Why Did Russia Disrupt Zapad Exercises In Belarus?

The tension in the Russian "elites" is growing.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the abandonment of the large annual Zapad military exercises in Belarus.

Charter97.org asked Ukrainian military expert Mykhailo Samus, the director at the New Geopolitics Research Network and expert of the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies (CACDS) about the reasons for the cancellation:

– Zapad are traditional strategic military exercises that have been carried out since Soviet times. They were intended for strategic operations in the Western direction. As a rule, it was the Warsaw Pact against NATO in Soviet times.

Starting from 1999, when the "Union State" of Belarus and Russia was created, regional groups of troops began to conduct joint exercises. That is, in fact, these exercises are intended for the joint organization of strategic operations by the Armed Forces of Russia and Belarus in the Western direction. These exercises were usually held every other year, but there were breaks and even long ones.

The most significant exercise was in 2017 when Russia completed the creation of its group directed against Ukraine: the 1st Tank Army, the 20th Army and the 8th Army.

At the same time, the scenario of a strategic operation was worked out during the 2017 exercises, which included operations against Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic countries.

It was after these exercises that Ukraine's NATO partners began to take the threat seriously. Although we told them about it much earlier.

Troops are needed in order to conduct such exercises. It is possible, of course, to conduct command and staff exercises (only on the basis of headquarters) at a strategic level, but usually, about 100,000 joint troops of Belarus and the Russian Federation participated in these exercises, and sometimes even more. Also, Russia also used its strategic missile forces, and Belarusian troops could study at Russian training grounds, use their Polonez systems, and so on.

Troops are needed to make it possible and at the moment Russia simply does not have troops that they could withdraw from the front and send for exercises in Belarus.

This time, they simply disrupted these exercises due to heavy losses at the front in Ukraine and the lack of reserves that could be withdrawn from the front. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are preventing them.

– Shoigu announced the cancellation of the exercises. How do you assess the current figure of the Russian Defence Minister?

– Shoigu is one of the pillars of the Putin regime. If you look at the late Prigozhin's failed mutiny, it was good evidence that an undercover struggle was going on. One of the groups that exists around Putin has tried to raise the stakes and their position in this struggle for the current or future distribution of some kind of power, access to resources, and so on.

But, apparently, Shoigu managed to withstand this onslaught. Nevertheless, the group, which, together with Shoigu, is just establishing itself in the power infrastructure of Russia and forming its own positions, will have to be defended more than once. After all, the tension in the so-called elites of Russia is growing.