MOSCOW – Russia will next month hold its biggest war games since at leastthe 1980s, with around 300,000 troops and 1,000 aircraft, the defenceminister said Tuesday.

The Vostok-2018 exercises will be carried out from September 11 to 15 inthe country’s east with the participation of China and Mongolia.

“This will be something of a repeat of Zapad-81, but in some senses evenbigger,” Sergei Shoigu said of the 1981 war games in Eastern Europe, incomments reported by Russian news agencies.

He said “more than 1,000 aircraft, almost 300,000 troops and almost all theranges of the Central and Eastern military districts” would be involved inthe exercises.

“Imagine 36,000 pieces of military equipment moving together at the sametime — tanks, armoured personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles. Andall of this, of course, in conditions as close to combat as possible.”

Moscow said last year’s Zapad-2017 military drills, conducted in allyBelarus and regions of Russia, saw the participation of roughly 12,700troops.

But NATO claimed Russia could have been massively underreporting the scaleof the exercises, which some of the alliance’s eastern members saidinvolved more than 100,000 servicemen. – APP/AFP