MINSK, August 14. /TASS/. Minsk is concerned over the offensive nature of NATO’s drills with the scenarios of the use of military force in response to potential conflicts in the post-Soviet space, the Defense Ministry of Belarus said on Wednesday.
Chief of the Belarussian General Staff, First Deputy Defense Minister of Belarus Major-General Oleg Belokonev made this statement at a press briefing on the upcoming Union Shield-2019 Russia-Belarus joint operational exercise.
"The analysis and the content of the largest of these drills, such as Anaconda 2018 and Dragon 2019, is evidence that NATO continues elaborating scenarios, which unfortunately envisage military response to the crises and conflicts that may arise in the post-Soviet space," the Belarusian general said.
"Moreover, the focus of their basic measures for troops’ training is seen to shift from defensive and special operations to defensive and offensive actions. All this cannot but cause our concern," the chief of the Belarusian General Staff said.
Belarus’s neighbors "hold such drills on their territory regularly, with the increasingly larger scope and number of the involved personnel and hardware [as compared to Belarusian-Russian drills] and the focus of these military exercises is far from being of defensive nature," the general stressed.