Russia recently conducted its largest military exercise since the breakup of the Soviet Union. More than 20,000 troops, 75 combat aircraft, 40 warships from the Pacific, Northern and Black Sea Fleets, and 5,500 pieces of heavy weapons were mobilised for 10-day war games code-named Vostok-2010. The military practised repulsing seaborne, air and land attacks and mounting counteroffensive operations in Siberia and the Far East. The western media were quick to suggest that Russia's muscle flexing close to the Chinese border was a response to the growing military challenge from China. That this was wishful thinking was evident from the fact that the Kremlin's relations with Beijing today are better than at any time in the past. Russia and China are strategic partners and co-founders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation;. Russia is a major source for state-of-the-art weapons for the Chinese army. The two countries have actually been staging joint war games. In fact, China was the only country other than Ukraine invited to watch the recent military exercises.
“This exercise is not directed against any specific country or military-political bloc,” explained Russia's Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. “It has a purely defensive nature in ensuring our state's security and national interests in the Far East.” The Vostok-2010 war games must be seen in the context of the sweeping military reform Russia launched nearly two years ago. The objective was to modernise and strengthen the armed forces whose combat worthiness had suffered from a chronic shortage of funds and new weapons over two decades. The current military strategy relies heavily on the country's nuclear arsenals; Russia's conventional forces are no match either for NATO or for the China's People's Liberation Army. Under the reform — billed as the most radical overhaul of the Russian military since the time of Peter the Great — Russia is abandoning the mass-mobilisation principle in favour of forming mobile, permanent-readiness forces, capable of rapid-reaction deployment in any part of Russia's sprawling territory. The reforms involve downsizing the armed forces from 1.3 million to 1 million men, switching from a division-based to a brigade-based table of organisation, and overhauling the system of military education. The Vostok-2010 war games have been officially characterised as a test for the “new look” of the armed forces. By 2020, resurgent Russia plans to have a slim, mobile, well-equipped army that possesses network-centric warfare capabilities and is capable of securely defending the country's long borders east and west, and projecting power far beyond.