Warning to the West through the display of modern forces…Ukraine crisis showcases Russian military revamp

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Ukraine crisis showcases Russian military revamp

Peter Apps — Reuters April

Russian troops on ‘exercises’ near the border with Ukraine recently. Click to enlarge

Holding drills on Ukraine’s border and sending bombers to the edge of NATO airspace, Russia’s newly reformed military is in just the kind of regional confrontation it was redesigned for, experts say.

Moscow has increased defence spending by about 30 percent since its 2008 war with Georgia, and those who study it say the money has been spent not just on hardware but on a much more flexible military structure.

The result, they say, is a more streamlined force that can mobilise key units in a matter of days and support President Vladimir Putin’s goal to reassert Russian influence over countries it once controlled within the former Soviet Union.

Earlier this month, NATO’s top military leader U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove said the forces currently arrayed along Ukraine’s border could overwhelm the troubled state’s forces in as little as five days.

Their deployment may be as much about intimidating the new government in Kiev and keeping it from sending heavier forces to Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Moscow separatists have seized government buildings in several towns.

With Russian nuclear bombers flying the length of the North Sea last Wednesday, prompting NATO jets to scramble, and a fighter conducting a mock attack on a U.S. destroyer earlier in the month, it is also testing the Western response.

“The Russian military has done a lot of thinking about operations other than war, and has deliberately designed itself to be much more flexible,” says Keir Giles, a former Russia expert at the UK Defence Academy and now senior fellow at Chatham House, an international affairs think-tank.

Analysts say the reforms pushed forward by Putin and his defence ministers were aimed at making the military much more limber. It might lack Washington’s ability to deploy across the world, but it is now much more capable closer to home.

In the Cold War era, much of Russia’s army was built around theoretically giant but effectively skeleton divisions of officers and equipment that would be fleshed out with conscripts or reservists to operate during war. Many have now been replaced with much smaller brigades staffed at full strength and drilled with snap exercises to test battle readiness.

Preplanned exercises have also become larger, often held in border areas, which reminds neighbours what they could be up against if they get on the wrong side of Putin.

August’s Zapad-13 exercise in Belarus involved up to 70,000 personnel plus bombers, fighters and about 30 warships. Training took place close to the Baltic state and Polish borders and, some Western officials say, appeared to conclude with a mock nuclear strike on a NATO member state….more here

Source: www.thetruthseeker.co.uk

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