A new era of transparent warfare beckons

ON FEBRUARY 4TH one of the four satellites operated by Maxar, a company based in Colorado which photographs more than 3m square kilometres of the Earth every day, took pictures of a Russian military camp in Rechitsa, Belarus. Rows of military vehicles were laid out neatly over a thick carpet of snow less than 50km from the border with Ukraine. On February 14th a sister satellite took another picture of Rechitsa. The snow had gone; so, too, had most of the vehicles (see above).