Russia is gathering more and more military forces on the border with Ukraine. You can see the white “Z” on tanks and trucks. This is a non-standard way of marking vehicles, which causes bewilderment among specialists.
Commentators noted identification marks on military equipment. Moreover, the most diverse equipment, numbering in the hundreds of units, got into the shots: tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, MT-LB, self-propelled guns, heavy flamethrower systems and MLRS, self-propelled mine-clearing rocket launchers, fuel trucks and supply vehicles.
There are many theories as to what they mean.
Arik Toller of Bellingcat’s investigative reporting team said marking vehicles is an unconventional activity for the Russian military. “I assume the worst,” he wrote.
The Daily Beast’s Barbara Latza Nadeau reports that Western military experts are perplexed at the symbol’s meaning.
Some see such markings as similar to World War II. At that time, they were intended for aviation in order to prevent bombardment of units.
The fact is that the Ukrainian military uses many types of equipment, which is also in the Russian army. In order to prevent “friendly fire”, distinctive marks could have appeared on Russian equipment.
Among other explanations, there are those that say that this sign is the designation of the region in which the vehicle will be sent into battle.
At the same time, a conspiracy version is added that “Russia uses the Latin alphabet to confuse the enemy and the foreign public.” The media of Ukraine also write about this.
Generally speaking, some of these attempts to unravel the “unusual markings” of Russian military equipment have taken a wrong turn. Some authors, for example, explain to their readers that “the unusual marking of military equipment of the RF Armed Forces is that the letter Z is not in the Russian alphabet.”
Among some readers, it was also suggested that the Russian equipment marked with this symbol be called the “Zorro squad” and others assumed that part 2 of the World War Z movie is being filmed.
Now a new version is gaining popularity, according to which this is the encrypted date of February 22, 2022: ZZ 0Z ZZ.
It turns out that in order to create confusion, it is enough to depict such markings on several pieces of military equipment and carry out movements in the border regions of Russia with this symbolism.