1944 he participated in an unsuccessful invasion of the Balkans, (the first Jassy–Kishinev Offensive) together with Generals Rodion Malinovsky and Fyodor Tolbukhin. By July he had advanced to the Vistula River in central Poland, and was