“For national security reasons, we will close border crossings with Belarus at midnight on Thursday night,” said Prime Minister Donald Tusk at a meeting with his cabinet on Tuesday afternoon.

“As you know, very aggressive – from the point of view of military doctrine – Russian-Belarusian manoeuvres begin on Friday in Belarus, very close to the Polish border,” he added.

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Source: https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/09/09/poland-to-close-belarus-border-amid-russian-zapad-military-exercises/

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The exercise conducted in the northern Lapland region in November is part of Dynamic Front 25, the largest NATO artillery exercise ever held in Europe, with fire drills in Finland as well as Estonia, Germany, Romania and Poland.

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This year’s exercises have been updated to include what Taiwan’s Defense Ministry has called “unscripted” scenarios to better simulate wartime conditions, a change one defense analyst told Newsweek was adopted after the “wake-up call” of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The drills, which will take place through Friday in strategic areas across Taiwan, come as Taipei faces increasing pressure from Beijing. China claims Taiwan as its territory, though Beijing’s Chinese Communist Party-led government has never ruled the island.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed that eventual unification with Taiwan is inevitable, through force if necessary. Chinese forces encircled Taiwan with major air, ground, and sea-based drills in May after the inauguration of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, a critic of Beijing who emphasized Taiwan’s sovereignty in his inaugural speech.

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Source: https://www.newsweek.com/taiwan-begins-anti-invasion-drills-amid-china-threat-1928255

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Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin said the exercises are in response to “unsuccessful attempts to drag [Belarus] into an epidemic of color revolutions and crush us with economic sanctions,” according to a post on Telegram.

The development comes as the Russian Defense Ministry said last month their troops were starting exercises to make sure they are ready for potential deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, as the Kremlin warned against Western “threats.”

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Source: https://thehill.com/policy/international/4716423-russia-launches-joint-nuclear-drills-belarus/

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HANOI, Vietnam — President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will get a second chance to make a deal when they meet for the second time Wednesday in the Vietnamese capital.

But the two-day summit will take place against a backdrop of warnings from intelligence officials and experts that the North is unwilling to relinquish its nuclear weapons, which it sees as key to regime survival.

That leaves little chance for a breakthrough. Even the Trump administration has sought to manage expectations, with the president saying he won’t lift sanctions and is in no rush to reach a deal.

China’s Foreign Ministry urged the two sides to “meet each other halfway.”

The third-generation North Korean leader rode into Hanoi on Tuesday in an armored limousine surrounded by motorcycle police as crowds lined up behind barricades and cheered.

He transferred to the limo after a nearly three-day, 2,500-mile train journey from Pyongyang through China to the Vietnamese border town of Dong Dang.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves from a car after arriving by train in Dong Dang in Vietnamese border town Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019, ahead of his second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.  MINH HOANG/AP

His entourage included North Korean lead nuclear negotiator Kim Yong Chol, his powerful sister Kim Yo Jong and other high-ranking officials, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Trump was to arrive by plane later Tuesday. The summit was expected to begin Wednesday evening with a private dinner, followed by a series of official meetings on Thursday.

The pomp surrounding the summit also provides Trump an escape from Washington as his former attorney and confidant Michael Cohen is scheduled to testify at a closed-door hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday in Washington.

Cohen will answer questions about his involvement in plans to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow as well as whether the president directed him to lie to Congress.

In Hanoi, Trump faces pressure to wrest concrete commitments from Kim after their first summit on June 12 ended with a vaguely worded agreement to work toward the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Here’s a look at what may be on the table:

Nuclear facilities

North Korea argues that it already has taken steps by suspending nuclear and missile tests and blowing up its main nuclear-testing facility. Kim also offered to dismantle the nuclear material production facility of Yongbyon if the United States takes “corresponding measures.”

The U.S. special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, said earlier this month that Pyongyang pledged to destroy all its plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities in exchange for reciprocal moves. Biegun also said that Pyongyang must provide a complete list of its nuclear assets before any deal can be reached. Any such deal would raise questions about verification. Past talks have collapsed over the issue of inspections.

End-of-war declaration

The 1950-53 Korean War, which pitted the U.S. and South Korea against the Chinese-backed North, ended in an armistice instead of a peace treaty. The North wants an end-of-war declaration, which would be the first step toward a formal peace treaty. The actual treaty would have to be signed by China, the U.S.-led United Nations Command and North Korea. But Washington has long said it wouldn’t begin the process until final, irreversible denuclearization is achieved. The U.S. concern is that a move toward a peace agreement would undercut the justification for maintaining some 28,500 American troops on the divided peninsula.

