Russia starts large-scale war games

Russia launched large-scale military exercises involving thousands of troops across parts of its southern regions yesterday which Georgia said would violate its territory.

The Defence Ministry said the sweep of the week-long Caucasus 2009 manoeuvres would include the volatile, mainly-Muslim regions of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia - continuing focus of rebel groups seeking to prise the area from Moscow's control.

Moscow sees the Caucasus mountains area as a strategically vital zone, the approach to prime agricultural and industrial regions and an important energy transit route. The Kremlin views any challenge here as a threat to the overall security and unity of a vast country stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.

A senior Russian general said the manoeuvres would involve Russian troops stationed in the Georgian breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Similar Russian exercises in the same region last August allowed Moscow to send troops and tanks into Georgia quickly to repel government troops who tried to retake South Ossetia. The brief war raised fears in the West over security of gas transit routes from the Caspian Sea to western Europe.

The manoeuvres will involve 8,500 military personnel, 200 tanks, 450 armoured vehicles and 250 pieces of artillery. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev criticised Nato for holding exercises close to the war zone in Georgia in May, saying they fuelled tension in the region.

"We are holding these exercises to boost the country's defence where it is being threatened," Dmitry Rogozin, Russian envoy to Nato, said in a video link with Moscow journalists.

"We will hold such exercises irrespective of Nato schedules. If we consider it important to strengthen our combat readiness on our sovereign territory, we will continue doing so... We hope that despite a lack of proper security guarantees for Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia's leadership will drop its military adventurism towards these republics."

"Because after each such military escapade Georgia's territory risks to get smaller and smaller," Mr Rogozin added.

Alexander Nalbandov, a Georgian deputy foreign minister, described the exercises as a "a pure provocation from Russia".

"The fact that the exercises are held not just on Russian territory, but on Georgia's occupied territory, with the participation of thousands of soldiers and the involvement of so much military hardware, makes this situation even worse," he said. The Russian exercises were launched two days after Nato and Russia resumed formal cooperation for the first time since last August's war.