On Aug. 3, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 312 carried an exclusive report on the Peace Mission 2007 exercise run simultaneously from command centers 3,000 kilometers apart in Russia and China. Friday, Aug. 17, President Vladimir Putin, while watching the exercise with China’s Hu Jintao, announced his order for the resumption of regular Russian long-range strategic bomber flights after 15 years.DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military experts note that the Russian-Chinese exercise began in fact two weeks before the given date and that an important part of the drill was the transfer of large military forces across vast distances.
The war game practiced tight military cooperation between the Russian and Chinese armies – and not only in combating terror. Those sources pointed to four novel manifestations:1. Chinese Air Force and special units will enter Russian territory for the first time and be activated in conjunction with Russian units from Chelyabinsk in the Russian Urals and Urumchi, capital of the Chinese province of Xinjiang.2. Also for the first time, a Russian-Chinese-Central Asian military war game will be directed from two command centers 3,000 kilometers apart in Russia and China. 3. China has never drilled its air force over any foreign territory.
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