Russia’s War Games With Fake Enemies Cause Real Alarm<br />report on Soviet military exercises prepared in the 1980s said<br />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.<br />Moscow, for its part, has said only that the exercises threaten nobody<br />and will involve operations in Belarus, in Russia’s Western Military District and in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, next to Poland.<br />He called on Russia to "respect both the letter and intentions" of the so-called Vienna Document, which commits Russia<br />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.<br />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<br />that the number of Russian troops taking part in Zapad-2017 could reach 100,000.<br />And officials in the Baltics and Poland have voiced alarm<br />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.<br />Russia, Mr. Stoltenberg said, has a record of exploiting loopholes in the Vienna Document, habitually<br />understating the number of troops taking part in war games by tens of thousands.<br />Military exercises, including those conducted by NATO, often feature invented enemies, a practice<br />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.
