A ship of the Russian Baltic Fleet in Kronstadt has been painted with an unusual camouflage paint that mimics urban development and building facades. The occupants' calculation is that the "residential sector" camouflage will prevent optical target recognition systems and artificial intelligence algorithms from identifying military vessels.
A ship of the Russian Baltic Fleet in Kronstadt has been painted with an unusual camouflage paint that mimics urban development and building facades. The occupants' calculation is that the "residential sector" camouflage will prevent optical target recognition systems and artificial intelligence algorithms from identifying military vessels.
This is evidenced by photos of OSINT researcher Massimo Frantarelli. Experimental camouflage was spotted in the summer of 2026 on small anti-submarine ships of the 1331-M project, reports "Militarnyi".
The key focus of the Russian experiment was the creation of a pattern that resembles a mixture of the facade of a house and the embankment. According to the plan, such a pattern should allow the ship to "merge" with the coastal architecture and urban landscape of the port. At the same time, part of the hull was deliberately painted black in order to visually "break" the silhouette and blur the dimensions of the ship. In addition to the "house" camouflage, the Russian military is testing patterns such as "zebra" and geometric Dazzle, and also installing homemade anti-drone nets on the deckhouses and torpedo tubes.
All of these solutions are designed to confuse computer vision neural networks that search for characteristic silhouettes and vulnerable nodes of naval equipment during automatic guidance. However, the effectiveness of such imitation camouflage against modern autonomous guidance systems in combat conditions remains unconfirmed.
In 2023, researchers reported that the Russian military was painting ships in a new camouflage that helps hide their true length and shape when analyzing satellite data. However, at that time, Satim, an image analysis company, was able to find and identify important Russian ships using AI .
