Just like the “good old days” in Eastern Europe…

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Russia kicks off war games as U.S., NATO watch anxiously

Western leaders have expressed concern about the size and scope of the Zapad exercises.

By DAVID FILIPOV | 4:02AM EDT - Thursday, September 14, 2017



MINSK, BELARUS — Russia on Thursday kicked off a week-long military exercise with its ally Belarus that has its NATO neighbors and the United States watching anxiously, but actually addresses one of Moscow's primary fears.

Shortly after Russia's Defense Ministry said the war games dubbed “Zapad”, or “West”, had begun, it announced that elements of its First Tank Army had been “put on alert” and moved into Belarus for the exercise. Airborne units stationed in Russia have also been put on alert and are getting ready to join the drills, the ministry said.

At a time of renewed Cold War-style tension between Russia and NATO, the symbolism couldn't have been more striking. The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact once used the Zapad exercises to prepare for war with the West; that tank army's job was to smash through NATO lines, including 300,000 U.S. troops.

The Russian announcement on Thursday was accompanied by a reassurance repeated by Moscow for weeks, that the current exercise is “of an entirely defensive nature and is not aimed at any other states”. The Russian scenario for the games is a separatist incursion into Belarus spurred on by three imaginary countries, Veishnoriya, Lubeniya and Vesbasriya — in which NATO observers and others recognize Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

Concerns in the Western alliance were raised by the apparent difference between official Russian figures about the size of the exercise — 12,700 troops and 680 pieces of military equipment, including 138 tanks — and Western estimates, based on troop and equipment movements,  that the number could range from 70,000 to as many as 100,000 participants.


Russian ships take part in the Zapad 2013 war games in the Baltic Sea. — Photograph: Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti/Kremlin/Reuters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, will appear on the sidelines of the drills this weekend, a sign of how important the drills are to the Russian leader, who has vowed to prevent “color revolutions” in the former Soviet region similar to the 2014 rebellions that established a pro-Western government in Ukraine.

The exercises — an update of Zapad war games held in 2009 and 2013 — show off a military that Putin has transformed into an effective force that has deployed to Syria and Ukraine in recent years.

The story line of the exercise sees militant groups linked to Veishnoriya and backed by the West cross the Belarus border, similar to the way “little green men”, widely assumed to be Russian soldiers, appeared in Ukraine in 2014 prior to Moscow's annexation of Crimea. The Russian forces cut off the insurgents access to the sea and air to prevent the Western coalition from providing backing to the separatists.

Western military officials have expressed concern that Zapad 2017 will serves as a “Trojan horse”, allowing Moscow to leave behind some of the military personnel and equipment it deployed for the drills. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told The Washington Post last week that Russia could build trust and head off possible accidents by being more transparent.


Protesters in Minsk, Belarus, take part in a rally on September 8th against the upcoming Zapad 2017 military exercises.
 — Photograph: Tatyana Zenkovich/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia EFE.

In Latvia, Foreign Minister ­Edgars Rinkevics told The Post that the country's leaders are “not panicking” but are being “cautious” because “what we are seeing is that the exercises are of an offensive nature, they are exercising access and area denial, they are exercising against at least four NATO member states under the pretext that they are fighting [separatists].”

NATO, which has been conducting its own exercises in Europe this summer, has stationed four battalions — including U.S. troops — in the Baltic states and Poland.

Western officials in the Baltics last week said they saw the games as a rehearsal of the capability to seal off Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and deny access to the Baltic Sea to NATO forces attempting to come to their rescue. They also see a larger strategic goal: to demonstrate to U.S. and NATO leaders the high cost of defending the Baltics, and thus bringing into question the viability of the alliance.

In Belarus, the country's small opposition, which fears Moscow could leave its troops in order to head off any attempt to remove Lukashenko from power, last week held a protest over the presence the Russian military.

• Ishaan Tharoor in Washington and Michael Birnbaum in Brussels contributed to this report.

