At the end of October, the Russian Armed Forces staged a military exercise in Crimea to rehearse the defense of the occupied peninsula. The military deployed forces from the Southern Military District/Joint Strategic Command (Obyedinennyye Strategicheskoye Komandovanie—OSK) to the Opuk training ground in Crimea, where they practiced the defense of the territory in a variety of tactical episodes involving the Military-Maritime Fleet (Voyenno-Morskoy Flot—VMF), Aerospace Forces (Vozdushno Kosmicheskikh Sil—VKS), Ground Forces and naval infantry. The strategic command-staff exercise (strategicheskiye komandno-shtabnyye ucheniya—SKShU) involved 8,000 personnel from three combined-arms armies (CAA), the Black Sea Fleet and the Caspian Flotilla as part of a much wider test of combat readiness in the Southern OSK (Mil.ru, October 25).
Russia’s Armed Forces Rehearse the Defense of Crimea – Jamestown
