Russia holds the largest military exercise in Europe for 40 years

military exercise of 1981 was the largest and grandest exercise ever conducted by the Soviet Union, mustering as many as 150,000 troops from across the and its alliance of satellite states, the Warsaw Pact. Cold-war nostalgics may be pleased to learn that this year’s iteration, which began on September 10th, might be larger still. Zapad-21 could involve up to 200,000 troops from Russia, Belarus and several other countries, if Russia’s defence ministry is to be believed, outnumbering even the very largest exercises of recent times. That reflects both the frostiness of Russia’s ties with the West, and . Whether Zapad-21 will in fact match the spectacle of 1981 is not entirely clear. In part, that is because Russia is caught between playing down the scale of its exercises, for diplomatic reasons, and embellishing them, to awe its enemies. The Vienna Document, a confidence-building measure agreed between Russia and the West in 1990, says that exercises with more than 13,000 troops must be reported and open to foreign observers. In recent years, Russia has simply insisted that what appear to be huge drills are in fact a series of distinct, smaller ones, and thus exempt.