• David Filipov is The Washington Post's bureau chief in Moscow, focusing on Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union. He previously reported for The Boston Globe from Boston, Russia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: Russia and Belarus hold joint military exercise

 • What you need to know about Russia's huge military exercise

 • Fear and confidence in the face of Russian war games

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russian-war-games-aim-to-head-off-another-color-revolution/2017/09/14/53aa93d8-9896-11e7-af6a-6555caaeb8dc_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

What would a Russia-NATO war look like?
Russia's war-gaming it right now.

NATO expressed concern about the size of the war games,
which Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally observing.

By DAVID FILIPOV, MICHAEL BRNBAUM and ANDREW ROTH | 4:01PM EDT - Monday, September 18, 2017


Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces
Valery Gerasimov, second right, watch a military exercise at a training ground at the Luzhsky Range, near St. Petersburg, September 18th.
 — Photograph: Mikhail Klimentyev/Associated Press.

LUGA, RUSSIA — A revitalized Russian military on Monday sent tanks, paratroopers, artillery, anti-aircraft weapons, jets and helicopters into frigid rains to engage the forces of a mock enemy called the “Western Coalition”. The barrage of firepower , part of war games that began last week,  was an explosive show of force that Baltic leaders said was a simulation of an attack against NATO forces in Eastern Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the field on Monday, skipping the 72nd U.N. General Assembly in favor of the military exercises held jointly with Belarus. The muscle-flexing, which began on Thursday, highlights the lethality of a fighting force that has taken a crash course of reforms and upgrades over the last decade.

In response, U.S. fighter jets in Lithuania have been scrambling nearly daily to inspect Russian activity over the Baltic Sea.

“It gets your blood pumping,” U.S. Air Force Lietenant Colonel Clinton Guenther, commander of a beefed-up NATO deployment of fighters in the Baltic country, said of the scrambling.

The Zapad war games — the word means “West” in Russian — focus on a hostile imaginary country called Veishnoria, which resembles a slice of the western part of Belarus with the biggest Catholic population and the highest prevalence of the Belarusan language. Veishnoria, along with two imaginary allies that appear to be stand-ins for the Baltics, attempts regime change in the Belarusan capital, Minsk, then foments separatism in parts of Belarus.

The Baltic countries that would be on the front lines of any potential Western conflict with Russia say that the exercises are only nominally about separatism and are mainly intended to leave them rattled.

“Russia is still trying to demonstrate force and aggression in its relations to its neighbors,” Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said in an interview.

But deployments this year of about 4,000 NATO troops across the Baltics and Poland leave the region far more confident that Russia will hold back from direct military confrontation, she said.

“We are prepared as never before. It's incomparable with 2009 or 2013, the years of the other most recent Western-facing exercises,” she said. NATO deployed troops and further bolstered its military presence in the region after Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Moscow has insisted that the exercises would rehearse a strictly defensive scenario and involve no more than 12,700 troops, just below the level that would require Russia to allow NATO observers under an international agreement. NATO leaders have said that the exercise may actually involve up to 100,000 troops.

For Russia, the exercises are a chance to exhibit the new strength of its military, which has undergone a decade-long modernization and deeply desires to shed its reputation as the creaky, inefficient successor of the Soviet Red Army. Military officials sought to show the success of the exercises despite the adverse weather conditions.

Putin arrived by helicopter at the Luzhsky military training range on Monday afternoon to observe the exercises. He did not give public statements, but let Russia's guns speak for him. If the yearly parade of Russian missiles and tanks on Victory Day in Red Square is a moment for pomp and circumstance, the Zapad war games are supposed to display the efficiency and strength of the renewed, and battle-tested, Russian military.

On Monday, the exercises began with the Russians launching a desperate defense: Tracer bullets sailed over a muddy field, while antiaircraft guns released salvos to down enemy drones and cruise missiles. Russia launched short-range ballistic missiles, naval forces and its newest Ka-52 attack helicopters. After repelling the invasion, the Russian forces launched a T-72-tank-led counteroffensive. (In the end, the Russians won.)

