‍By CGTN's The Point

“The only purpose is to keep our troops well prepared for any kind of danger,” Alexander Lukin, a professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Russia, said on CGTN’s The Point, as the Zapad 2017 military drill between Russia and Belarus is underway.  

“If someone wants to be worried, let them be worried. We cannot do anything about it,” he added.

“I completely disagree,” countered Harvey Dzodin, a research fellow with the Center for China and Globalization.

He said he thought the exercise involved more than the 12,700 troops Moscow had disclosed and complained about a lack of transparency.

“You have something to hide because you are not telling us, by various estimates based on the number of support facilities and so on, that there are upwards of 100,000, 200,000 or 300,000 troops who are participating from Russia and Belarus on this exercise and they are threatening the Baltic states and threatening Poland that looks very much like the hypothetical countries involved in this exercise,” he argued.

Alexander Lukin refuted this allegation, describing it as typical Western propaganda.

“If any kind of exercise threatens border states, how about American exercises in South Korea? Does that mean it threatens China or North Korea (the DPRK)?” he asked.

Before the Zapad 2017 drill got underway, several NATO countries took part in Sweden’s largest military exercise in 23 years, with more than 1,400 US troops participating.

“I have heard people saying that Russia is threatening American interests by bringing its troops close to American bases in Europe. What are American troops doing there in the first place?” asked Alexander Lukin, who expressed concern that America and its allies are conducting military exercises near Russia and felt puzzled by American’s worries about the Russian exercise which happened far away from American territory.

Harvey Dzodin responded with a quote from US Army Lieutenant General Ben Hodges when he referred to a possible ‘Trojan horse’.

“What he meant by that is all this equipment, all these troops are now present in Belarus. We will see how many of them will remain afterwards.”