WASHINGTON, July 28 (UPI) -- Russian policymakers Thursday boosted their threat to deploy supersonic Tupolev Tu-160 "White Swan" -- NATO designation Blackjack -- nuclear bombers in Cuba to say they might put them in Venezuela and Algeria, too.
Like the original threat, floated July 21, to deploy the Blackjacks in Cuba, this one was reported Thursday in the Moscow newspaper Izvestia and also was attributed to unidentified sources in the Russian Defense Ministry.
The day after the first Izvestia report ran, U.S. Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz, at his confirmation hearing to be the next USAF chief of staff on July 22 before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, solemnly warned that sending the super-bombers to operate out of Cuba would be crossing "a red line in the sand."
Izvestia Thursday said Russian air force strategic bomber crews had already traveled to Cuba and that they had studied the location of a possible air base where their heavy aircraft could land to take on fuel.
RIA Novosti said the Tu-160 Blackjacks and the Tu-95MS Bears recently had been upgraded and equipped with new X-555 cruise missiles that had an operational striking radius or range of more than 2,200 miles, so they would not have to fly over U.S. territory or even be based provocatively too near the U.S. homeland to have the near 24/7 capability of hitting U.S. cities with their missiles from a safe distance.
Russia may sell Chavez T-90 tanks, MANPADS
Oil-rich Venezuela may have signed off already on another huge arms deal with Russia during President Hugo Chavez's visit to Moscow last week.
RIA Novosti said Thursday it had received what it called "unofficial reports" that the fiercely anti-American Chavez had closed the deal with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last Wednesday. The news agency said the agreement could include modern T-90 Main Battle Tanks, Ilyushin Il-76 military transport aircraft and man-held surface-to-air missiles -- MANPADS in current U.S. parlance.
"The new agreement, most likely, involves purchases of Igla man-portable air defense systems, Il-76MD military transport planes and T-90 Main Battle Tanks," Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, told RIA Novosti.
He said the deal was part of an ambitious armament program under which Chavez, flush with wealth as global oil prices remain higher than $120 a barrel despite recent falls of around $20 per barrel from their record heights, was contemplating buying as much as $5 billion of Russian weapons over the next decade.
Chavez originally had looked to the Saab Corp. in Sweden to provide his MANPADS, but under U.S. pressure they backed away from the deal in 2006, giving the Kremlin its chance, Pukhov said.
The Il-76s are the rough Russian equivalent to the legendary U.S. Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules military transport. Venezuela has operated a fleet of C-130s for many years, but they are now long in the tooth and suffering from a lack of spare parts and recently trained mechanics and maintenance engineers.
RIA Novosti noted Russia currently has a surplus of IL-76s available for foreign sale, since plans to sell them to China collapsed amid mutual recriminations.
RIA Novosti cited a spokesman for Uralvagonzavod, the Urals-based organization that makes the T-90s, as claiming the Russian MBTs, already being sold to India in their hundreds, had greater cannon hitting power, maneuverability, speed and armor than U.S. and other Western models but still cost only "almost half the price."
However, the official admitted it would be several years before his complex could start making T-90s for Venezuela. In December 2007 Russia won a huge new order to sell India another 347 T-90s in addition to the 310 it bought a few years ago. So far Russia has refused to sell the T-90S to China.
The Uralvagonzavod official said, though, that the plant would have to operate at full capacity to meet outstanding orders, so it would be a few years before the company would be able to produce tanks under a new foreign contract.
RIA Novosti noted that in the 2005-2006 period, Venezuela purchased "more than 50 combat helicopters, 24 Su-30MK2 fighters, 12 Tor-M1 air defense missile systems and 100,000 AK-103 rifles from Russia. Current contracts are worth about $4 billion, according to various sources."
Russian admirals plan at least five new aircraft carriers.
Russia has plans to start constructing at least five to six new aircraft carriers equipped with space-linked communications systems to operate in the Arctic and Pacific oceans, but work on the ambitious new carriers will not even start for at least another four years, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Thursday.
The news agency cited Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky as saying the navy command had decided to build complete systems for the new carriers and not just the ships themselves.
"Everything must work in a system, including aircraft carriers. We have called them sea-borne aircraft carrier systems, which will be based in the Northern and Pacific Fleets. The construction of such systems will begin after 2012," Vysotsky said in a speech on the Russian holiday known as Navy Day.
Vysotsky said the new projected carriers would be linked to Russian military communications satellites.
However, many Russian commentators have criticized the ambition of the navy brass's plans and noted that currently Russia has only one aircraft carrier, even in theory, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which has experienced endless operational problems and only became operational again a short time ago after a long, costly and long-drawn-out refurbishing.
