The annual Rapid Trident military exercises, taking place in the western Ukrainian city of Yavoriv until September 23, involve an "unprecedented" number of 2,500 soldiers from 15 countries (AFP Photo/Yuri DYACHYSHYN)

Kiev (AFP) - Ukraine on Monday launched joint military exercises with the United States and a host of other NATO countries as its bitter rival Russia gears up for its own war games on the EU border.

The annual Rapid Trident military exercises, taking place in the western Ukrainian city of Yavoriv until September 23, involve an "unprecedented" number of 2,500 soldiers from 15 countries, the Ukrainian military said in a statement.

"Today, your support is very important for us. The experience of our colleagues is extremely valuable for the Ukrainian army," Colonel Sergei Litvinov, the exercises co-director on the Ukrainian side, said.

The Ukraine drills began days ahead of Moscow's massive military exercise "Zapad 2017" ("West") in neighbouring Russia and Belarus.

The event has caused alarm in the Baltic states and Poland and drawn criticism from the United States and NATO for a lack of transparency.

Russia has said the exercises will involve about 12,700 Russian and Belarusian troops and are "purely defensive" in nature, but critics say there could be as many as 100,000 soldiers taking part.

NATO has also deployed about 1,000 soldiers in each of the Baltic states and Poland in response to growing concern over Russian intentions after Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

The peninsula annexation was followed by Russian-backed insurgency in the Ukraine's war-torn east that has killed more than 10,000 people.

Kiev and the West have accused Russia of buttressing the rebels and sending in regular troops across the border, claims Moscow has repeatedly denied.

On Friday, Kiev reported the first combat death since the warring sides agreed to a new truce in August after a series of previous such deals failed to bring any tangible results.</s>TALLINN/VILNIUS (Reuters) - From planes, radars and ships in the Baltics, NATO officials say they are watching Russia’s biggest war games since 2013 with “calm and confidence”, but many are unnerved about what they see as Moscow testing its ability to wage war against the West.

NATO eFP battlegroup soldiers attend a sniper shooting competition in Rukla, Lithuania September 13, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

NATO believes the exercises, officially starting on Thursday in Belarus, the Baltic Sea, western Russia and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, are already underway. It says they are larger than Moscow has publicized, numbering some 100,000 troops, and involve firing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

Codenamed Zapad or “West”, NATO officials say the drills will simulate a conflict with the U.S.-led alliance intended to show Russia’s ability to mass large numbers of troops at very short notice in the event of a conflict.

“NATO remains calm and vigilant,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last week during a visit to an Estonian army base where British troops have been stationed since March.

But Lithuania’s Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis was less sanguine, voicing widely-felt fears that the drills risk triggering an accidental conflict or could allow Moscow to leave troops in neighboring Belarus.

“We can’t be totally calm. There is a large foreign army massed next to Lithuanian territory,” he told Reuters.

Some Western officials including the head of the U.S. Army in Europe, Gen. Ben Hodges, have raised concerns that Russia might use the drills as a “Trojan horse” to make incursions into Poland and Russian-speaking regions in the Baltics.

The Kremlin firmly rejects any such plans. Russia says some 13,000 troops from Russia and Belarus will be involved in the Sept. 14-20 drills, below an international threshold that requires large numbers of outside observers.

NATO will send three experts to so-called ‘visitor days’ during the exercises, but a NATO official said these were no substitute for meeting internationally-agreed norms at such exercises that include talking to soldiers and briefings.

Moscow says it is the West that threatens stability in eastern Europe because the U.S.-led NATO alliance has put a 4,000-strong multinational force in the Baltics and Poland.

Wrong-footed by Moscow in the recent past, with Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its intervention in Syria’s war in 2015, NATO is distrustful of the Kremlin’s public message.

In Crimea, Moscow proved a master of “hybrid warfare”, with its mix of cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and use of Russian and local forces without insignia.

One senior European security official said Zapad would merge manoeuvres across Russia’s four western military districts in a “complex, multi-dimensional aggressive, anti-NATO exercise”.

“It is all smoke and mirrors,” the official said, adding that the Soviet-era Zapad exercises that were revived in 1999 had included simulated nuclear strikes on Europe.

NATO officials say they have been watching Russia’s preparations for months, including the use of hundreds of rail cars to carry tanks and other heavy equipment into Belarus.

