Russia launches massive war games on Nato’s eastern flank

MOSCOW: Russia on Thursday began huge joint military exercises with Belarus along the European Union’s eastern flank in a show of strength that has rattled nervous Nato members.

Named Zapad-2017 (West-2017), the manoeuvres are scheduled to last until September 20. They are being conducted 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 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. Russia’s defence ministry insisted the manoeuvres were "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 could be massively underreporting the scale of the exercises, which some of the alliance’s eastern members say involves more than 100,000 servicemen. —