Russia puts bombers back in the skies

CHEBARKUL TESTING RANGE, Russia - President Vladimir V. Putin placed strategic bombers back on long-range patrol for the first time since the Soviet breakup, sending a tough message to the United States yesterday hours after a major Russian military exercise with China.

Putin reviewed the first Russian-Chinese joint exercise on Russian soil before announcing that 20 strategic bombers had been sent far over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans, showing off Moscow's muscular new posture and its growing military ties with Beijing.

"Starting today, such tours of duty will be conducted regularly and on the strategic scale," Putin said. "Our pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life."

Putin said that halting long-range bombers after the Soviet collapse had hurt Russia's security because other nations - an oblique reference to the United States - had continued such missions.

"I have made a decision to resume regular flights of Russian strategic aviation," Putin said in nationally televised remarks. "We proceed from the assumption that our partners will view the resumption of flights of Russia's strategic aviation with understanding."

U.S.-Russian relations have been strained over Washington's criticism of Russia's democracy record, Moscow's objections to U.S. missile defense plans, and differences over crises such as the Iraq war.

But the Bush administration downplayed the significance of the patrols. "We certainly are not in the kind of posture we were with what used to be the Soviet Union. It's a different era," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again, that's their decision."

Soviet bombers routinely flew missions to areas where nuclear-tipped cruise missiles could be launched at the United States. They stopped in the post-Soviet economic meltdown after the breakup of the country in 1991. Booming oil prices have allowed Russia to sharply increase its military spending.

The latest moves are "a significant change of posture of Russian strategic forces," said Alexander Pikayev, a military analyst at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations. "It's a response to the relocation of NATO forces closer to Russia's western border."

NATO has expanded in recent years to include the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as well as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

Yesterday's war games with China near the Urals Mountain city of Chelyabinsk involved 6,000 troops from both countries, along with soldiers from four ex-Soviet Central Asian nations that are part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional group dominated by Moscow and Beijing.

The former Cold War rivals share a heightening distrust of what they see as the United States' outsized role in global politics, and they have forged a "strategic partnership" aimed at counterbalancing Washington's policies.

The United States, Russia and China are locked in a tense rivalry for influence in Central Asia, the site of vast hydrocarbon resources. Washington supports plans for pipelines that would carry oil and gas to the West and bypass Russia, while Moscow has maneuvered to control exports. China also has shown a growing appetite for energy to power its booming economy.