Belarussian tanks in action during the joint Russia-Belarus strategic military exercises Zapad 2017, at the Borissov training range in Belarus, 20 September 2017. Photo: EPA/TATIANA ZENKOVICH
Russia and Belarus began their Zapad 2025 joint military exercises on Friday, the first large-scale training operation carried out by the two allies since 2021, the Russian Defence Ministry has announced.
The exercises, which are expected to last until Tuesday, are taking place on Belarusian and Russian territory, as well as in the Baltic and Barents Seas, and are of a primarily defensive nature, the Belarusian Defence Ministry said, according to Russian news agency Interfax.
The first phases of Zapad 2025 are to centre on “repelling aggression,” before the training exercises shift focus to “restoring territorial integrity” in its later stages, which will include participatory support from multiple “friendly states,” the Russian Defence Ministry said.
The exercises will also include planning for the use of nuclear weapons and the Oreshnik missile system, Belarusian Defence Minister Viktor Khrenin told BelTA, Belarus’s state-owned news agency, in August.
Though plans for Zapad, which means “West” in Russian, were officially announced in February, they take place at an unusually tense time in NATO-Russian relations, following this week’s unprecedented incursion of Russian drones into Polish territory, which led to the first direct NATO-Russian clash since Turkey downed a Russian jet that entered its airspace without permission in 2015.
Following the incident, Poland invoked Article 4 of the NATO convention, triggering a consultative meeting of the alliance’s most senior decision-making body, and has since temporarily restricted its airspace along the country’s border with Belarus, closed its land border with the country indefinitely, and requested that NATO allies help it create an “anti-drone wall” by supplying additional air defence systems.
On Thursday, French President Emmanual Macron announced that France would deploy three fighter jets to “help protect Polish airspace,” stressing that Europe would “not yield” to Russian intimidation.
Poland’s Deputy Defence Minister Cezary Tomczyk said that an additional 40,000 Polish soldiers would be deployed to the country’s eastern border in response to the Zapad 2025 exercises, a substantial increase from the 10,000 troops usually stationed there.
On Thursday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stressed that the Zapad 2025 exercises would take place as planned, adding that they were not “aimed at anyone”, and would instead “involve continuing military cooperation and developing interoperability between two strategic allies,” Peskov said, according to state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.
In 2021, more than 200,000 Russian and Belarusian military personnel took place in the Zapad 2021 exercises, during which the combined forces conducted airborne assault exercises, deep raids, and other offensive maneuvers against a fictional enemy dubbed the “Polar Republic”.
Five months later, Russian forces launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, employing many of the same manoeuvres and tactics that they had been practising during the Zapad 2021 exercises.
