I understand that Russian exercises has a lot of military theater going on when the Russians act out a pre-planned maneuver over several days, but it seems indeed Vostok 2018 is different:
On this occasion force on force training did seem to occur. One of the PLA battalion was a medium combined arm battalion standing in for a medium combined arm brigade. As a lot of us here on this site knows a PLA medium combined arms brigade has Type 08 wheeled IVF and Type 11 wheeled assault gun to form the spearhead. Hence why this exercise came to mind when I was thinking how to explain the recent Russian weakness against the AFU counterattack and hence why I was interested in how much of AFU's vehicles in the counterattack are technicals vs how many are MRAPs. Technical mounted troops would be conceptually similar to PLA light combined arms brigade or US infantry BCT equipped with Mengshi/Humvee (and we don't have good data on how Russians can stand up to those). Where as MRAP being better protected could be thought of as discount medium combined arms brigade or Stryker BCT and we know from this Vostok 2018 result that Russians have trouble dealing with them.
While yes, it would have been politically easy to dismiss that result as "well yeah, of course the blue OPFOR was meant to lose, they were out numbered 4 to 2". Nevertheless if indeed the PLA medium combined arm battalion ended up wiping out a whole blue mechanized infantry regiment by themselves in 24 hours alarm bells should have been ringing.