Russia and Nato have been conducting increasingly large-scale military exercises to prepare for a possible conflict with each other, but the war games themselves are making a clash more likely, a new report warns.
The report by the European Leadership Network (ELN) think tank calls on both sides to communicate more and to improve the transparency of their military activities. It also encourages them to wind down the scale of their war games while starting work on a new treaty that would limit the sort of weaponry allowed along their borders.is seen as provocative by the other side and feeding a dynamic of distrust and unpredictability,” Ian Kearns, ELN’s director, said. “Everyone is focusing on the deterrent value of big exercises, but there is a downside and that is the risk factor. Politicians have to show political judgment and restraint about when is the right time to scale down what could be a spiralling sequence of exercises.”
The Russian exercise in March started in the far north and spread across the federation in order to mimic a rapidly escalating conflict. Troops were deployed to reinforce vulnerable outlying regions like the Kola peninsula, islands in the Arctic, the Kaliningrad enclave, Crimea and the north Pacific island of Sakhalin. As well as the huge number of elite forces and conscripts, the exercise involved 12,000 pieces of heavy equipment, 65 warships, 15 submarines and 220 aircraft.