Russia Looks To Gauge NATO With Zapad War Games. Here’s What To Know.

Summary

Russia and Belarus are launching the "Zapad 2025" joint military drills on September 12, aiming to showcase their combat power despite Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine.
The exercises will include practicing the planning of nuclear weapon use and involve around 7,000-8,000 troops, significantly smaller than previous iterations.
NATO and neighboring countries are closely monitoring the drills, citing concerns over transparency and potential provocations.

Russia and Belarus have kicked off major joint military drills as tensions in the region spiked after Russian drones entered Polish territory, prompting Warsaw and NATO allies to scramble their defenses.

The “Zapad-2025” drills that began on September 12 will take place in Belarus and Russia and will last until September 16.

Russian officials said the war games will simulate repelling an enemy attack and analysts say a central aim of the exercises is to showcase that the Russian military is still powerful after three-and-a-half years of grinding war in Ukraine that is estimated to have cost Moscow more than one million casualties.

“I think the purpose is for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to try to show that he is still strong, that the war in Ukraine hasn’t really affected them,” Lance Landrum, a retired Lieutenant General in the US Air Force who is now a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), told RFE/RL.

This year’s war games are also set to practice the decision-making around the use of Russian nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable intermediate range missiles that Moscow has promised to supply to Minsk. Russia hasn’t said how many tactical nuclear weapons it has deployed to Belarus, but Lukashenko said in December that his country had several dozen.

“I think this is a display for nations and world media as part of their influence campaign,” Landrum said.

The drills have already drawn concerns from Ukraine and other countries bordering Belarus -- such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland -- who will be watching closely after the last Zapad military exercises in 2021 were used in part as cover for moving Russian troops into Belarus, where they then rolled into Ukraine in February 2022.

A NATO spokesperson told RFE/RL that the alliance monitors Russian military activity closely and that they call on "Russia and Belarus to act in a predictable and transparent manner in line with their international commitments" during the Zapad drills, but that NATO does "not see any immediate military threat" against any member.

"The Kremlin has consistently demonstrated a lack of transparency, including with regard to the size and scope of its exercises," the spokesperson told RFE/RL. "It has a known history of using military exercises to pursue coercive policies."

How Many Troops Will Be In Zapad-2025 Exercises?

Amid the Kremlin’s ongoing war in Ukraine, this year’s Zapad could be the most limited ever.

Belarusian defense officials said earlier this year that about 13,000 troops would participate in the exercises close to the country’s western border. But in May, that number was revised and cut in half, putting the likely total to be around 7,000-8,000 personnel.

That announcement also said that the main maneuvers would take place deeper inside Belarus. Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin said most of the exercise will happen around the city of Barysau, about 74 kilometers northeast of Minsk, although some “small units will carry out practical tasks to repel a hypothetical enemy” in areas close to the border with Poland and Lithuania.

Moscow is also only forecast to send about 2,000 troops to Belarus, while the total exercise will also cover Russia’s Moscow and Leningrad military districts, the Kaliningrad exclave, the Arctic region, and the Baltic and Barents seas.

Russia, however, is also running three other separate exercises with countries from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) -- a military bloc that includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan, which could mask the true size of Zapad.

Still, Zapad is expected to be far smaller in scale than the estimated 200,000 troops that took part in the last iterations of the military exercises in 2021.

Why Are This Year's Zapad Drills Significant?

While this year’s drills are set to be smaller than in recent years, they mark a return to strategic level exercises for Russia and Belarus since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“This year’s exercise will very likely indicate how Moscow expects a war against NATO to play out,” the German Council on Foreign Relations wrote in a recent report previewing the exercises. “While there is no acute danger of escalation, the exercise will provide NATO with important lessons on Russia’s concept of a future war.”

Zapad, which means “West” in Russian, is the latest iteration of military exercises that began in the 1970s under the Soviet Union and continued until its collapse in 1991. It was revived in 1999 and later expanded under Putin as part of a four-year cycle of military drills that rotate through Russia and its neighbors' geographic regions.

In the past, the Kremlin has not shied from provocation in its military exercises.

In addition to the 2021 drills hiding military deployments ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western officials have stated that they believe Zapad exercises in 2009 and 2013 included simulated nuclear strikes against Warsaw and Stockholm.

A Spotlight On Belarus And Nuclear Weapons

In December, Belarusian autocratic leader Aleksandr Lukashenko and Putin signed a treaty giving security guarantees to Belarus, including the possible use of Russian nuclear weapons to help repel any aggression.

The treaty followed Moscow’s revision of its nuclear doctrine, which for the first time placed Belarus under Russia’s nuclear umbrella amid tensions with the West.

Khrenin, Belarus’s defense minister, said that troops will practice “planning the use of” Russian nuclear weapons in the Zapad drills, but the exercise will not involve their physical deployment.

While Western military observers will be following this development closely, the war games also come as Lukashenko recently signaled willingness to mend his relationship with the West, which has been severely strained for years over his brutal crackdown on dissent and his support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

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Lukashenko “is pushing a narrative of de-escalation, promising to influence Putin’s actions and make concessions such as releasing political prisoners,” said Ryhor Astapenia, the Belarus Initiative director at Chatham House, in a recent analysis looking at the exercises.

This year has seen regular releases of political prisoners, including 52 of various nationalities on the eve of the drills, as well as a public push for a rapprochement with the West. In August, Lukashenko spoke by phone with US President Donald Trump, who called him a “highly respected President” in a social media post.

“If these exercises proceed in a dull and transparent manner, they will likely pave the way for further dialogue,” Astapenia said.