Russia’s War Games With Fake Enemies Cause Real Alarm
report on Soviet military exercises prepared in the 1980s said
that deception was always a central feature of Moscow’s training program, with Soviet forces deploying elaborate ruses to camouflage the real number of troops and purpose of their major exercises.
Moscow, for its part, has said only that the exercises threaten nobody
and will involve operations in Belarus, in Russia’s Western Military District and in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, next to Poland.
He called on Russia to "respect both the letter and intentions" of the so-called Vienna Document, which commits Russia
and Western nations to report all exercises with more than 13,000 troops or 300 tanks and to allow foreign observers to monitor those that do.
The Baltic States and Poland, which fear that the fictional nations invented by Zapad planners are thinly disguised proxies for their own countries, say they believe
that the number of Russian troops taking part in Zapad-2017 could reach 100,000.
And officials in the Baltics and Poland have voiced alarm
that the exercises could be used as a cover for Russian aggression, as happened in 2014, when Moscow staged large-scale exercises to camouflage preparations for its annexation of Crimea and intervention on the side of pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Russia, Mr. Stoltenberg said, has a record of exploiting loopholes in the Vienna Document, habitually
understating the number of troops taking part in war games by tens of thousands.
Military exercises, including those conducted by NATO, often feature invented enemies, a practice
that blurs their real purpose and avoids upsetting real countries that do not like to be used as a punching bag for military training — especially when this involves simulated nuclear attacks.