Tag Archives: Mongolia

Russia to hold biggest war games in nearly four decades

By Andrew Osborn

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia will next month hold its biggest war games in nearly four decades, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday, a massive military exercise that will also involve the Chinese and Mongolian armies.

The exercise, called Vostok-2018 (East-2018), will take place in central and eastern Russian military districts and involve almost 300,000 troops, over 1,000 military aircraft, two of Russia’s naval fleets, and all its airborne units, Shoigu said in a statement.

The maneuvers will take place at a time of heightened tension between the West and Russia, which is concerned about what it says is an unjustified build-up of the NATO military alliance on its western flank.

NATO says it has beefed up its forces in eastern Europe to deter potential Russian military action after Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and backed a pro-Russian uprising in eastern Ukraine.

The war games, which will take place from Sept. 11-15, are likely to displease Japan which has already complained about what it says is a Russian military build-up in the Far East.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is due to attend a forum in Vladivostok over the same period, and a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said on Tuesday Tokyo always paid attention to shifts in Russian-Chinese military cooperation.

Shoigu said the war games would be the biggest since a Soviet military exercise, Zapad-81 (West-81) in 1981.

“In some ways they will repeat aspects of Zapad-81, but in other ways, the scale will be bigger,” Shoigu told reporters, while visiting the Russian region of Khakassia.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has said that Chinese and Mongolian military units will also take part in the exercise.

“A MORE ASSERTIVE RUSSIA”

When asked if the cost of holding such a massive military exercise was justified at a time when Russia is faced with higher social spending demands, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said such war games were essential.

“The country’s ability to defend itself in the current international situation, which is often aggressive and unfriendly towards our country, means (the exercise) is justified,” Peskov told reporters on a conference call.

When asked if China’s involvement meant Moscow and Beijing were moving towards an alliance, Peskov said it showed that the two allies were cooperating in all areas.

China and Russia have taken part in joint military drills before but not on such a large scale.

NATO spokesman Dylan White said that Russia had briefed the alliance on the planned exercise in May and that NATO planned to monitor it. Russia had invited military attaches from NATO countries based in Moscow to observe the war games, an offer he said was under consideration.

“All nations have the right to exercise their armed forces, but it is essential that this is done in a transparent and predictable manner,” White said in an emailed statement.

“Vostok demonstrates Russia’s focus on exercising large-scale conflict. It fits into a pattern we have seen over some time: a more assertive Russia, significantly increasing its defense budget and its military presence.”

Shoigu this month announced the start of snap combat readiness checks in central and eastern military districts ahead of the planned exercise.

“Imagine 36,000 armored vehicles – tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored infantry vehicles – moving and working simultaneously, and that all this, naturally, is being tested in conditions as close as possible to military ones,” Shoigu said on Tuesday.

(Additional reporting by Katya Golubkova and Andrey Kuzmin in Moscow, Robin Emmott in Brussels and Elaine Lies in Tokyo; Editing by Alison Williams)

Aid agencies brace for devastating Mongolian ‘dzud’ this winter

ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) – Global aid agencies are responding to a call for assistance by Mongolia as harsh winter weather raises fears for the safety and livelihoods of the country’s traditional pastoralists, who have already been hit hard by a drought last year.

Dry weather has scorched most of Mongolia’s wheat crop and now mass animal deaths due to a freezing winter, locally known as “dzud”, are threatening more pain for the country, where farming accounts for about 13 percent of the economy. The last dzud in 2009-2010 killed 9.7 million of the country’s livestock, according to the National Emergency Agency of Mongolia.

While the government has not yet declared the current winter a natural disaster, it has warned the situation could get worse. So far, a drop in temperatures to minus minus 67 Fahrenheit has killed nearly 200,000 livestock.

The weather and grazing conditions are already worse than they were in the previous dzud, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said in a statement, citing the Mongolian Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

“Usually for the dzud, the most devastation is observed in March, April and May,” Garid Enkhjin, national program coordinator for the IFRC in Mongolia, told Reuters.

The IFRC said it has launched an emergency appeal for $835,000 to assist 25,500 Mongolian herders, who are at risk of losing their livestock and livelihoods due to the extreme winter.

Currently, 80 percent of Mongolia is under snow, making it difficult for nomadic families to travel along centuries-old pasture routes to find food for their livestock. Aggravating the situation is the fact that herders can live up to 31 miles from urban settlements and many are without cars.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has said it plans to provide trucks to get aid to families’ doorsteps at some of the most-difficult-to-reach areas.

“We want to relieve the burden of that last mile of distance to the most affected,” Ben Hemingway, USAID’s regional adviser, said on phone from Bangkok.

In the worst affected districts, sheep and other livestock have started dying. Many herders are trying to sell their animals while they are still alive, leading to an oversupply of livestock that has driven down market prices.

Although the death toll for animals so far is far less than in 2009, “the impact on the people is more or less the same”, said Enkhjin. “Livelihoods will be impacted immediately and have devastating effects.”

(Reporting by Terrence Edwards; Editing by Himani Sarkar)