International sanctions

The United States and the U.N. Security Council have imposed punishing economic sanctions against the North for banned nuclear weapons development. Nobody expects Trump to agree to lift the measures, but experts say the U.S. could allow more exemptions for humanitarian needs and inter-Korean economic projects. The Trump administration, however, has insisted it will maintain its “maximum pressure campaign” until denuclearization is achieved.

Military exercises

Trump surprised the international community and many of his aides when he announced he was suspending joint military exercises with South Korea, which have long been a lynchpin of the alliance. The next major drills are reportedly expected to begin Monday on a smaller scale, but officials have declined to confirm that until after the summit. North Korea hates the drills, which it considers rehearsals for an invasion. Experts say Kim may also push for Washington to agree to ease up on the deployment of so-called strategic assets such as aircraft carriers and supersonic bombers to the divided peninsula.

gamel.kim@stripes.com
Twitter: @kimgamel

Source: https://www.stripes.com/news/trump-kim-get-second-chance-to-make-deal-but-expectations-low-amid-doubts-n-korea-will-surrender-nukes-1.570437

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Russia and China are drawing closer together as the two great powers solidifytheir entente to challenge the United States and its liberal hegemony.

Not only do Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping seem to have established a good personal rapport, the Russian military and the People’s Liberation Army are set to conduct massive wargames such as Vostok-2018 exercises on a regular basis in the future. Russian defense minister Gen. Sergei Shoigu said as much when he hosted his Chinese counterpart Gen. Wei Fenghe during a visit to the Tsugol training ground as a part of Vostok-2018 . “We have agreed to hold such exercises on a regular basis,” Shoigu said in a statement.

Wei, for his part, also stressed the importance of Sino-Russian “cooperation on operational and strategic levels.” The Chinese military and political leadership in Beijing consider such cooperation with the Russians to be particularly important, according to the Russian Defense Ministry statement.

Indeed, both the Russian and Chinese leadership stressed cooperation between the two great powers during Xi’s visit to Vladivostok, Russia, on September 11. “Today was President Xi’s working visit to Russia,” Putin said. “It included talks during which we discussed the most urgent bilateral and international matters, and outlined further plans to promote the comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation between Russia and China.”

Xi, for his part, noted that he had met with his “close friend” Putin three times within the past four months, which demonstrates the “special character” of Sino-Russian relations. “The President and I agree that since the beginning of this year Russian-Chinese relations have been showing dynamic growth, have entered a new era of rapid development and are reaching a higher level,” Xi said. “The parties reaffirmed firm mutual support in the choice of the development path that agrees with the national features of both countries as well as our security and development interests.”

Xi further noted that Russia and China share a common worldview and share the same common interests. Xi also touted the importance of the Sino-Russian entente to global security—at least from the Chinese point of view. “As permanent members of the UN Security Council and leading countries in the developing markets, China and Russia bear enormous responsibility for the maintenance of peace and stability together with the promotion of the development and prosperity all over the world,” Xi said. “We have similar or identical positions on international matters, broad common interests and firm foundations for cooperation. China-Russia cooperation in maintaining equality, justice, peace and stability throughout the entire world is gaining ever more importance against a backdrop of growing instability and unpredictability on a global scale.”

Putin also urged the Russian “regions” to further expand their ties to their Chinese counterparts, which he views as key to the Sino-Russian entente. “We hope that your cooperation strengthens ties between our countries and helps Russia and China step up their relations,” Putin said. “It is our belief that our relations are essential and critical for our countries, as well as for the world in general. These are global, strategic relations that are gaining momentum. Your efforts will be decisive in ensuring this progress.”

While Russia and China have not always been on the best of terms, especially after Sino-Soviet in the 1960s, Moscow and Beijing have found common ground in recent years even if the relationship remains transactional in many ways. Even American experts on Russia are starting to accept the possibility of a genuine Beijing-Moscow entente directed against the United States. “I think a strategic partnership is slowly in the offing, but is encumbered by the two sides’ self-interest and transactional impulses,” as Center for Naval Analyses analyst Michael Kofman told The National Interest earlier this year. “As such, the catalyst will be a third actor, namely the United States, and the extent to which those countries perceive a threat from Washington in common.”

Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for The National Interest. You can follow him on Twitter: @davemajumdar.

Source: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-and-china-will-now-hold-military-exercises-regular-basis-31157

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First, four Army Stryker armored combat vehicles collided, sending 15 soldiers to the hospital with minor injuries. No one died.

But hours later, an anti-American blog claimed a Lithuanian child was killed in the crash and posted a photo of a grisly accident.

It was a different collision from the Army mishap and Lithuanian news media quickly denounced the blog post as fake, designed to turn public opinion against the Americans and their Baltic ally.

The bloggers had borrowed a page from the playbook of Russia’s so-called hybrid warfare, which U.S. and Lithuania officials say has increasingly combined the ability to manipulate events using a mix of subterfuge, cyberattacks and information warfare with conventional military might.

The 12-day military exercise, which involved 18,000 U.S. and allied troops spread across four countries formerly part of the Soviet bloc, offers a window into how Army commanders are countering not just Russian troops and tanks, but also twisted truths.

“The Russians are actively seeking to divide our alliance and we must not allow that to happen,” Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, warned separately in a speech in France the day after the June 7 accident in Lithuania.

The military exercises occurred as President Donald Trump sidled up to Moscow, calling for Russia to be readmitted into the Group of 7 industrialized nations and meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia July 16.

U.S. commanders say they are tuning out Trump’s comments and concentrating on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ newest defense strategy, which focuses more on potential threats from Russia and China, and less on terrorism.

Over the past year, the United States and its NATO allies completed positioning about 4,500 soldiers in the three Baltic States and Poland, and have stationed several thousand other armored troops mostly in Eastern Europe as a deterrent to Russian aggression.

In Brussels, allied defense ministers met recently in advance of a NATO summit meeting in July. They approved a plan to ensure that by 2020 at least 30,000 troops, plus additional attack planes and warships, can respond to aggressions within 30 days.

These tensions are part of an expanding rivalry and military buildup, with echoes of the Cold War, between Washington and Moscow.

The doctored photo of the Army accident in Lithuania was just the latest reminder of what U.S. officials called Russia’s increasing reliance on cyberattacks and information warfare to keep its rivals off balance.

Last year, for instance, Lithuanian prosecutors investigated a claim of rape against German soldiers who were stationed in Lithuania as part of a NATO mission to deter Russia.

Ultimately, the report turned out to be false. Moscow denied being involved in any disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting troops, but the incident was widely viewed as an attempt to sow divisions among the allies. Moscow is flexing its conventional might, too, sending military forces for its own exercises along its western border with Europe and also to Syria and eastern Ukraine.

Additionally, Russia is building up its nuclear arsenal and cyberwarfare prowess in what U.S. military officials call an attempt to prove its relevance after years of economic decline and retrenchment.

In response, the Pentagon has stepped up training rotations and exercises on the territory of newer NATO allies in the east, including along a narrow 60-mile-wide stretch of rolling Polish farmland near the Lithuanian border northeast of here called the Suwalki Gap.

The corridor is sandwiched between the heavily militarized Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Moscow’s ally, Belarus, and is considered NATO’s weak spot on its eastern flank.

In the unlikely event of a land war, U.S. and allied officers say, the region is where Russia or its proxies could cut off the Baltic States from the rest of Europe. Since Russia annexed Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, Eastern Europe has felt increasingly vulnerable.

“Putin is a bird of prey,” said Piotr Lukasiewicz, a retired Polish army colonel and former Polish ambassador to Afghanistan. “He preys on weak states.”

The Polish government has offered to pay the U.S. up to $2 billion to build a permanent military base in the country, an offer the Trump administration is weighing cautiously.

U.S. forces are, apparently for the first time, flying unarmed Reaper surveillance drones from a Polish base in the country’s northwest.

Nearly 2,000 Special Operations forces from the United States and 10 other NATO nations carried out one of their biggest exercises ever — Trojan Footprint 18 — in Poland and the Baltics this month.

Elsewhere in Europe, Norway agreed two weeks ago to increase the number of U.S. Marines training there regularly, to 700 from 330, drawing an angry protest from Moscow.

The Russian military threat has changed markedly since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Putin has invested heavily in modern infantry forces, tanks and artillery.

Moscow has also increased its constellation of surveillance drones that can identify targets and coordinate strikes launched from other weapons.

Russia’s big war game in Belarus last year — known as Zapad 2017 — involved tens of thousands of troops and raised concerns about accidental conflicts that could be triggered by such exercises, or any incursions into Russian-speaking regions in the Baltics.