Military commanders said that 95 foreign representatives from 50 countries, including NATO member states, attended the exercises. They also sought to underline Russian aviation's ability to maintain combat operations in poor weather, with two flights of four Sukhoi ­Su-24M bombers carrying out airstrikes in the driving rain.

“The strike on ground targets was complicated by weather conditions: heavy precipitation, low clouds, and strong gusts of wind,” a Russian Defense Ministry report said. The planes dropped 250-kilogram high-explosive fragmentation bombs. The pilots destroyed ground targets imitating infrastructure, fortifications and convoys of the simulated enemy, it said.

In the first phase of the exercises, which ended over the weekend, Russian and Belarusan forces defended civilian infrastructure from enemy cruise missiles in co-ordination with ground-based air defense. With the diversionary force defeated, Russia went on the offensive for phase two.

The top U.S. general in Europe said that NATO was being vigilant about the war games but that he had not “seen anything that indicates it being anything other than an exercise.”

In Tirana, Albania, Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, who is also the supreme allied commander of NATO, said he had seen no evidence that Russia might leave a force in the Baltic region after the exercises conclude.

Scaparrotti did say the exercises were “larger than what they told us.”

“It's following in line with what we've seen with these annual exercises in the past. They're usually very large. They're usually initially defensive in nature but also have an offensive portion thereafter that looks to me like a rehearsal of an attack,” Scaparrotti added. “That's worrisome if you're a NATO country on the border.”

One Lithuanian army officer, Lietenant Colonel Linas Idzelis, said that some of his civilian friends considered planning vacations around the exercises, so that they would be outside the country in case of invasion. He said he told them they should not be concerned.

Putin's arrival at the war games came as world leaders and diplomats gathered in New York for the U.N. General Assembly.

In recent months, the U.N. Security Council has seen angry confrontations between Russia and the United States over alleged hacking in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as well as the international response to the North Korean nuclear program.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday that Putin's absence was not a snub to the United Nations.

“Indeed, this year the president's schedule did not allow him to participate in the General Assembly session, and he does not take part every year. So there's nothing unusual in this case,” Peskov said.

• Michael Birnbaum reported from Vilnius, Lithuania, and Andrew Roth reported from Moscow. Thomas Gibbons-Neff in Tirana contributed to this report.

• David Filipov is The Washington Post's bureau chief in Moscow, focusing on Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union. He previously reported for The Boston Globe from Boston, Russia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

• Michael Birnbaum is The Washington Post's Brussels bureau chief. He previously served as the bureau chief in Moscow and in Berlin, and was an education reporter.

• Andrew Roth is a reporter in The Washington Post's Moscow bureau.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: Russia defeats ‘Western Coalition’ in military exercises

 • What pro-democracy activists in Belarus fear most about the war games

 • The enemy is clear in Russia and Belarus war games

 • Russia and Belarus launch war games

 • Fear and confidence in the face of Russian war games

 • Putin is using the defeat of Hitler to show why Russia needs him

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/putin-watches-as-russias-military-exercises-turn-up-the-firepower/2017/09/18/8099f4fa-9bb7-11e7-b2a7-bc70b6f98089_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

I might have to dig out my DVD copies of “Strategic Air Command”, “Bombers B-52” and “Doctor Strangelove” (I've got that last one on BluRay as well as DVD) and watch them for a bit of nostalgia and good old time's sake. Nothing like a bit of “cold war paranoia” for its entertainment value, eh?

[Donald]

I just feel sorry for people who's life is so boring that they need to repeatedly watch the same move...😳

...living on the environment due ehhhhh👌

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Russia held a big military exercise this week.
Here's why the U.S. is paying attention.

NATO leaders are assessing Russia's military capability, which is in a period of change.

By MICHAEL BIRNBAUM and DAVID FILIPOV | 5:37PM EDT - Saturday, September 23, 2017


Military jet flies during the joint Russia-Belarus strategic military exercises Zapad 2017 near Borysow in Belarus on September 20th.
 — Photograph: Tatiana Zenkovich/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia EFE.

