General Sergei Shoigu announced that the Vostok 2018 exercise, which took place in the eastern Siberian plains from September 11 to 15, will have been a massive exercise, bringing together nearly 300.000 Russian soldiers and their 36000 vehicles and 1000 aircraft. and helicopters, the largest exercise since 1981 for Russian or Soviet forces.
The exercise took place in 2 phases, the first lasting 2 days, simulating the alerting and regrouping of forces on short notice, and the second for the military operations themselves.
Beyond the technical analyses, the exercise is already a great success, since the Russian forces will have succeeded in mobilizing and moving in 48 hours a force of 300.000 men, plus 5000 Chinese and Mongolian soldiers, with their equipment. and their logistics lines. Certainly the forces were already on alert, but the result is no less impressive, and must have had a great effect at NATO headquarters, knowing that it took several weeks for the Atlantic alliance to deploy two armored brigades on the Russian and Belarusian border, when reinsurance measures were triggered towards the Baltic countries, Poland and Romania.
Indeed, today, it would probably take the West between 1 month and 1 ½ months to deploy on Europe's eastern borders a force of less than 100.000 men with their equipment, and this assuming a rapid and fluid American reinforcement (not hindered).
Beyond NATO, the message has certainly not gone unnoticed in kyiv, while tensions in the Sea of ​​Azov and on the Donbass front line have only increased in recent weeks, as for the actors of the Syrian conflict, who might be tempted to believe that Russia is a bear with feet of clay.
At the same time, Moscow marked its very good understanding with Beijing, and its close collaboration with the Middle Kingdom, again a clear message intended for Westerners, and more specifically for Americans. Implicitly, the Russian forces also showed that they were masters of all Russian territory, even if it was 7000 km away from the main body of troops. As Talleyrand repeated, if it goes without saying, it goes all the better by saying it; in this case, by showing it!
With this exercise, Russia showed that it once again had the means to be part of the nations aiming at the global level, and no longer regional, as it has often been wrongly classified. If today the Kremlin no longer has the demographic, economic and ideological power that the Soviet Union had, it has a mobilizable military force bringing it to the same level as the United States and China, without even refer to the country's strategic capabilities.