As a precaution, the U.S. Army has moved 600 paratroopers to the Baltics during Zapad and has taken over guardianship of the airspace of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which lack capable air forces and air defense systems.

NATO’S NEXT MOVE?

Russia’s military show of force raises some uncomfortable questions for the alliance because NATO cannot yet mass large numbers of troops quickly, despite the United States’ military might, NATO officials and diplomats said.

NATO, a 29-nation defense pact created in 1949 to deter the Soviet threat, has already begun its biggest modernization since the Cold War, sending four battalions to the Baltics and Poland, setting up an agile, high-readiness spearhead force, and developing its cyberspace defenses.

But NATO has deliberately taken a slowly-slowly approach to its military build-up to avoid being sucked into a new arms race, even as Russia has stationed anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles in Kaliningrad, the Black Sea and Syria.

“The last thing we want is a military escalation with Russia,” said one senior NATO official involved in military planning, referring to Zapad.

In the event of any potential Russian incursion into the Baltics or Poland, NATO’s new multinational forces would quickly need large reinforcements. But a 40,000-strong force agreed in 2015 is still being developed, officials say.

Lithuania’s Karoblis said he hoped to see progress by the next summit of NATO leaders in July 2018.

Slideshow (7 Images)

Baltic politicians want more discretion given to NATO to fight any aggressor in the event of an attack, without waiting for the go-ahead from allied governments.

During Zapad, NATO is taking a low-key approach by running few exercises, including an annual sniper exercise in Lithuania. Only non-NATO member Sweden is holding a large-scale drill.

NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Everard told Reuters there was no need to mirror Zapad. “It’s not a competition,” he said during a visit to NATO forces in Latvia.</s>The large-scale Russian military exercise known as Zapad, which started in Belarus on Thursday, is already a propaganda success: It has alarmed Russia’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization neighbors and garnered so much Western media coverage that one might think it was an actual combat operation. But it has also provided an important insight into the fears of the Russian and Belarusian rulers, fears that are not necessarily groundless.

To Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, the exercise is meant to “frighten” her country. To Finnish Defense Minister Jussi Niinisto, it’s about “information warfare” (“Western countries have taken the bait completely, they’ve plugged the exercises so much,” he said recently). To military experts, the quadrennial exercise is a chance to see how much the Russian army has progressed since 2013, when the last Zapad was held. To me, the most intriguing part of the exercise is its storyline.

It places a small, hostile and, most importantly, imaginary nation called Veyshnoria in the western part of Belarus — the part of the country with the biggest Catholic population and the highest prevalence of the Belarusian language, which voted nationalist in the country’s last free election in 1994, as Belarusian economist Sergei Chaly pointed out in a recent Facebook post. That’s a clear indication of what could spark war between Russia and the West, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and their generals.

The scenario they seem to have in mind starts with Western powers destabilizing Belarus the way they, in Putin’s view, destabilized Ukraine in 2014. Within Putin’s worldview, Ukraine is now split into a U.S.-controlled part and the bit held by pro-Russian rebels in the east. That’s the idea behind Veyshnoria, too — and it’s not entirely fictional. Pro-Western and nationalist activists in Belarus have welcomed “Veyshnoria” gleefully, creating a website and social network feeds for it. It’s all facetious, of course, but behind it is a dream of a Belarus — or even a part of Belarus — that belongs to the Western world and is moving toward NATO and European Union membership. The Belarusians who post about Veyshnorian history, politics and even economy, are doing it just a tiny bit wistfully, imagining how their country could have been if not for Lukashenko.

To the Belarusian dictator, and to the Kremlin, these are symptoms of covert Western influence operations, the kind that led to the Ukrainian revolution. Only if the same happens in Belarus, Russia intends to interfere more forcefully. And if it does, it expects a military response from the U.S., given Belarus’ proximity to the Baltic states, which the U.S. has vowed to defend. As Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and fellow at the Kennan Institute, told me:

“Belarus is 100 percent the most likely cause of a fight between Russia and the U.S. When you look at the spread of conflict scenarios, Belarus is Russia’s red line and the Baltics are the U.S. red line. The U.S. line is easy not to cross; Belarus on the other hand can fall victim to all sorts of crises and the Russian fear is that neighboring countries will play games that ultimately result in war.”

