The scope and geography of the maneuvers turned out to be bigger than what was originally stated. The exercise simulated a wide inter-state conflict, the NATO noted.
“A full assessment will take several weeks, but it is now clear that the scale and geographical coverage of the “Zapad 2017″ exercises were significantly bigger than the initial claims (by Moscow and Minsk – ed.)” said the NATO spokeswoman to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Thursday, 21 September.
According to her, the maneuvers were held not only in Belarus, Kaliningrad, Leningrad Region and in the Baltic Sea as was announced before the start of the exercise. The “significant” exercises simultaneously took place in the Arctic, the Far East, the Black Sea near the border with Ukraine, as well as in Abkhazia, where the representatives of the Russian authorities officially linked some of them with “Zapad 2017”, added Oana Lungescu.
The North Atlantic alliance believes that the “Zapad-2017” drill clearly simulated “a conflict between states” and that they involved, “the full range of Russian and Belarusian weapons”, including navy, submarines, fighter planes, tanks, artillery and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
NATO believes that the maneuvers of Russia and Belarus actually involved more troops than was officially announced. Earlier, Minsk and Moscow reported about 12,700 troops.
The alliance has not yet given specific numbers, but they are around “several tens of thousands of soldiers” involved in the “Zapad-2017”. OSCE Vienna Document obliges the organizers of the military maneuvers to give foreign observers access to the drill, if the number of personnel involved in the maneuvers is more than 13 thousand people.
