Yesterday, Vladimir Putin announced that Russian nuclear bombers were headed back into the sky:
MOSCOW, Saturday, Aug. 18 — President Vladimir V. Putin said Friday that the Russian Air Force would begin regular, long-range patrols by nuclear-capable bombers over the world’s oceans, resuming 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 the standoffs of the cold war.
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 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 announcement follows a summer in which the Russians have been increasingly assertive in the skies and have directly challenged American and British air forces:
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 that it had scrambled fighter jets in response.
An aggressive, militaristic Russia. Didn’t we already play this game once ?
If nothing else, though, Vladimir Putin is proving that, again, The Simpsons are prophetic:
