by Fu Yiming
BRUSSELS, Jan. 28 (Xinhua) -- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) kicked off "Steadfast Defender 2024," its largest military drill in decades, on Wednesday.
Analysts have said that the drill, the largest since the end of the Cold War, is directed at Russia. It aims to cheer up Ukraine, which is frustrated on the battlefield, and play up the so-called "Russian threat" to persuade NATO members to support military expansion and prepare for war.
Such a move provokes confrontation and is harmful to regional peace and security.
FLEXING MUSCLES
The "Steadfast Defender 2024" drill, spanning the Atlantic, is scheduled to extend until the end of May.
NATO said the military exercise had been planned for several years and is the largest one held by NATO since 1988. About 90,000 soldiers from 31 NATO member countries and Sweden will participate.
The exercise includes over 50 ships ranging from aircraft carriers to destroyers, plus over 80 fighter jets, helicopters and drones, and at least 1,100 combat vehicles, including 133 tanks and 533 infantry fighting vehicles, according to NATO.
NATO said the exercise "will show that NATO can conduct and sustain complex multi-domain operations over several months, across thousands of kilometers, from the High North to Central and Eastern Europe, and in any conditions."
"The alliance will demonstrate its ability to reinforce the Euro-Atlantic area via trans-Atlantic movement of forces from North America," said NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe Christopher Cavoli.
SUPPRESS RUSSIA
Although NATO refrained from explicitly naming any specific country in its announcement, experts and media reports say Russia is the target of what NATO describes as "a simulated emerging conflict scenario with a near-peer adversary."
It will be the first large-scale NATO exercise where new defense plans will be implemented, NATO said. And its top strategic document lists Russia as the most significant and direct threat to the security of NATO members.
"The exercises are quite unprecedented," said Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman, adding that NATO is not trying to hide the fact that the exercises are postured against Russia.
Experts argued that the drills are also intended to cheer up Ukraine, which is frustrated on the frontlines and deeply worried about growing fatigue in the West and stagnating financial aid from the United States and EU.
Tass news agency reported that there has been increasingly more rhetoric in Europe and the United States about a direct military conflict with Russia on the battlefield.
"A situation where an enemy is being conjured up is leading directly to a revival of the very idea of maintaining NATO as a counterweight (to that purported threat)," Viktor Mizin, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International Relations, told Russian media Izvestia.
Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told RIA Novosti that Russia is not afraid of such "provocative demonstrations" since it has "all the resources to ensure security and defense capability."
PROVOKING TENSIONS
Before the start of the military exercise, Rob Bauer, chair of the NATO Military Committee, claimed that civilians in NATO countries should be prepared for the prospect of an all-out war with Russia in the next 20 years.
Analysts have pointed out that NATO is overemphasizing the "Russian threat" and the possibility of a future war with Russia. They argue that this is being done to justify NATO's expansion towards the east and north and to persuade the people of NATO countries to increase their military spending and join the military.
The central locations involved in the drill are the Baltic nations, identified by NATO as particularly vulnerable to a possible Russian assault. Other areas include Norway and Romania, situated on the outskirts of the alliance; Poland on the alliance's eastern flank; and Germany as a central hub for reinforcements.
"An exercise of this scale ... marks the final and irrevocable return of NATO to the Cold War schemes," Grushko said, warning that "any events of this scale significantly increase the risk of military incidents and further destabilize the security situation."
"But the interests of European security today are of little concern to those who lead NATO; the main thing for them is to keep this instrument of American influence afloat in the already lost struggle to preserve Western hegemony in the world," he added.
Analysts also pointed out that confrontation measures adopted by NATO cannot resolve the security concerns of member states. Instead, they will deepen the hostility between Europe and Russia and worsen the region's security. Enditem
(Xinhua correspondent Zhang Zhang from Warsaw also contributed to the story)
