Is Russia’s war drill preparation for another invasion?

RUSSIA has simulated an all-out war against Nato that involved bombing Germany and invading the Baltic states, defence analysts claimed yesterday.

They said the ‘West 2017’ exercises in September were practice for a shock military campaign.

Tens of thousands of troops carried out drills near the Belarus capital Minsk with artillery, tanks, rocket launchers and air and navy raids.

There were fears at the time that Moscow was using the war game as cover to station soldiers and equipment in Belarus. But analysts from two Western spy agencies now claim the exercises were a dry run for an attack on Nato.

The drills rehearsed the capture of the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – as well as Poland, Norway and the non-aligned states of Sweden and Finland, the experts told the German newspaper Bild.

Moscow has repeatedly said the exercises were purely defensive and were not aimed at targeting a third country or group of countries. But the analysts told Bild the drills were essentially a practice run for a ‘full-scale conventional war against Nato’.

They said the drills concerned the capture of the Suwalki Gap, a small area of Nato Polish-Lithuanian land between Belarus and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

During the war game, this territory was ‘invaded’ and named ‘Veyshnoria’. The experts said Russia practised ‘neutralising or seizing air fields and harbours so there are no reinforcements arriving from other Nato states’.

The analysts said Russian planes flew over the North Sea, Germany and the Netherlands for two days to rehearse taking out airports, power reactors and naval bases.

‘They exercised bombings of western European targets, approaching the German and Dutch coast from the North Sea as well as Swedish, Finnish and Polish mainland from the Baltic Sea,’ the sources said. ‘The drill included waves of Tu-95 strategic bombers as well as support aircraft like fighter jets and refuelling planes.’

President Vladimir Putin watched a 45-minute display of firepower as part of the exercise at the Luga firing range, about 110km from Russia’s border with EU member state Estonia. Russia claimed only around 13,000 troops were involved in the exercise – meaning it stayed below the international threshold that requires large numbers of outside observers. But Western officials believe up to 100,000 military personnel may have taken part.

Western relations with Moscow have reached their worst level since the Cold War following Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, a conflict which has left 10,000 dead.

The previous west-facing war game took place in 2013, just before Russia invaded Crimea.

Earlier this year Nato deployed four battalion-size battlegroups of 4,530 soldiers to Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which border on Belarus and Russia.

The 29-nation Western alliance also has an air-policing mission over the Baltic republics.

As a precaution, the US army has moved 600 paratroopers to the Baltics and has taken over guardianship of the airspace of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which lack capable air forces and air-defence systems.

American troops have also been deployed to bases across Poland this year on a rotating basis.