VILNIUS, LITHUANIA — The vast Russian military exercises that ended this week showed off a muscular fighting force practicing state-on-state warfare, NATO's deputy military commander said, in one of the first assessments of a large-scale operation that put Russia's neighbors on nervous alert.

The Zapad exercise, which rehearsed a conflict along Russia's western borders, showed off a force that was marshaling itself “probably more quickly, more efficiently, with this underlying message that if you thought we were in decay, we're not,” NATO's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, British General James Everard, said in an interview.

The exercise, whose active phase ended on Wednesday, is an every-four-years effort that was held this month for the first time since Russia in 2014 annexed Crimea from Ukraine then sparked war in the eastern part of the country. Because Russia used exercises as cover ahead of both its operations in Ukraine and its 2008 invasion of Georgia, its neighbors were cautious this time as the Kremlin fired up its military machine.

Now Western allies are sifting through intelligence reports and starting the arduous work of assessing Russia's military capability, which is deep into a reform that has translated the force from a neglected and struggling group into one that for two years has been able to project power into Syria, far from Russia's borders.

Everard said that the first formal assessments would likely not be ready before the end of October. But he said that some of the basics of effective large-scale warfare — an ability to pick up and move large numbers of troops, and then command them effectively — were on clear display.

“You see a recognition in the Russian hierarchy that if you are going to have a foundation of military force behind your stratagem, and I think they do, then it needs to work,” he said.

Military analysts also said the exercise was a chance for the Kremlin to shoot a message straight to the Pentagon and its allies that Russia has a formidable fighting force capable of mobilizing across its enormous territory — and it needs to be reckoned with.

But if the exercises showed off a Russian military that is much better trained and equipped than at any point since the Soviet collapse, the scenario of the exercises — an enemy from the West tries to overthrow the government in Moscow's ally, Belarus, and is beaten back — also may reveal Russia's greatest handicap.

Moscow says it is convinced it is under threat of assault by a hostile force in the West that is determined to bring its military to Russia's borders. This, as President Vladimir Putin sees it, has already been done in the Baltics. He believes the United States and NATO were the instigators of street protests that forced Ukraine's president to flee to Russia in 2014.

Viewed from that perspective, Zapad was intended to reinforce a point Putin made in December: That Russia is “stronger than any aggressor.”

“Russia is acting on a faulty threat assessment and seeks to fashion a military response to largely imaginary threats and challenges that are not military in nature,” said Vladimir Frolov, an independent foreign policy analyst based in Moscow. “It's all about strategic messaging of coercion and compellence directed at the U.S. and NATO, to prevent things the West has no intention of doing or the capability to accomplish.”

NATO says it is a defensive alliance and creates no military threat to Russia. Many NATO officials disbelieve the Kremlin's stated concerns, saying they are an excuse to practice for war against the West.

Although Russia publicly declared that the exercises were small enough to exempt them from international transparency obligations, most Western observers said that the concurrence of drills and joint exercises across Russia's vast territory made them far larger than what was formally announced. The Russian and Chinese navies drilled in the east. The Russian military exercised in Central Asia. Bomber flights ranged over the Norwegian Sea. Paratroopers were active far above the Arctic Circle.

Adding a nuclear edge to the war gaming, Russia carried out two tests of its new intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-24, the first two days before Zapad began and the second on the culminating day of the exercise.

Western officials are still trying to estimate how many troops took part in the exercises. Some security officials and analysts ventured initial guesses that Zapad may have been a smaller exercise than other major efforts in recent years, although they said it was still a significant event.

“It was effectively a national-level military operation,” said Igor Sutyagin, a senior research fellow for Russian studies at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based security think tank. He said his initial estimate was that between 65,000 and 72,000 troops took part.


Servicemen take part in the joint Russian-Belarusian military exercises Zapad-2017 (West-2017) at a training ground
near the town of Borisov on September 20th. — Photograph: Sergei Gapon/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

Putin, who viewed a mock battle involving tanks, missiles, air power and paratroopers at a firing range in Luga, northwestern Russia, also watched a broadcast of Russia's new Iskander-M missile being launched from a firing range in southern Russia to a target in Kazakhstan some 300 miles away. The weapons were not only a fearsome show of Russian firepower, they were also a sparkling advertisement for the nation's arms exporters.