To Kofman, the current Zapad exercise continues a line of Russian signaling to the West that began with NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, during the Kosovo war. “It was the seismic event from which Russian threat perceptions have never recovered,” he says. During that air campaign, Russia saw the U.S. technological superiority. The U.S. military, it found, could act anywhere with almost total impunity. So ever since, Russia has been trying to come up with a response, should the U.S. intervene in what it sees as its sphere of influence — in response to Russian attempts to secure that sphere. The storyline of the Zapad exercise means the Kremlin considered a more forceful U.S. response to Russian interference in Ukraine a possibility, though perhaps a remote one. In the same way, it’s a possibility to Putin with regard to Belarus.

With Zapad, the Kremlin is trying to show the U.S. and NATO how Russia would deal with such a U.S. response. In Kofman’s words:

“The point of Zapad has always been to establish coercive credibility with the U.S., that were the U.S. to intervene either in Russia or on Russia’s borders in a country like Belarus, Moscow would use force all the way up to nuclear weapons. We’re at a transition point right where Russia is increasingly less reliant on nuclear weapons, though they still form an important component of how Russia intends to control escalation, and establish escalation dominance. Zapad has gone from 1999 — ‘If you intervene we will nuke you’ — to 2017: ‘If you intervene we have the forces to take you on, and then if we’re losing we will probably still nuke you.’ ”

The good thing about that message is that it is essentially defensive, in line with official statements from Russia and Belarus. But the troubling part is that if people in Belarus, or in Russia itself, get fed up with those countries’ oppressive regimes, as Ukrainians did with President Viktor Yanukovych’s corrupt rule, the authoritarian rulers’ reaction may not be aimed merely at suppressing the rebellion. It may be a military move against the West, which will be automatically blamed for the domestic troubles of the regime.

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.</s>MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The Zapad 2017 joint strategic military exercise started on the territory of Russia and Belarus, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.

"The Zapad 2017 joint strategic exercise of the armed forces of the Union State of Russia and Belarus began on September 14," the ministry said.

Up to 12,700 servicemen (about 7,200 from Belarus, some 5,500 from Russia), up to 70 aircraft and helicopters, up to 680 items of military equipment, including about 250 tanks, up to 200 guns, multiple rocket launchers and mortars, and up to 10 warships take part in the drills.

Several NATO member states and Ukraine have raised concerns about the drills, while the German defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, claimed last week that over 100,000 troops would participate, an allegation refuted by Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov.

According to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg NATO will send three experts exercises, following invitations from Russia and Belarus. Previously, Stoltenberg said that the alliance does not see any imminent threat posed against any NATO member by the drills. However, a number of NATO member states located in eastern Europe, including Poland and Lithuania, as well as Ukraine, have already expressed their concerns over the upcoming Russia-Belarus exercises.

In their turn, senior Russian and Belarusian officials reiterated that the drills do not pose any threat to other states and are exclusively defensive in nature. Moreover, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko stated earlier that these exercises would be open for foreign observers. The Defense Ministry of Belarus reported in August that observers from seven countries — Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden, Norway — were invited to the event.</s>An upcoming Russian military exercise in Europe is making analysts nervous.

CNN is reporting that the major exercise, called Zapad 2017, will take place in Kaliningrad, which borders Poland, and Belarus which borders both Poland and Ukraine.

“Military analysts see such war games as a possible rehearsal for a Russia-NATO armed conflict as it is taking place very close to an area that analysts consider to be the most likely target of a Russian offensive,” the article states.

There is also concern by NATO that Russia is not being as transparent about the exercise as it should, such as “not allowing observers to monitor the exercise to ensure that it is not a cover for an aggressive military operation,” as required by international treaties, according to CNN.

There is also worry about the true number of participating troops, with the Russians claiming 13,000 and observers saying it could actually be as large as 100,000 Russian and Belorussian forces, according to CNN.

The U.S. is currently participating in a multinational training exercise in Ukraine called Exercise Rapid Trident 17. The Russian exercise will begin just days after it ends on Sept. 23.

The Ukrainian-led annual exercise has 1,800 participating service members from 14 countries, and is “focused on peacekeeping and stability operations,” according to the US Army Europe website on the exercise.</s>The first day of major joint war games between Russia and Belarus began in confusion Thursday, as the militaries of both countries announced the Russians would be moving in opposite directions.

The defence ministry in Moscow first announced that units of the Russian first tank army were rushing toward Belarus - a statement swiftly denied by the Belarusian military, who insisted the Russian tanks were heading to training bases in their own country.

