ammunition out of Czechoslovakia on a supposed logistics exercise; and confining most of their soldiers to barracks across the northern Warsaw Pact area. The Czechoslovak authorities thus did not suspect anything when two Aeroflot airliners made unscheduled landings at night, full of "fit young men". The men cleared customs and travelled to the Soviet Embassy in the centre of Prague. There they picked up weapons and returned to the airport, taking over the main buildings. They at once allowed further aircraft to land uniformed Spetsnaz and airborne troops, who took over key buildings across Prague before dawn. Reinforcements were then brought in by road, in complete radio silence, leaving NATO electronic warfare units "confused and frustrated". Ukraine, 2014 The 2014 annexation of Crimea was described in the West as maskirovka. As the BBC writer, Lucy Ash put it: "Five weeks later, once the annexation had been rubber-stamped by the Parliament in Moscow, Putin admitted Russian troops had been deployed in Crimea after all. But the lie had served its purpose. Maskirovka is used to wrong-foot your enemies, to keep them guessing." The area was swiftly occupied by so-called little green men, armed men in military trucks who came at night, with no insignia, so that even pro-Russian activists did not understand what was happening. They were later revealed as Russian special forces, but at the time Vladimir Putin denied this. Time magazine reported in April 2014 that the troops in eastern Ukraine described themselves as Cossacks, whereas analysts in Ukraine and the West considered at least some of them to be Russian special forces. Their obscure origins made them seem more menacing and harder to deal with. The article observed that the wearing of face masks (actually, balaclavas) was typical of the Russian tradition of military deception, making asking why they were worn, as one masked separatist remarked, "a stupid question". In April 2014, the Huffington Post asserted that "President Putin's game plan in Ukraine becomes clearer day by day despite Russia's excellent, even brilliant, use of its traditional maskirovka". The subsequent war in the Donbas region of Ukraine has also been described as a Russian maskirovka campaign. As with Crimea, the conflict began when armed 'rebel' forces without military insignia began seizing government infrastructure. Unlike the action in Crimea, there were no Russian military bases to deploy soldiers from. Support for Russia amongst the local population was not as