Does this Tuesday mark the start of a Russian offensive in Ukraine? As NATO member countries feared, Russia has just launched military maneuvers near Ukraine and in annexed Crimea. It is a “joint” operation which involves “the air force and anti-aircraft, groups of ships from the Black Sea and Caspian fleets”, said the commander of the Russian forces for southern Russia, Alexander Dvornikov.
According to TASS, the air force exercises involve 60 fighters and bombers in four regions, most notably the Crimean peninsula which Russia annexed in 2014 in retaliation for a pro-Western revolution in Ukraine. This includes coordinating the action of the navy and the air force during missile launches.
Response to Washington’s “escalation of tensions”
In addition, some 6,000 men are engaged in maneuvers to check their combat readiness on several bases in several regions of southern Russia.
The announcement of these exercises comes a few hours after the Kremlin denounced the alert of thousands of American soldiers because of the Russian-Western crisis over Ukraine, seeing it as a new “exacerbation of tensions” by Washington.