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“The exercise will become one of the main events of operational and combat training of the Russian armed Forces in 2024,” says Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Admiral Aleksandr Moiseev.
The announcement posted by the Ministry of Defense [unsafe link] on September 10 is the first official confirmation the the long-planned drill has kicked-off.
Although, naval movements have been going on for more than a week. The Barents Observer Thursday reported about the Northern Fleet’s multi-domain bastion defense manoeuvres with anti-submarine hunting in the Barents Sea. On Monday this week, we reported about Baltic Fleet warships sailing north along the coast of Norway.
Massive war games400 warships, submarines and auxiliary fleet support vessels are out sailing. 120 aircraft of the Navy and air force participate and in total 90,000 personnel are involved, the Defense Ministry informs. There are also some 7,000 units of weapons and special equipment involved with the coastal units involved. Along the coast of the Kola Peninsula that includes anti-ship bastion missiles, anti-aircraft S-400 and S-300 missiles and troopers protecting the strategic naval bases, including where nuclear submarines are sailing out.
The exercise involves the Pacific Fleet, where Chinese warships will join, the Northern Fleet, the Baltic Fleet and the Caspian Flotilla. Admiral Moiseev is for a good reason not mentioning the fleet he himself was head of in 2018, the Black Sea fleet. Most of the warships there are damaged or sunken after Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022 and Kyiv started to attack the vessels at sea or at port in Sevastopol and Novorossiysk.
