Russia to hold biggest military drill since fall of the Soviet Union

Russia will next month hold its biggest war games since the fall of the Soviet Union, defence minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday, a massive military exercise that will also involve the Chinese and Mongolian armies.

The exercise, called Vostok2018 (East-2018), will take place in central and eastern Russian military districts and involve almost 300,000 troops, more than 1,000 military aircraft, two of Russia’s naval fleets, and all of its airborne units, Shoigu said in a statement.

The manoeuvres will take place at a time of heightened tension between the West and Russia, which is concerned about what it says is an unjustified build-up of the Nato military alliance on its western flank.

Nato says it has beefed up its forces in eastern Europe to deter potential Russian military action after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 and backed a pro-russian uprising in eastern Ukraine.

The war games, which will take place from September 11-15, are likely to worry Japan, which has already complained about a Russian military build-up in the Far East, something Moscow has linked to Tokyo’s roll-out of the Aegis US missile system.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is due to attend a forum in Vladivostok over the same period, and a Japanese official said Tokyo always paid attention to shifts in Russian-chinese military cooperation.

Shoigu said the war games would be the biggest since a Soviet military exercise, Zapad-81 (West-81) in 1981.

Shoigu said that both Russia’s Pacific and Northern Fleets would take part, while the defence ministry said Chinese and Mongolian military units will also participate.