Algeria arrives on the Pacific stage hand-in-hand with Russia
For the first time Algeria is taking part in the Vostok military exercises, which are taking place in the far east of mainland Russia, on the shores of the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk. The Algerian National People's Army has confirmed that it plans to send around 100 uniformed personnel to the exercises, in which the Kremlin's closest allies are taking part.
The manoeuvres are expected to involve more than 50,000 military personnel, including around 10,000 from the Chinese armed forces. Along with host Russia and Algeria, India, China, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Syria, Nicaragua, Laos, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan will also participate.
The exercises will test the organisational and coordination capabilities of these different forces in defensive and offensive simulations. In addition to the weapon systems of the participating units (infantry fighting vehicles, armoured transports, artillery pieces), 140 air assets and 60 warships will be present.
Vostok 2022
— Algerians with attitude ?? (@supwithdz) August 31, 2022
Contingents of Russia, China and Algeriapic.twitter.com/NWrYeMKahG
The manoeuvres are expected to be large-scale, although the war in Ukraine prevents Russia from repeating the feat of Vostok 2018, for which Moscow's military command mobilised 300,000 military personnel, almost a quarter of its total active personnel that year.
According to the Maghreb defence blog MenaDefense, the Algerian military faces the interesting challenge of working in a very varied multinational environment and in a scenario with which it is not entirely familiar, namely amphibious operations in the Pacific.
The Algerian military-political regime once again demonstrates its closeness to Putin and its trust in Moscow in the defence field. Along with the anti-terrorist manoeuvres scheduled for November 2022 in military sector 3, 50 km from Morocco, Algeria continues its trend of support for Russia. Various voices in the international community hoped that Macron's visit to Algiers would limit Russian influence on the Tebboune government. The French president's achievements are called into question with the arrival of Algerian troops in Vladivostok on Thursday.
Russia must be pulling out all the stops in Algeria, its main ally in North Africa, and thanks to which it was able to penetrate the Sahel, especially Mali, a country with which Algeria shares a porous border.
Algeria thus joins the series of military manoeuvres that have been taking place in the Pacific since Nancy Pelosi's visit to the region and her controversial stop on the island of Taiwan. After the Speaker of the House of Representatives' visit, China called for major manoeuvres and missile deployments in the region. Now it is Russia's turn to launch the Vostok 2022 juste in front of Japan's northernmost islands. At some points, the Japanese and Russian coasts are separated by a mere 250 km.
International analysts wonder whether Algeria has definitively crossed the point of no return in its international relations or whether it remains in the geopolitical 'Carrefour' between East and West, a Carrefour with increasingly distant paths since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Since 2019, Algeria has been 81 per cent dependent on Russian military imports to equip its armed forces. It has since become the third largest customer of the Russian defence sector, after China and India.