The confusion only exacerbated fears that the Zapad war games taking place largely in Belarus are a cover for a Russian assault, like those that preceded the annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Many have joked that the Russian forces—officially numbering 3,000—might not withdraw at the end of the exercises, and analysts have speculated that they could leave behind military equipment to cut down deployment time in case of conflict.

“Without question, all participants of the exercises will return to their permanent bases after the exercises, including the Russian units to the territory of the Russian Federation,” Vladimir Makarov, spokesman of the Belarusian defence ministry, told journalists. He added that the war games “don't hold any danger for Belarus, for neighbouring countries, for Ukraine”.

Yet while the exercises are designed to demonstrate Russia's ability to fight Nato, they have also eroded Minsk's claims to neutrality and alarmed its neighbours. On Thursday, Poland's defence minister called Zapad 2017 a “serious threat” to regional security, and Ukraine has been holding its own “Unflinching Firmness” military manoeuvres this week.

Even before it started, Zapad had been rattling Nato and its allies. Sweden is holding its largest military exercises in two decades, responding to a simulated attack from the direction of Russia, and US army tanks and fighting vehicles arrived in northern Poland on Monday as part of the ongoing Operation Atlantic Resolve exercises.

Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president who has long played Russia and the West off each other for aid money, cheap oil and political benefit, has only reluctantly proceeded with this year's biannual joint exercises.

Displaying unusual openness, the Belarusian authorities said they have invited more than 80 observers from international organisations and nearby countries.

The 12,700 troops officially said to be participating—Western pundits have estimated up to 100,000 could actually be involved—fall under the threshold for broad international monitoring. “Belarus has been trying to distance itself from Russia and establish neutrality in tensions between Russia and the West, and these exercises ruin this,” said analyst Valery Karbalevich. A Russian T-90 tank firing in Kubinka Patriot Park outside Moscow during the first day of the "Army 2017" International Military-Technical Forum. “But Belarus can't refuse because it would be very disloyal to Russia.” If it wasn't already clear that the Zapad exercises were a thinly veiled preparation for a conflict with Nato, their supposed “aggressor countries”—called Lubeniya, Veishnoriya and Vesbasriya—were located roughly where Lithuania, Latvia and Poland are on a map shown at the Russian defence ministry briefing. Moscow is demonstrating to Washington and Nato it can quickly establish control of Belarus and cut a corridor to the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, headquarters of the Baltic fleet, according to analyst Alexander Golts. “For first time in many years Russia is openly working out military actions against Nato members,” he said. The war games also showcase Russian military equipment, which was on display to buyers at the Army expo in Moscow earlier this month. Some 140 tanks, up to 150 artillery and air defence units and more than 40 planes and helicopters will participate. But some here worry Belarus is becoming Russia's Western front. For years Moscow has been seeking an airbase in Belarus, and Russia recently proposed creating a joint air defence system with Belarus. Earlier this month, the Belarusian opposition staged a protest against the Zapad exercises as a threat to independence. “The main danger is that we are drawn into a conflict. On our territory the Russian army will train to attack the West,” said Mykola Statkevich, the recently freed opposition leader. “No one wants conflict, but when escalation is happening, no one wants to step down, the likelihood of negative scenarios increases.”</s>The first day of major joint war games between Russia and Belarus began in confusion Thursday, as the militaries of both countries announced the Russians would be moving in opposite directions.

The defence ministry in Moscow first announced that units of the Russian first tank army were rushing toward Belarus - a statement swiftly denied by the Belarusian military, who insisted the Russian tanks were heading to training bases in their own country.

The confusion only exacerbated fears that the Zapad war games taking place largely in Belarus are a cover for a Russian assault, like those that preceded the annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Many have joked that the Russian forces—officially numbering 3,000—might not withdraw at the end of the exercises, and analysts have speculated that they could leave behind military equipment to cut down deployment time in case of conflict.</s>The three Baltic states are watching with concern the latest round of Russian military drills that some analysts believe could be the largest of their kind since the Cold War.

Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, who often criticizes Russian leaders, says the mid-September military exercise in Belarus is a sign that Kremlin is preparing for a serious conflict with NATO.

"We are anxious about this drill ... it is an open preparation for war with the West," she told reporters.

Russia and Belarus say the exercises, which last until Sept. 20, will involve 5,500 Russian and 7,200 Belarusian troops.</s>Russia on Thursday kicked off a week of war games with ally Belarus that have NATO neighbors and the United States watching anxiously, but also allowed Moscow to flex its muscles against one of its primary fears — possible political fissures in the Kremlin’s own orbit.

