The same report claimed the troops left the rail lines littered with trash. 'After unloading, a lot of abandoned equipment - body armor, helmets, personal gear - remained.' 'Military equipment is frequently dropped from the platforms during unloading,' the channel wrote. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has called the Belarus exercises 'the biggest Russian deployment there since the Cold War.' The maneuvers, a 10-day exercise set to end on February 20 and involving an estimated 30,000 Russian troops and almost the entire Belarusian military, come at a time when Russia has massed military assets around Ukraine and in the occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea, sparking fears of a new invasion. The first Russian troops began arriving in Belarus for the unexpected Union Determination-2022 exercises on January 18.
'They drink a lot and sell a lot of their diesel fuel. 'The soldiers have settled in the surrounding forests,' the local, who asked not to be identified, added. 'I've seen with my own eyes the movement of tracked military vehicles on the streets of the city,' said a resident of the Belarusian town of Khoyniki, in the southeastern corner of the country not far from the Ukrainian border, when asked about the Russian forces in his country for joint military exercises.