On Wednesday, October 6, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his generals summed up the results of the largest Russian-Belarusian strategic exercise "WEST-2021" this year. According to Shoigu, the maneuvers demonstrated the increased training of troops, the ability of the created interspecific groups of the two states to effectively carry out tasks to ensure regional security. "I consider the objectives of the exercise to have been achieved, the training issues have been worked out in full," the Defense Minister concluded.
He recalled that in the "West-2021" new forms and methods of warfare were being worked out, taking into account the peculiarities of modern local wars and armed conflicts. Many things, according to Shoigu, have been tested in practice. So, for the first time at night, in adverse weather conditions, a parachute battalion was landed on modern equipment - BMD-4M.
"Twenty-one IL-76MD military transport aircraft have ejected more than 30 units of new generation amphibious assault vehicles," the minister said. Military topographers have tested the capabilities of the unified kAleidoscope software system. It made it possible to create a three-dimensional image of a virtual combat space during the exercise, thereby more accurately assessing the situation and significantly reducing the time for decision-making by the command.
Drones were actively used in the exercise to effectively adjust the fire, as well as in the interests of intelligence units. "The remote disabling of the so-called "flock" of attack unmanned aerial vehicles of a conditional enemy has been successfully worked out," Shoigu recalled.
At the landfills near Kaliningrad, the military used the Platform-M shock robotic complexes for the first time. Remotely controlled robots on a tracked chassis have shown high efficiency in destroying enemy manpower in urban conditions. And at the Mulino training ground in the Nizhny Novgorod region, the URAN-9 and nErekhta reconnaissance and fire support robots were used for the first time.
"During the exercise, we checked the functioning of two combat training centers for Air Force and air defense specialists being created on the territory of Belarus, as well as the organization of combat duty in the Unified Regional Air Defense System of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus," Shoigu recalled. According to him, the experience gained by Russian and Belarusian fighter crews will be taken into account when protecting the air borders of the Union State.
Yuri Gavrilov
