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Military drills

Post-Soviet bloc’s first-ever Air Bridge-2018 drills kick off in Russia

At the joint command center in Yekaterinburg the CSTO air forces’ representatives will practice joint operations to control the air traffic of the bloc's member-states

© Valery Matitsyn/TASS

YEKATERINBURG, October 1. /TASS/. The Collective Security Organization’s first-ever joint air exercise Vozdushny Most-2018 (Air Bridge-2018) has begun in Yekaterinburg. It will be held in the Central Military District till October 14, with the CSTO member-states - Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan - taking part.

"We are holding the Air Bridge-2018 exercise for the first time. The CSTO member states’ transport planes will airlift large mobile contingents. A total of 3,500 troops and 620 pieces of military equipment will be transported," the Central Military District’s commander, Lieutenant-General Alexander Lapin, said at the opening ceremony.

A unified system of control to command CSTO air force and air defense groups had been created with reliance on integrated and combined automated control systems, such as Polyana-D4M1 and Bastion.

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At the joint command center in Yekaterinburg the CSTO air forces’ representatives will practice joint operations to control the air traffic of CSTO member-states, airlift troop contingents and materiel to the sites of combat training missions in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Russia. As the Central Military District’s press-service said, the command center will have a staff of 140.

"I would like to point out that this exercise is being held within the framework of another one, Boyevoye Bratstvo-2018 (Combat Brotherhood-2018), underway in the Central Asian Region. Before, such exercises never involved the air component. This time transport planes will be used - Ilyushin-76, C-295 and Antonov-26," the deputy chief of the CSTO unified command, Lieutenant-General Nurlan Ormanbetov, said on Monday.

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