MILITARY/RUSSIA: “A recent major exercise by the Russian military revealed significant strides in its ability to conduct the sort of complex, large-scale operations, using drones and other new technology, that would be part of any all-out war with the United States in Europe, according to American and allied officials.
Preliminary Pentagon and NATO assessments of the exercise, one of the largest of its kind since the end of the Cold War, are classified and will take months to complete. But Western officials said the military maneuvers, known as Zapad, Russian for ‘west,’ far exceeded in scope and scale what Moscow had said it would conduct, and tracked more closely to what American intelligence officials suspected would unfold, based on Russian troop buildups in August.
Before the exercise, Russia said the drills would involve fewer than 13,000 troops engaged in a counterterrorism scenario in Belarus, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, the Baltic Sea region and around St. Petersburg. Instead, tens of thousands of Russian troops in the Arctic and Far East, the Black Sea, close to Ukraine’s borders and in the Abkhazia region of Georgia also joined in, Western military officials said…
The military exercise, planned for many months, was part of a larger effort by President Vladimir V. Putin to showcase Russia’s military prowess as it tries to reassert itself as a world power. Beyond Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election in support of the Trump campaign, its military has in recent years dispatched troops to Syria, captured Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine, rattled the Baltic States with snap exercises and buzzed NATO planes and ships.”
-Eric Schmidt, “Vast Exercise Demonstrated Russia’s Growing Military Prowess,” The New York Times online, Oct. 1, 2017