Alwaght- Some 300,000 troops and tens of thousands vehicles, aircraft and warships are participating in the largest military exercise Russia has staged in 37 years. Units from China are to take part in the maneuvers as well.
According to reports, the Vostok 2018 exercise is meant to test the capability of the Russian military to rapidly move and deploy large forces over long distances as well as coordinating between several branches during a large-scale engagement.
The war games will include around 300,000 Russian soldiers and officers, including 6,000 airborne troops, over 1,000 warplanes, helicopters and drones, about 36,000 armor, and 80 combat and support ships.
The assets have been sent from all over Russia to several training ranges in the Far East of the country by railroad and military transport planes. Several units of the People’s Liberation Army of China will join the Russians for a drill at the Tsugol range.
For some participants, Vostok 2018 will be their first chance to show off some new weapon systems. For instance, the Airborne Troops will be deploying their freshly-supplied BMD-4M air-dropped infantry fighting vehicles and Patriot pickup trucks armed with Kornet anti-tank missiles. Meanwhile, the military engineers will be doing their best to confuse “the enemy” with inflatable mock-ups of Iskander missile launchers and S-300 anti-aircraft batteries.
The exercise will be witnessed by monitors from 57 nations as well as NATO and the European Union, according to Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin. He added that Russia informed NATO of the planned exercise months ahead of time during a meeting in May.
Exercises similar in scale have not been held since 1981 when the Zapad-81 drills that involved about 100,000 troops were held in the Soviet Union's Belarusian, Kiev and Baltic Military Districts and in the Baltic Sea.
The Vostok 2018 exercise will last until September 17. According to Chief of Russia’s General Staff Valery Gerasimov, its main purpose is to check the level of training that can be assessed only in an exercise of proper scale.
