Although the exercise formally runs from September 10th to 16th, troops and equipment have been flooding into exercise areas for months and some may almost certainly stay behind afterwards
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 theand 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.
It is not only the size of Zapad-21 that worries the West, though. The exercise spans Russia and Belarus, with thousands of Russian troops in the latter . And much as Zapad-81 occurred amid a political crisis in Poland, with growing protests against its then-communist government, the backdrop today is also turbulent. After losing an election in August 2020, Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s dictator, cracked down violently on protests—and moved steadily closer to the Kremlin.
All of this has made Poland jittery. On September 6th Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, explained why the government wanted to extend a state of emergency declared on the country’s border with Belarus the previous week. It was largely in response to a surge in refugees, encouraged by Belarus to put pressure on Poland and other neighbouring countries, but the looming drills played a role too, suggested Mr Morawiecki.
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