Russia-Belarus war games rattle NATO
US gear reaches Poland
MOSCOW, Sept 14, (Agencies): Russia on Thursday began major joint military exercises with Belarus along the European Union’s eastern flank — a show of strength that has rattled nervous NATO members.
Named Zapad-2017 (West-2017), the manoeuvres, scheduled to last until September 20, are taking place on the territory of Moscow’s closest ally Belarus, in Russia’s European exclave of Kaliningrad and in its frontier Pskov and Leningrad regions.
Moscow says the drills will involve 12,700 troops, 70 aircraft, 250 tanks and 10 battleships testing their firepower against an imaginary foe close to borders with Poland and the Baltic States. In a statement announcing the start of the exercises Russia’s defence ministry insisted the manoeuvres are “of a strictly defensive nature and are not directed against any other state or group of countries.”
But NATO claims Russia has kept it in the dark and seems to be massively underreporting the scale of the exercises, which some of the alliance’s eastern members insist could see more than 100,000 servicemen take part. The war games come with tensions between Russia and NATO at their highest since the Cold War due to the Kremlin’s meddling in Ukraine and the US-led alliance bolstering its forces in eastern Europe.
Moscow has dismissed fears over the drills — the latest in a series of annual exercises that rotate around the vast country — as fuelled by the “myth about the so-called ‘Russian threat’”.
Broke
But for NATO allies, especially jittery members such as Poland and the Baltic States which only broke free from Moscow’s grip 25 years ago, such reassurances have not dampened suspicion.
“We have seen before that military exercises have been used as a disguise for aggressive actions against neighbours,” NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview with Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti new agency released Thursday.
“We don’t see an imminent threat against any NATO ally, but the best way for Russia to help to reduce tensions and to avoid or prevent misunderstandings, miscalculations, is to be transparent.”
Moscow has held a stream of exercises since ties with the West plunged in 2014 over Ukraine, with the military claiming some drills included nearly 100,000 troops.
Minsk has said the games will role play a conflict with a made-up rebel region backed by neighbouring European nations. Russia says they will simulate assaults by “extremist groups” trying to carry out “terrorist attacks”.
Russian military expert Alexander Golts told AFP that Moscow “very skillfully manipulates the figures for such drills because it does not want to have to invite foreign observers”.
“Russia at every drill is working on one and the same scenario — how to deploy troops quickly,” he said.
The Kremlin has vigorously defended its right to hold exercises and has long blamed the United States for ratcheting up tensions by expanding NATO up to its borders and holding its own provocative drills.
The Russian war games come as Ukraine on Monday launched annual joint military exercises with the US and a host of other NATO countries.
Meanwhile non-aligned Sweden has mobilised 19,000 soldiers for its biggest drills in 20 years which also include units from across Scandinavia and the US.
“We can’t be totally calm. There is a large foreign army massed next to Lithuanian territory,” he told Reuters.
Some Western officials including the head of the US Army in Europe, Gen. Ben Hodges, have raised concerns that Russia might use the drills as a “Trojan horse” to make incursions into Poland and Russianspeaking regions in the Baltics.
Experts
NATO will send three experts to so-called ‘visitor days’ during the exercises, but a NATO official said these were no substitute for meeting internationallyagreed norm sat such exercises that include talking to soldiers and briefings.
Moscow says it is the West that threatens stability in eastern Europe because the US-led NATO alliance has put a 4,000-strong multinational force in the Baltics and Poland.
Wrong-footed by Moscow in the recent past, with Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its intervention in Syria’s war in 2015, NATO is distrustful of the Kremlin’s public message.
In Crimea, Moscow proved a master of “hybrid warfare”, with its mix of cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and use of Russian and local forces without insignia.
One senior European security official said Zapad would merge manoeuvres across Russia’s four western military districts in a “complex, multi-dimensional aggressive, anti-NATO exercise”.
“It is all smoke and mirrors,” the official said, adding that the Soviet-era Zapad exercises that were revived in 1999 had included simulated nuclear strikes on Europe.
NATO officials say they have been watching Russia’s preparations for months, including the use of hundreds of rail cars to carry tanks and other heavy equipment into Belarus.
As a precaution, the US Army has moved 600 paratroopers to the Baltics during Zapad and has taken over guardianship of the airspace of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which lack capable air forces and air defence systems.
Meanwhile, a shipment of US military equipment has been unloaded at a Baltic Sea port in Poland as Russia prepares to conduct war games across the border in Belarus.
American troops were deployed to bases across Poland this year on a rotating basis as reassurance amid Russia’s increased military activity.
Over 1,000 pieces of US equipment, including Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and selfpropelled howitzers, arrived at the port of Gdansk on Wednesday.
Thousands of Russian and Belarusian troops are set to participate in the weeklong Zapad-2017 military exercises starting Thursday in Belarus.
Leaders in Poland, the Baltic states, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria are concerned Russia might not pull back all of its soldiers after the drills.