Russia on Tuesday launched its biggest war games since the fall of the Soviet Union — teaming up with China in a massive show of force that NATO decried as a drill for “large-scale conflict.”

President Vladimir Putin planned to attend the exercises, featuring about 300,000 Russian troops, after hosting Chinese leader Xi Jinping at an economic forum in Russia’s far eastern city Vladivostok.

The week-long war games — dubbed “Vostok-2018” (East-2018) — “have kicked off” in far eastern Russia, the Russian defense ministry said.

The Kremlin also will deploy 36,000 military vehicles, 80 ships and 1,000 aircraft, helicopters and drones, while the Chinese will provide some 3,500 troops for the games.

The Russian strongman praised the Kremlin’s increasingly close ties with China as he met with Xi at the economic forum in Vladivostok on Tuesday.

“We have trustworthy ties in political, security and defense spheres,” said Putin, who also posed for a photo op with his Chinese counterpart to cook up traditional blini pancakes.

For his part, Xi said the two countries’ “friendship is getting stronger all the time.”

The games come at a time of mounting tensions between Moscow and the West amid accusations of Russian interference in Western affairs and conflicts in Ukraine and Syria

NATO said Vostok-2018 “demonstrates Russia’s focus on exercising large-scale conflict.”

“It fits into a pattern we have seen over some time — a more assertive Russia, significantly increasing its defense budget and its military presence,” the alliance’s spokesman Dylan White said last month.

NATO has said it will closely monitor the exercise, as will the US, which has a strong military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

But Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed such concerns.

“These are very important drills but they are part of routine annual work to develop the armed forces,” he told reporters Tuesday.

Peskov has earlier said Russia’s “ability to defend itself in the current international situation which is often aggressive and unfriendly to our country is justified, essential and without alternative.”

The Russian military has compared the show of force to the USSR’s 1981 war games, in which as many as 150,000 Warsaw Pact soldiers took part in “Zapad-81” (West-81).

But Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the latest exercises are even larger.

“Imagine 36,000 military vehicles moving at the same time: tanks, armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles — and all of this, of course, in conditions as close to a combat situation as possible,” Shoigu said, according to Agence France-Presse.

The location of the main training range for Vostok-2018 — about 3,000 miles east of Moscow — means it is likely to also be watched closely by Japan, North and South Korea as well as by Mongolia, which will send some of its own troops to take part.



With Post wires