Russian cruise missile bombers fly to Caribbean

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- Two Russian Tupolev Tu-160 White Swan supersonic bombers landed Wednesday night in Venezuela, where they were personally acclaimed by President Hugo Chavez as heralding the end of Yankee imperialism.

The 1,380 miles per hour Tu-160s -- NATO designation Blackjack -- flew into Liberator air base in Venezuela. Fiercely anti-American Chavez greeted them with an address on Venezuelan national television with the words "The Yankee hegemony is finished."

The U.S. Air Force and NATO took the Blackjacks very seriously and sent combat aircraft to shadow them closely in their flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

For the two Tu-160s are historic and strategic game-changers. They can carry 99,000 pounds of munitions, including Mach-2, nuclear-capable X-555 cruise missiles capable of annihilating targets 2,000 miles inland in the continental United States when fired from outside U.S. air space

Sending the beautiful gigantic aircraft -- which look remarkably like the old Concorde supersonic airliner -- to Venezuela marks a serious Russian strategic counter-move to the unprecedented concentration of U.S. and NATO warships in the Black Sea -- regarded by Russia as a private lake for 250 years since the time of the Empress Catherine the Great -- and they are also the most aggressive strategic challenge or gambit the Kremlin has laid down in the Western Hemisphere in at least a quarter of a century.

Arguably, their deployment could prove as epochal as the Soviet deployment of deadly nuclear missiles in Cuba within 90 miles of the U.S. mainland that set off the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Venezuela is thousands of miles south of the Rio Grande, the southern border of the United States, but the Tu-160 Blackjacks with their long range, their astonishing speed -- well over twice that of a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress -- and their enormous munitions carrying capacity are ideally designed to close that gap.

Russia's Defense Ministry described the Tu-160s as being on a training mission and said they would soon return to Russia. They landed in Venezuela the same day the U.S. frigate USS Taylor and three warships from NATO allies Spain, Germany and Poland left the Black Sea after an 18-day exercise that infuriated Russia. Senor Russian Adm. Eduard Baltin told reporters in Moscow last week that if a shooting war erupted, the Russian navy could sink all American and NATO warships in the Black Sea within 20 minutes.

In retaliation, the Kremlin is sending its nuclear-powered missile cruiser Pyotr Veliky on a visit to Venezuela in November to flex Russian naval power in the Caribbean.

Back on July 24, as previously reported in these columns, unnamed Russian defense officials were quoted unofficially in the Moscow press as saying Russia might send its Tu-160s and other strategic bombers to be deployed out of Venezuela in retaliation for continued NATO military and political expansion in Central and Eastern Europe.

Three days earlier, on July 21, an earlier unofficial report had hinted that Russia might even base the Blackjacks in Cuba. The Bush administration took that report so seriously that four-star U.S. Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz July 22 at his confirmation hearing to be the next USAF chief of staff told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that sending the giant Blackjacks to Cuba would be crossing "a red line in the sand."

Four-star Russian Gen. Pyotr Deinekin, former head of the Russian air force, told the RIA Novosti news agency in July that allowing the Blackjacks to operate from bases in Venezuela would allow the aircraft to operate on an almost 24/7 basis within very close distance of the United States itself.

RIA Novosti also noted the bombers could loiter in the air outside Russian territory, equipped with extensive electronic signals intelligence -- SIGINT -- and replace the capabilities of Russian military intelligence's SIGINT station at Lourdes outside Havana, which was shut down six years ago.

Schwartz's tough comments to the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 22 confirmed how seriously the U.S. Air Force takes the threat of a forward deployment of Tu-160s in Cuba. Schwartz knows that U.S. military planners cannot afford to bet against Blackjack.