Keir Giles is an associate fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House. He is also a director of the Conflict Studies Research Center, a group of subject matter experts in Eurasian security.
Despite the extraordinary level of Western media and analytical interest in September 2017’s Russian-Belarusian Zapad military exercise before it began, key lessons and implications from it have only become clear after it ended.
Recent Western assessments of Russia’s renewed military power have led to a wide range of differing conclusions and, taken together, provide a mixed and confusing picture of the scale and nature of the threat.