“The president was very positive about the conduct and the result of that event,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on Friday.

As the exercise unfolded, the Pentagon stepped up the presence of U.S. forces in the region. The U.S.-led heavy armored battalion deployed to Poland was in the process of rotating, meaning it was temporarily doubled. The U.S. Air Force sent three extra F-15 fighter jets to patrol the skies over the Baltics. And nearly 500 U.S. Army troops fanned across the Baltics for the month of September to do exercises.

“We train hard to have a combat edge, and that has a deterrent effect,” said Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Jones, the commanding officer of the Germany-based U.S. Army squadron doing the troop exercises in the Baltics.

Some of the Russian military capabilities seen by NATO leaders confirmed their pre-existing concerns.

“In 24 to 48 hours, some parts of the Russian armed forces could be ready to invade one Baltic state or all of them,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis said in an interview. “It's clear that it's not only defense but it's also about offense.”

Part of the exercise rehearsed cutting off the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from the rest of NATO, Latvian Defense Minister Raimonds Bergmanis told Latvia's LETA news agency. That is a nightmare scenario for the alliance because Russia has stationed powerful anti-aircraft missile systems in its exclave of Kaliningrad, creating challenges for any Western attempt to retake the region.

Despite the Western worries, the training may not have been flawless.

“What had been expected but did not happen was the demonstration of readiness of the newly formed divisions, which adds credibility to the proposition … that they are rather far from being combat-capable,” said Pavel Baev, who studies the Russian military at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

Other embarrassing incidents included a Tu-22M long-range bomber overshooting a runway and a misfiring rocket from a Ka-52 attack helicopter that hit spectators.

The “Russian Air Force is feeling the pressure of the protracted deployment in Syria,” Baev said. “Typically, maintenance is the weakest link, and accidents multiply,” he said.

Still, during the exercise, top military and security officials held daily briefings to prepare for the worst-case scenario of an invasion, even as they said they thought it was unlikely one would occur.

“As a human being, when you see such events close to your country, you always think, ‘what if?’” said Lithuanian Colonel Mindaugas Steponavicius, the commander of the Iron Wolf Brigade, Lithuania's core fighting force.

Earlier this year, NATO deployed battalions of about 1,000 troops to each Baltic nation and Poland, a step that alliance leaders hoped would ease the risk that Russia would try to seize any territory from those nations.

“We all hoped that the Cold War or something comparable would never happen again,” said German Army Lieutenant Colonel Thorsten Gensler, the commander of the German-led, multinational NATO battalion that has deployed to Lithuania to dissuade Russia from attacking NATO territory. “So it is a kind of deja vu for me to be here.”

• David Filipov reported from Luga, Russia.

• Michael Birnbaum is The Washington Post's Brussels bureau chief. He previously served as the bureau chief in Moscow and in Berlin, and was an education reporter.

• David Filipov is The Washington Post's bureau chief in Moscow, focusing on Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union. He previously reported for The Boston Globe from Boston, Russia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Russia threatens retaliatory strikes against U.S. troops and their allies in Syria

 • What would a Russia-NATO war look like? Russia's wargaming it right now.

 • Here's what pro-democracy activists in Belarus fear most about Russia's war games

 • Russia and Belarus launch war games aimed at holding the line against the West

 • Fear and confidence in the face of Russian war games

 • The Baltics' tangled geography that has both sides feeling surrounded

 • Near Russia's border with the Baltics, soldiers on both sides are practicing for war

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-held-a-big-military-exercise-this-week-heres-why-the-us-is-paying-attention/2017/09/23/3a0d37ea-9a36-11e7-af6a-6555caaeb8dc_story.html

[Donald]

Oh..must have pulled the troops out of eastern Ukraine for the weekend🙄