Officially, the exercise involves just under 13,000 troops but Igor Sutyagin, senior research fellow of Russian Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said in a note Tuesday that this number will be easily surpassed.
“Top of the concerns is the number of troops participating in the exercise.
“To avoid foreign monitoring, Russia and Belarus announced that just 12,700 troops will be participating in the exercise, below the Vienna Document threshold (of 13,000),” Sutyagin explained.
And the RUSI analyst said while Lithuania and Ukraine have put the estimated figure at around 140,000 troops, the true number may well sit around the middle.
“A forensic analysis of the data available about these exercises offers conclusive evidence that Russia is being economical with the truth.
“This analysis suggests the number of troops participating in the exercises will be closer to 65 to 70,000,” the security expert added.
Sutyagin arrived at this figure by identifying regiments openly participating in Zagad as well as noting a Russian Ministry of Defense request for 4,162 train carriages to transport troops and military hardware to and from Belarus.
“This represents a massive increase on the 2015 and 2016 transport requirement, which were 125 and 50 carriages respectively, a rise in requirements which one can only assume as necessary to fulfilling the day-to-day needs of the Russian forces permanently deployed to Belarus,” he said.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has posted details of the exercise on its website and described the Zapad 2017 anti-terror exercise as purely defensive.
“The exercise stipulates that some extremist groups have penetrated to the territories of the Republic of Belarus and the Kaliningrad region of the Russian Federation in order to carry out terrorist attacks and destabilize the Union State of Russia and Belarus.”
The official statement added that in addition to the claimed 12,700 troops, around 70 aircraft, 10 warships, and 250 tanks will take part in the Zapad exercise.
