-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 17, 2007 5:04:19 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The Russians Are Coming
Russia Resumes Patrols
by Nuclear Bombers
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
New York Times, August 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/18/world/europe/17cnd-russia.html?hp
MOSCOW, Saturday, Aug. 18 — President Vladimir V. Putin said Friday
that the Russian Air Force would resume regular, long-range patrols
by nuclear-capable bombers over the world’s oceans, renewing the
practice after a 15-year hiatus in another sign of Russia’s growing
assertiveness.
In the first flight, 14 bombers and six supporting airplanes took
off at midnight on Friday, Mr. Putin said, in remarks carried on
state television. Mr. Putin said such patrols would continue “from
this day on.”
The sortie on Friday included Tu-160 and Tu-95 airplanes, known by
their NATO appellations as Blackjacks and Bears, according to a
statement posted on the Russian Defense Ministry Web site.
The Russian bombers were flying Friday over the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans and the North Pole, and were being escorted by NATO
fighter jets, the site said, recalling cold war-era standoffs.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia would periodically send
its aging bomber fleet on missions, but only during major military
training exercises; the country was too poor to fly the planes often.
That is no longer the case. Now the bombers, capable of carrying
nuclear weapons, will regularly fly missions far from Russian soil
separately from scheduled training exercises. Mr. Putin suggested
Friday that the decision was a response to military threats to Russia.
This month, Russian bombers flew near the American military base on
the Pacific island of Guam. Gen. Pavel V. Androsov, the commander
of long-range aviation, boasted that the sortie prompted the United
States to scramble fighter jets that flew so close to the Russians
that the pilots, “smiled at each other and then peacefully went
their separate ways.” The Pentagon confirmed that Russian airplanes
had been spotted but said that no fighter jets had been sent to
intercept them.
In July, Russian Tu-95 bombers flew toward Scotland but turned back
before entering British airspace. In that case, the Royal Air Force
confirmed it had scrambled fighter jets in response.
The American the response on Friday was muted. “Militaries around
the world engage in a variety of different activities,” Gordon D.
Johndroe, the White House spokesman, told reporters in Crawford,
Tex., according to a transcript. “It’s not entirely surprising that
the Russian Air Force, the Russian military, might engage in this
kind of activity.”
Russian television showed images of sleek bombers soaring into the
air, refueling and landing, though it was unclear whether the
images depicted the sorties that took off Friday. Russia has 79
strategic aircraft, capable of carrying 900 cruise missiles,
Russian television reported, far fewer than at the height of the
cold war.
Still, the resumption of bomber flights was the latest in a series
of assertive gestures by Russia, emboldened by windfall petroleum
wealth and angered over what it has called American and NATO
aggressiveness, including plans for a missile-defense system in the
Czech Republic and Poland, analysts said.
Earlier this year, Russia backed out of a major arms pact, the
Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, and defied British
demands to extradite the principal suspect in the radiation
poisoning of a Russian security service defector in London.
“They believe, with some legitimacy, that they are a rising power,”
Cliff Kupchan, a Russia expert at the Eurasia Group in Washington,
a political risk advisory and consulting firm, said in a telephone
interview. “Until they feel they are playing their due role in
international relations, we will continue to see assertive behavior
from Russia.”
“It’s a symbolic gesture, but it stands for something very real,
which is a resurgent Russia,” he said of the resumption of
strategic bomber patrols.
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