Russia gears up for biggest military excercises in four decades
Russia will hold its biggest war games in nearly four decades next month as part of a massive military exercise that will also involve Chinese and Mongolian troops.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the exercise, called Vostok-2018, would take place in the central and eastern Russian military districts and would involve roughly 300,000 troops, over 1,000 aircraft, two naval fleets and every single Russian airborne unit.
The manoeuvres, which will take place between 11 and 15 September, come amid heightened tensions between the West and Russia, which has complained about a recent build-up of NATO forces along its western borders.
NATO claims to have bolstered its forces in eastern Europe as a deterrent against an aggression after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Shoigu proclaimed the war games would be the region's biggest since Zapad-81, a Soviet military exercise held in 1981.
"In some ways, they will repeat aspects of Zapad-81, but in other ways, the scale will be bigger," Shoigu said.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has said that Chinese and Mongolian military units will also take part in the exercise and when asked if its southern neighbour's involvement meant that Moscow and Beijing were en route to forming an alliance, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it showed the allies were cooperating in all areas.
While China and Russia have taken part in military drills in the past, never had they done so on such a large scale.
NATO said that Russia had briefed it on the exercise earlier in the year, that it planned to monitor the games and that Russia had even invited military attaches from NATO countries based in Moscow to observe the war games.