Russia will flex its military muscles
and hold the world’s biggest war games since the cold war era next month,
including almost 300,000 troops and 1,000 aircraft, the defence ministry said,
leading Nato to warn of a “more assertive Russia”.
The Vostok-2018, or East 18, exercises simulating
large-scale warfare, which the Kremlin called “justified”, will be carried out
from September 11 to 15 in the country’s east, with troops from China and
Mongolia also taking part.
Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the exercises would
be similar in size to those held in September 1981 by the Soviet authorities,
called Zapad-81, or West 81.
Those were unprecedented at the time in
terms of the number of troops and military hardware, with around 100,000 troops
involved, Russian television reported.
“This will be something of a repeat of
Zapad-81, but in some senses even bigger,” Shoigu said in comments.
The war games come as Russia is hit by the
latest round of US sanctions and faces even harsher ones over its alleged role
in a nerve agent attack in Britain, with relations with the West at their
lowest ebb since the cold war.
Nato spokesman Dylan White said that since
Vostok-2018 would take place east of the Ural Mountains, Moscow was not obliged
to notify the West or invite observers from the Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, although an invitation had been extended to military
attaches.
The planned drill showed “a more assertive Russia, significantly
increasing its defence budget and its military presence,” White said.
Meanwhile Kremlin spokesman Dmitry
Peskov defended the drills telling journalists that spending state funds on the
country’s defence capabilities was “justified, necessary and the only option”,
despite the country’s economic problems.
Defence minister Shoigu said the drills
would be “on an unprecedented scale both in terms of the area covered and in
terms of the numbers” of military forces.
“More than 1,000 aircraft, almost 300,000
troops and almost all the firing ranges of the Central and Eastern military
districts” would be involved, he said.
“Imagine 36,000 pieces of military equipment
moving together at the same time – tanks, armoured personnel carriers, infantry
fighting vehicles. And all of this, of course, in conditions as close to combat
as possible.”
Russian troops underwent snap checks of their
combat-readiness last week and Russia has already sent around 30 fighter planes
to aerodromes in eastern Siberia, the defence ministry said.
Chinese troops have also begun arriving by train with their
equipment in the region east of Lake Baikal, the ministry said.