Russia began military exercises this Monday with ten thousand troops in the Chukotka and Bering seas, off the US state of Alaska, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced.
“About ten thousand military personnel and more than 50 units of war materiel, including surface and support ships, submarines, aircraft and helicopters, participate in the tactical exercise,” the ministry said in a statement.
The “Bal” and “Bastion” coastal defense systems, as well as tracked off-road armored vehicles, also participate in the tests, he stated, quoted by the Spanish agency EFE.
The program began with the execution of combat exercises to defeat a group of ships in the northeastern part of the Bering Sea, according to the Russian agency TASS.
“The crews of the missile cruiser “Varyag” and the nuclear submarine missile cruiser “Tomsk”, as well as the coastal missile system “Bastion”, practiced the missile attack,” it reported, citing the Ministry of Defense.
The exercises, called “Finval 2023” and led by the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Admiral Nikolai Evmenov, aim to protect “communications on the Northern Sea Route”, which passes through the Russian Arctic.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it promoted the Northern Sea Route as the future of global freight transport from Asia to Europe.
The Defense Ministry also announced today that Russian forces attacked sites in Ukraine where long-range shells and depleted uranium missiles supplied by kyiv’s Western allies were stored.
“All objectives were achieved,” the ministry said in a statement published on social networks, according to the Spanish agency Europa Press.
The attack also destroyed radio reconnaissance and sabotage group training centers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, he added.
Moscow did not specify the locations of the attacks, but Ukrainian military authorities said they had shot down, on Sunday night, 17 cruise missiles in the areas of Dnipropetrovsk (southeast), Poltava (center) and Khmelnitsky (west).
Information released by Russia and Ukraine about the course of the war cannot immediately be independently verified.
Source: TSF
