No ‘Diplomat’: Russia Holds Massive Military Drill Aimed at China, Japan Russia is holding its biggest war games since the era of the Soviet Union in its Far East region that borders on China, Japan and Korea. According to Russian media sources, “160,000 servicemen, 1000 tanks, 130 planes and 70 ships” are participating in the drills, which will continue through July 20. A statement released by Russia’s Defense Ministry said: “The main purpose of the activities is to check the readiness of the military units to perform assigned tasks and evaluate the level of personnel’s training and technical preparation as well as the level of equipment of units with arms and military equipment.” “The land part of the exercise is directed at China, while the sea and island part of it is aimed at Japan”, Alexander Khramchikhin, whom the BBC describes as an independent Moscow-based military analyst, told the UK broadcaster. A retired Russian general told the BBC that “The Sakhalin part of the maneuvers was intended to simulate a response to a hypothetical attack by Japanese and U.S. forces.” (…) Many Russian officials strongly suspect China of trying to mount a long-term annexation strategy over Russia’s Far East, due to the large number of Chinese immigrants who have populated the area in recent years. Other countries, notably the U.S. in the 19th Century, have used similar strategies to expand their territory. As Vassily Mikheev, deputy director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics (IMEMO), part of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, told the American scholar David Shambaugh in 2009:“Anti-Chinese feelings are very strong [in Russia] and changing. There is a feeling that China wants to conquer the Russian Far East. In the past five to six years, these primitive anti-China sentiments are being joined by new anti-China feelings based on a fear of economic threat.”
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 03:37:41 +0000
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