The Kremlin firmly rejects any such aims and says NATO is the security threat in Eastern Europe. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, in Helsinki, Finland, this month, in part to discuss “the current international security situation in Europe,” a spokesman for Dunford said.

A mobile U.S. command post here in northeastern Poland reflects the Army’s new realities in Eastern Europe.

Soldiers accustomed to operating from large, secure bases in Iraq and Afghanistan now practice disguising their positions with camouflage netting. Troops disperse into smaller groups to simulate avoiding sophisticated surveillance drones that could direct rocket or missile attacks against personnel or command posts. Intelligence analysts track Twitter and other social media for information on their adversaries and local sympathizers.

“We have to be nimble,” said Brig. Gen. Richard R. Coffman, a deputy commander of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division based in Fort Riley who is overseeing much of the U.S. training from a command post in Orzysz.

For Lithuanian officers, many of whom have served alongside Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, the expanded allied presence is welcome payback for the Baltic contributions to those counterterrorism campaigns of the past decade.

When it comes to Russian aggression, the Lithuanians have long memories. Hanging in the spacious office of Maj. Gen. Vitalijus Vaiksnoras, Lithuania’s second-ranking officer, is a huge painting of the Battle of Orsha — from 1514 — when a force of 30,000 Lithuanians and Poles defeated 80,000 Russians.

“We cannot afford to be weak,” said Vaiksnoras, who studied in San Antonio and at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. “The Russians will take advantage of that.”

Source: http://themercury.com/in-eastern-europe-army-girds-against-russian-might-manipulation/article_c72b7a0c-d32b-5211-a377-c22e4ed0c698.html

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Russia today began major joint military exercises with Belarus along the European Union’s eastern flank — a show of strength that has rattled nervous NATO members. Named Zapad-2017 (West-2017), the manoeuvres, scheduled to last until September 20, are taking place on the territory of Moscow’s closest ally Belarus, in Russia’s European exclave of Kaliningrad and in its frontier Pskov and Leningrad regions.
Moscow says the drills will involve 12,700 troops, 70 aircraft, 250 tanks and 10 battleships testing their firepower against an imaginary foe close to borders with Poland and the Baltic States.

In a statement announcing the start of the exercises Russia’s defence ministry insisted the manoeuvres are “of a strictly defensive nature and are not directed against any other state or group of countries.” But NATO claims Russia has kept it in the dark and seems to be massively underreporting the scale of the exercises, which some of the alliance’s eastern members insist could see more than 100,000 servicemen take part.
The war games come with tensions between Russia and NATO at their highest since the Cold War due to the Kremlin’s meddling in Ukraine and the US-led alliance bolstering its forces in eastern Europe.

Moscow has dismissed fears over the drills — the latest in a series of annual exercises that rotate around the vast country — as fuelled by the “myth about the so-called ‘Russian threat’”. But for NATO allies, especially jittery members such as Poland and the Baltic States which only broke free from Moscow’s grip 25 years ago, such reassurances have not dampened suspicion. “We have seen before that military exercises have been used as a disguise for aggressive actions against neighbours,” NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview with Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti new agency released Thursday. “We don’t see an imminent threat against any NATO ally, but the best way for Russia to help to reduce tensions and to avoid or prevent misunderstandings, miscalculations, is to be transparent.”

Moscow has held a stream of exercises since ties with the West plunged in 2014 over Ukraine, with the military claiming some drills included nearly 100,000 troops. Minsk has said the games will role play a conflict with a made-up rebel region backed by neighbouring European nations. Russia says they will simulate assaults by “extremist groups” trying to carry out “terrorist attacks”. Russian military expert Alexander Golts told AFP that Moscow “very skillfully manipulates the figures for such drills because it does not want to have to invite foreign observers”. “Russia at every drill is working on one and the same scenario — how to deploy troops quickly,” he said.

The Kremlin has vigorously defended its right to hold exercises and has long blamed the United States for ratcheting up tensions by expanding NATO up to its borders and holding its own provocative drills. The Russian war games come as Ukraine on Monday launched annual joint military exercises with the US and a host of other NATO countries. Meanwhile non-aligned Sweden has mobilised 19,000 soldiers for its biggest drills in 20 years which also include units from across Scandinavia and the US.

Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/russia-launches-war-games-on-natos-eastern-flank/855291/

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