Moments after Russia’s Defense Ministry said the exercises 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 also were mobilized and prepared 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 potential war with the West. The tank unit’s job was to smash through NATO lines, including 300,000 U.S. troops once stationed in Europe.

But the U.S. force is down to 30,000, and many countries that once formed the Soviet bloc are now members of NATO.

Russia sees itself hemmed in by a hostile, expanding force. President Vladimir Putin has decried “color revolutions” — popular rebellions that swept some former Soviet countries, such as Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange” protests — as a tool of the West, and vowed to prevent any more of them.

The scenario Russian and Belarusian forces are playing out involve a “Western Coalition” of imaginary states: Lubenia, Vesbaria and Veishnoria, in which Russian and Western observers see similarities to NATO members Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. In the war game scenario, the three enemies are attempting to change the regime in Minsk, turn Belarus against Russia, and annex parts of Belarus to Veishnoria.

The first phase of the drills pits Russian and Belarusan forces against “illegal armed formations” and “saboteur groups” of the Western Coalition that have infiltrated Belarus.

The Russian announcement 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.”

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.

Putin and his Belarusan 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.

On Thursday Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters, “We reject complaints of these exercises not being transparent.” He accused the West of “whipping up hysteria” as a “provocation.”

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 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.

Fear and confidence in the face of Russian war games

What you need to know about Russia’s huge military exercise

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news</s>Russia has today kicked off its controversial week-long war games in Belarus and the Baltic, involving thousands of troops and military vehicles.

The maneuvers, called Zapad - meaning 'West' in Russian - has left neighbouring countries worried it is a precursor to an invasion and seen NATO members accuse Moscow of lying about the size of the drills.

Tensions between Moscow and the West have spiraled since Russia's 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and Ukraine is among the nations worried Zapad 2017 could lead to further landgrabs .

The military exercises are now officially underway at several locations in Belarus, the Baltic Sea, western Russia and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Russia and Belarus have said that the exercises, which will last until September 20, will involve 5,500 Russian and 7,200 Belarusian troops, as well as a large number of military vehicles, war ships and aircrafts.

It will simulate a rebel uprising with 'troops' backed up by a fictional foreign power, widely assumed to be NATO.

However, NATO officials say the number of troops is much larger than Moscow has publicised, closer to 100,000.

By claiming that only 13,000 troops are involved, Russia stays below the international threshold that requires large numbers of outside observers.

And despite assurances from Minsk and Moscow, leaders in Poland, the Baltic states, Slovakia, Romania, the Ukraine and Bulgaria are concerned Russia might not pull back all of its soldiers after the drills.

Lithuania's Defence Minister Raimundas Karoblis said the drills risk triggering an accidental conflict or could allow Moscow to leave troops in neighbouring Belarus.

'We can't be totally calm. There is a large foreign army massed next to Lithuanian territory,' he told Reuters this week.

Some Western officials including the head of the U.S. Army in Europe, Gen. Ben Hodges, have raised concerns that Russia might use the drills as a 'Trojan horse' to make incursions into Poland and Russian-speaking regions in the Baltics.

Wrong-footed by Moscow in the recent past, with Russia's seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its intervention in Syria's war in 2015, NATO is distrustful of the Kremlin's public message.

In Crimea, Moscow proved a master of 'hybrid warfare', with its mix of cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and use of Russian and local forces without insignia.

One senior European security official said Zapad would merge manoeuvres across Russia's four western military districts in a 'complex, multi-dimensional aggressive, anti-NATO exercise'.

'It is all smoke and mirrors,' the official said, adding that the Soviet-era Zapad exercises that were revived in 1999 had included simulated nuclear strikes on Europe.

NATO officials say they have been watching Russia's preparations for months, including the use of hundreds of rail cars to carry tanks and other heavy equipment into Belarus.

As a precaution, the U.S. Army has moved 600 paratroopers to the Baltics during Zapad and has taken over guardianship of the airspace of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which lack capable air forces and air defence systems.
Russia and Belarus begin a six-day joint strategic military exercise inside Belarus and Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast. The military exercise simulates war against the fictional state of Veyshnoria. According to the Defence Ministry of Belarus, fewer than 13,000 personnel will be taking part in the exercise; however, Western analysts believe the total number will range from 60,000 to 100,000.