Russia's Future Soldier and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Look the Same

Russia's future soldier program, envisioning a cutting edge kit that the country's troops could wear into battle one day, has often produced concepts that look like they belong in a sci-fi film or a video game.

But new designs for futuristic armor shared recently by Russia's deputy prime minister have taken it a step further. They are almost identical to the cover of a computer game released six years ago.

Images posted on Twitter on Tuesday by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin depicted a full bodysuit concept for a Russian soldier. Rogozin shared the image as he announced he had hosted members of parliament at his military research agency.

The armor suit, complete with a visor helmet, flame- and water-resistant features and a multipurpose rifle, embodies the ideal that officials have repeatedly envisioned as the new generation of combat gear for the military. The image also closely resembles the cover art for a recent installment of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon game series.

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Art from the game, which is also called Future Soldier, features a serviceman facing toward the viewer, striking the same pose as Rogozin's image. The soldier holds a similar gun, sports a similar belt of flash-bang and smoke grenades around his waist, wears the same vest and several elements including the folds of one arm's sleeve are uncannily alike.

In the game art, the soldier sports an armor pad above his biceps, on top of which sits another flap with the game's logo and the flag of the United States. In the version posted by Rogozin, the features are also visible on the suit's sleeve but the area covered with insignia in the game is left blank.

Eagle-eyed Russian internet users spotted the similarities shortly after the minister's post. Digital news outlet TJournal posted a comparison between the two on Thursday. Russian meme site Lentach poked fun at the post, asking its followers on Twitter to "spot 10 differences" between the two images, while one of the first users to point to the striking similarity wrote that everyone had missed the worst part of Rogozin's post.

"That Russia's soldier of the future that Rogozin presented looks like a soldier from a computer game is not the worst thing," Philipp Kireev wrote on Twitter. Instead, pointing to the oddly shaped accessory mounted on the soldier's rifle, he concluded that "the worst thing is instead of a scope he has a bottle of vodka."

The concept image of the Russian suit has been circulating since around the time of computer game's release in 2012, and several news outlets in Russia and in Ukraine have accused Moscow's arms makers of getting lazy in their designs. Rostec has hit back, denying the company plagiarized the game's design. Instead, the company said that the similarities show a joint "movement toward the ideal."

Rostec's statement to Russian business channel RBC read: "The image of the soldier of the future today affects not only computer game manufacturers but also the developers of military equipment the world around.... To put it simply, the images of the soldier of the future that we see in sci-fi today, are the ideal towards which everyone is moving and which will one day be embodied not just in 3D computer graphics, but in reality."