Russian and Chinese ground forces practice interoperability in the “Peaceful Mission 2013” joint military exercise

I have recently written about the large scale military exercises conducted by Russia in the Far East and I remember that some clueless commentator (from the BBC I think) wrote that while the maritime component was directed at Japan, the land component was directed at China.  At the time I did not think that it was worth spending any time debunking this silly notion, but today I will mention that far from threatening each other, the Russian and Chinese military are, yet again, conducting joint training and military exercises.  While in the previous joint exercises Russia and China had trained together on the seas (Joint Sea 2013), this time they are doing so on land.

The latest Sino-Russian joint military exercise, called “Peaceful Mission 2013”, is being conducted at the Chebarkul military training grounds in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region and involved armor and artillery (about 70 pieces of heavy equipment, such equipment, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, reconnaissance patrol, 120 mm caliber howitzers, 152 mm self-propelled artillery and a number of engineering and maintenance vehicles), army aviation (Chinese helicopters crew from the Shenyang Military Region few over 4'000km lead by Russian helicopters and special forces units (350 soldiers).  In spite of that big firepower, these exercises were characterized by both Russian and Chinese officials as "anti-terrorist" training.  Cute.

Here is a short Russian TV report just to give you sense of what this all looks like and to gauge the mood of the participants:


Bottom line: far from threatening each other (an old dream of the Anglo elites) Russia and China are making unprecedented efforts to jointly train together with a strong stress on interoperability.  In other words, the two countries are practicing joint military operations against a common enemy.

My guess is that the next thing we will see are joint military operations by Russian and Chinese air forces.

The Saker