MINSK, Belarus (AP) – Military officials in Belarus have sought to calm Western fears about major war games with Russia involving thousands of troops, tanks and aircraft, just hours before they are due to get underway.
The Zapad (West) 2017 maneuvers, mainly in Belarus this year, have caused concern at NATO and in neighboring countries. Some members of the alliance, including the Baltic states and Poland, have criticized a lack of transparency about the exercises and questioned Moscow’s real intentions.
“We are not threatening anyone,” Oleg Voinov, an adviser to the Belarusian Defense Minister, told journalists Thursday. “We have chosen military bases that are significantly removed from the borders with Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.”
Russia-West relations have hit their lowest point since the Cold War following Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and continuing fighting between Russian-backed separatists and troops loyal to Kiev in eastern Ukraine. Western worries about the planned maneuvers have ranged from allegations that Russia could use them to permanently deploy its forces to Belarus to fears of a surprise attack on the Baltics.
Poland’s National Security Bureau head, Pawel Soloch, said Thursday that the exercises were a demonstration “of the Russian state’s capacity to hold full-scale war action.”