“300,000 Troops and 900 Tanks: Russia’s Biggest Military Drills Since Cold War

Aug. 28, 2018

Pic: A Russian soldier patrolling near military vehicles in Moscow in April.Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

According to the New York Times, “Russia is mobilizing for its biggest military exercise since the height of the Cold War, the Kremlin says, citing a tense international climate that is “frequently aggressive and unfriendly toward us.”

The exercises, which are set to involve nearly 300,000 Russian troops, 1,000 aircraft and 900 tanks, will also include units from China for the first time. They will start on Sept. 11.

In a separate display of military power, Russia was reported on Tuesday to have assembled a large flotilla of warships off the coast of Syria. Russian news media outlets, citing unnamed defense ministry officials, described it is as Russia’s largest naval deployment in the area since Moscow first intervened in Syria’s civil war in September 2015.

The move follows a flurry of claims by Russia, unsupported by evidence, that the West is preparing to stage a fake chemical weapons attack inside Syria as a pretext for an assault on the forces of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Known as Vostok-2018 or East-2018, the September military exercises, involving land and air units, will begin near Russia’s eastern border with China and Mongolia. Both have agreed to join a series of regular exercises that used to be restricted to Russia and countries that were either once part of the Soviet Union or Soviet allies.

The participation of China, which will send helicopters and about 3,200 troops from the People’s Liberation Army, signals a significant reshaping of military exercises that began in the Soviet era. For decades they were aimed primarily at preparing the Red Army for a possible attack by or on China.

The Soviet Union and China clashed repeatedly along their long border in the late 1960s, nearly tumbling into all-out war. They remained bitter foes until the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev normalized relations with a visit to Beijing in 1989.

President Vladimir V. Putin, his ties with the West severely strained by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and military incursions into eastern Ukraine, has put a premium on developing ever closer ties with China as a counterweight and insurance policy against the United States.

Asked on Tuesday at a regular briefing with reporters why Vostok-2018 would be so big, a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said, “The country’s ability to defend itself in the current international situation, which is frequently quite aggressive and unfriendly toward us, is absolutely justified and has no alternative.”

Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying that the exercises in Russia’s far east would be the “biggest drill to take place in Russia since 1981.” That was the year large exercises known as Zapad, or West, were held by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.

The last iteration of the Zapad drills was held in September 2017 in conjunction with Belarus, the former Soviet republic and close Russian ally. That action unnerved the Baltic States and Poland, which feared that the fictional nations invented by Russian military planners as targets for a simulated attack were thinly disguised proxies for their own countries.

In the West, Russia faces off against NATO, but on its eastern flank, it has no obvious enemy or rival. The area has instead become a zone where Russia is keen to demonstrate its close ties to China, despite the risk that Russia’s weak economy and vast expanses of sparsely populated territory make it a vulnerable junior partner.

Alexander Gabuev, a China expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research group, said that while the scale of the exercises was significant, “what is most significant is that China is taking part in drills that Russia only used to do with its allies.”(italics ours)

“China was seen as the potential threat or target in exercises like Vostok,” Mr. Gabuev said, “but it is now being invited to join as a friend and even a quasi-ally. This is really unprecedented.”

All the same, he said, Chinese troops taking part in Vostok-2018 may well be restricted to a military training ground in Tsugol, near where the borders of China, Russia and Mongolia meet. That could allow a far bigger Russian contingent elsewhere to prepare for clashes with China.

Russia’s military, Mr. Gabuev said, “is not so naïve that it is not preparing a contingency plan” in case relations with China take a sudden turn for the worse, as has happened many times in the past.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/world/europe/russia-military-drills.html

Pray that Russia and China will not form a military alliance to threaten the West or other regions and nations.

Pray for 5:5:5

• 5 lost family, neighbors or friends
• 5 minutes of scripture-based prayer/day using the scriptures I prayed for you, listed below
• 5 days/week

Unite with 3 or 4 others once a week, ignite your home/office as a house of prayer, asking God how He wants you to reach/love on and serve the lost  ones for whom you are praying.

www.zumeproject.com is an excellent on line in life discipleship training tool that God can use to turn your HOP into a church planting movement of disciples worth multiplying.

Colin Millar, a “prayer igniter” living in Houston, Texas- This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.