Mainstream Weeklyby R.G. Gidadhubli
Russia and Belarus have jointly conducted military exercises known as Zapad (West) 2017 running through from September 14 to 20, 2017, which was witnessed by the Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 18. Russia holds the military exercises every four years, rotating them with drills in three other parts of the country. The location of the Zapad 2017 exercise assumes geo-political significance since it is in the western region of Belarus which borders NATO members, namely, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, as well as Ukraine. It also includes the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which lies between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. In this military exercise 70 aircraft and up to 680 pieces of military hardware, including tanks, artillery units, and ships, were employed. Zapad 2017 held near the NATO’s eastern flank has fanned already deep tensions between Moscow and the West. Being aware of this fact the Chief of Russia’s Armed Forces General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, during his meeting with the chairman of the NATO military committee, Petr Pavel, held on September 7, reassured him that the joint military exercises with Belarus were ’long-planned and defensive’ and ’not aimed against any third country’.
Notwithstanding assurances given by Russia, the Zapad 2017 military exercise has caused heartburn to many Western countries, particularly the NATO allies. Several Western military and political leaders have expressed concerns about Russia’s massive military manoeuvres. Firstly, the General Petr Pavel, the chief of the NATO’s Military Committee, stated on September 16, that the manoeuvres could lead ’to unintended consequences of potential incidents during the exercise.’
Hence he was candid in making a strategic statement: ’We have high concentration of troops in the Baltics. We have a high concentration of troops in the Black Sea and the potential for an incident may be quite high because of a human mistake, because of a technology failure.’
Secondly, while addressing the BBC on September 10 on Zapad 2017, the NATO alliance’s Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, called on Russia to be ’fully transparent’ which is understandable and at the same time accused that Russia has a history of ’under-reporting’ the number of troops in its exercises and ’using loopholes in international agreements to avoid international observation’. Moreover, he was even candid in stating that military exercises could be used as a disguise or a precursor for aggressive military actions against their neighbours linking it to Russia’s alleged invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. But this is not logical because unlike in the present context, Russia did not declare to the world nor invited observers while undertaking and frankly justifying its military actions both in Georgia and Crimea.
Thirdly, Stoltenberg has been critical of Russia and candid in his statement to the Associated Press that while the NATO routinely invited Russia to watch its war games as a confidence-building measure, “Russia has never, since the end of the Cold War, invited any NATO ally to observe any of their exercises