WASHINGTON - When thousands of Russian troops wheeled and maneuvered through the steppes of southern Siberia two years ago, as part of massive military exercises known as Tsentr, Western experts spotted something unusual.
Amid Defense Ministry orders for tank brigades, paratrooper battalions, motorized rifle divisions, and railroad cars carrying howitzers, there were orders for the federal fisheries agency.
"And I wondered, 'What the hell is the fisheries ministry doing?'" recalls Johan Norberg, senior military analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency. The eventual conclusion, he says, was that the Russian fisheries fleet was seen by military planners as an intelligence asset, playing a small role in national defense.
It's an example offering a small window into not only how Russian commanders approach large-scale military games. It's also the kind of insight that Western analysts hope to gain beginning next week when one of the largest exercises Moscow has conducted on its western borders since the Cold War get under way: a real-world, real-time glimpse at what Russia's military is truly capable of, after years of institutional reforms.
The Zapad drills, taking place in Belarus and the regions east of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and formally kicking off on September 14, are the first to be held in close proximity to NATO member countries since Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
For that and many other reasons, they are giving heartburn to NATO allies from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with some observers predicting that the number of participating personnel could exceed 100,000, along with tanks, artillery units, aircraft, and other equipment.
Though few, if any, Western planners anticipate any outbreak of hostilities with Russia, NATO states have taken steps to reassure their populaces and to show they are taking the Russians seriously. U.S. Air Force fighter jets are now patrolling Baltic airspace; Poland is closing its airspace near Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad; and four NATO battle groups, featuring 4,500 troops, are on alert in the Baltics and Poland.
That said, as much as anything, the Zapad exercises serve as a midterm exam for Russian armed forces and military planners, a measure of reforms made over the past decade.
"The exercise is actually a very good opportunity for us to...get a better sense of what the Russian military is actually capable of: how it can handle logistics, move different units, or, in an operation, exercise command and control over combined armed formations in the Baltic theater, which is the one we're principally concerned with, right?" says Michael Kofman, a senior research scientist at CNA Corporation and a fellow at the Kennan Institute in Washington.
"This one is a lot more interesting to us because we don't plan on fighting Russia in Central Asia," Kofman says.
?Preparations have been ongoing for weeks, with large numbers of railroad cars shipping heavy weaponry and vehicles into Belarus and civilians mobilized at some large state-owned enterprises in Kaliningrad and elsewhere.
"As we've seen before, Russians train exactly as they intend to fight," Kristjan Prikk, undersecretary for policy at the Estonian Defense Ministry, said during a July event at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. "Thus, Zapad will give ample information on their military development and certainly on their political thinking, as it is right now."
In 2008, when Russia invaded its former Soviet neighbor Georgia, its armed forces easily overcame Georgia's defenses and some of its U.S.-trained personnel, but the five-day war showcased significant weaknesses. For example, some Russian officers were reportedly unable to communicate with others over existing radio frequencies and were forced to use regular mobile phones. Russian surveillance drones performed poorly.
Other reforms already under way at the time included a shift from the Soviet military structure, organized around divisions, to a smaller brigade structure and the increased use of contract, rather than conscripted, soldiers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (front left) speaks with his Belarusian counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka during the closing stages of the Zapad war games in 2013.