Tens of thousands of troops and the Oreshnik missile: The maneuvers with which Russia is challenging NATO

A large contingent of the Russian Armed Forces is already deployed in Belarus, on the doorstep of Europe, to train for open warfare against NATO starting this Friday. The Zapad 2025 exercise will include the development of the Oreshnik ballistic missile, a much more dangerous weapon than the drones with which Moscow tested NATO defenses in Poland on Wednesday. The Kremlin maintains that these maneuvers are not directed against anyone, the same statement it made four years ago when it deployed the forces that attempted to take Kyiv via Belarus. Meanwhile, Russian propaganda is celebrating the weaknesses that — according to its narrative — Poland and its allies demonstrated in the face of a surprise incursion.

Russia and Belarus hold various types of joint exercises each year. Zapad, which has been held every four years since 2009, is a special exercise. During the most recent maneuvers, held in September 2021, Washington finally understood that an invasion of Ukraine was imminent. “Right about then we realized this is odd; it was much bigger in scale and scope than the previous year’s exercise,” Mark Milley, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, later told Politico.

In December of that year, the presidents of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, announced another unprecedented joint exercise, Allied Resolution, for February 2022. Moscow promised European leaders that it would withdraw its troops from Belarus once the maneuvers were completed. On February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine from that territory on the shortest route to attempt to take Kyiv.

The Zapad 2025 exercises will run from September 12 to 16. Their true scope is secret, although according to the Belarusian Ministry of Defense, some 13,000 troops will participate, along with dozens of aircraft. However, Western intelligence suspects there will be many more. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned of the deployment of “up to 150,000 troops” on Belarusian soil. As a precedent, Moscow announced 12,800 “active” combatants at Zapad 2021, but later acknowledged that the contingent was around 200,000 troops, many supposedly involved in other tasks that were never specified.

In response to the rising tensions, Poland and Latvia will close airspace along their borders with Russia and Belarus, and Warsaw will reinforce its military presence by deploying 40,000 troops during the exercises.

The Russian high command will closely monitor the performance of its Strategic Missile Forces, the Kremlin’s nuclear forces, in these maneuvers. Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin announced in August that the Oreshnik ballistic missile would play a special role. Putin tested his new weapon against Ukraine in December 2024 and threatened to systematically use it to attack his enemy’s political and command centers.

Although Western intelligence doubts Moscow’s ability to mass-produce this modification of the RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental missile, the Oreshnik poses a new threat to Europe. Its design allows it to strike at shorter ranges than the Rubezh, which a few years ago would have violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, abandoned by both the United States (in 2019) and Russia (last August). With a range of 2,000 to 5,000 kilometers (1,240-3,105 miles) and capable of carrying nuclear warheads or conventional explosives, the Oreshnik could land at a speed of Mach 10 — about 12,300 kilometers per hour (7,640 mph) — on any city in the European Union.

The drones that flew over Poland on Wednesday reached speeds of 190 kilometers per hour (120 mph), and Warsaw claims to have shot down at least three of the 19 that entered its airspace. Ukraine, which receives between 100 and over 500 drones and hypersonic missiles daily, typically reports interception rates of between 50% and almost 100%.

Kremlin propaganda and its pro-war bloggers have quietly celebrated what they consider a failure of NATO’s air defenses. At the same time, to exonerate Moscow, they claim it was a false flag attack by Kyiv or a mistake caused by Ukrainian electronic warfare actions intended to divert Russian drones and missiles.

“If it weren’t for the Belarusians’ warning, the Poles might have completely ignored the drones’ flight into their territory,” says military blogger Alexander Kots, with more than half a million followers on Telegram. “How nice it would be if we destroyed the Polish airfield in Rzeszów, like Israel did with Doha,” he adds.

Rzeszów is an important logistical hub for Western military aid to Ukraine. According to the German newspaper Bild and Der Spiegel magazine, several Russian drones targeted this airfield.

Putin tries to draw Lukashenko into war

The perception among Russian military analysts is that a confrontation with NATO is quite feasible in the future. A source close to the Russian Ministry of Defense told this newspaper that Putin seeks to reverse the results of the Cold War and return Russia to its status as a “great power,” with the maximalist objective of recovering “his own sphere of influence and the right to dictate terms” in Eastern Europe.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated in June that Russia could be prepared for war with NATO by 2030. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates it will pose a “significant military threat” by 2027.

The Russian Zapad exercises have their origins in the Soviet Zapad exercises, which also involved the Baltic republics and Ukraine, then under Moscow’s mandate. The largest exercises took place in 1981 with some 150,000 Warsaw Pact troops. At the time, NATO suspected the exercises were a cover for an invasion of Poland, which was mired in protests against the Kremlin-puppet communist regime.

Today, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are protected by NATO, while Lukashenko’s dictatorship survives on a knife edge. Rescued by Putin from the 2020 election fraud protests, the Belarusian regime provided its territory to Moscow as a platform for invading Ukraine and has conceded part of its sovereignty to Russia under the Union State, although it has so far managed to avoid taking an active part in the war against Ukraine.

Lukashenko, in power since 1994, doesn’t want to put all his eggs in Putin’s basket. The dictator has strengthened ties with the administrations of Joe Biden and Donald Trump over the past two years with gestures such as the release of dozens of political prisoners. The latest batch, this Thursday, saw the release of 52 detainees after a meeting in Minsk with White House representative John Cole.

Among those released are politician Nikolai Statkevich and philosopher Vladimir Matskevich, as well as more than a dozen foreign citizens. Some of those imprisoned had been held for more than a decade. However, there are still 1,177 political prisoners in the country, according to the Belarusian NGO Viasna, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

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