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A Grand Jury to Unlock Rosenberg Records …The Rosenbergs are remembered for stealing what has been called "the secret of the atomic bomb." A wire from historian Ronald Radosh, ... reminds us that it is widely acknowledged that the atomic material given to the Soviets by Julius Rosenberg's brother-in-law, David Greenglass, served only as confirmation to the Russians of the much more accurate information they had received from atomic scientists Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. The Rosenbergs are remembered for stealing what has been called "the secret of the atomic bomb." A wire from historian Ronald Radosh, ... reminds us...

The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, that touchstone of atomic espionage, is a case that launched a thousand doctorates and enough historical texts to make a library groan. Now, however, the 50-year-old record may grow even more complex: on Monday, the federal government, in an unusual move, consented to release most of the secret grand jury testimony taken in the case. In papers filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, prosecutors said that they would not oppose the release of testimony from 35 of the 45 witnesses who appeared before the grand jury in New York in 1950 and...

Nine experienced cross-country skiers hurriedly left their tent on a Urals slope in the middle of the night, casting aside skis, food and their warm coats. Clad in their sleepwear, the young people dashed headlong down a snowy slope toward a thick forest, where they stood no chance of surviving bitter temperatures of around minus 30 degrees Celsius. Baffled investigators said the group died as a result of “a compelling unknown force” — and then abruptly closed the case and filed it as top secret. The deaths, which occurred 49 years ago on Saturday, remain one of the deepest mysteries...

Communists also used political subversion to shape the course of World War II. They manipulated intelligence and State Department analysis to push America toward war with Japan, relieving the threat that Japan might go to war with Moscow. They fought against a plan to invade Europe through Italy, rather than France, as this would have imperiled the eventual Soviet control of Eastern Europe. Soviet agent Alger Hiss was a top advisor to Roosevelt at the Yalta conference that confirmed Soviet control of Eastern Europe, leading to forty years of tyranny and millions murdered in those countries.

On February 22, 2008, Ben Smith of Politico reported a story that ran under the headline, “Obama once visited ‘60s radicals.” It concerned how, “In 1995, [Illinois] State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to few of the district’s influencial liberal at the home of two will known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.” Dr. Quentin Young, described as “a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payers health care,” [1] was quoted as saying “I can remember being one of small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that...

A mission to find the lost wreck of the Titanic was actually a cover story for inspecting the wrecks of two nuclear submarines, the man who discovered the famous liner has revealed. Dr Bob Ballard led a team in 1985 that pinpointed the wreckage of the enormous ship 73 years after it sank in the Atlantic. But he almost didn't succeed after his top secret mission to find two Cold War subs left him with just 12 days to find the Titanic. The United States Navy lost two submarines during the 1960s - the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion -...

He has battled against Nazi villains, a Beduin swordsman and a pit of poisonous snakes. Now Indiana Jones can add the Communist Party of St Petersburg to his list of adversaries. Party leaders accused the actors Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett yesterday of promoting crude, anti-Soviet propaganda in their new film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. They have urged Russian moviegoers to boycott the film and told Ford, 65, not to visit the country. The swashbuckling archaeologist’s fourth adventure is set in the Cold War in 1957. It pits Indiana Jones against a sinister KGB agent,...

Obama preached to his flock yesterday and what he said would surprise many people with a little knowledge of history (a class Obama clearly flunked). He said that the Soviet Union collapsed because we negotiated with them.....stop laughing, let me finish.....and that Iran really isn't that big of a threat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew5qP2oPdtQOk, history lesson. The USSR collapsed because their economy collapsed. That collapsed because they tried to keep up with Reagan and the defense build up along with the "star wars" program. Then he goes on to say Iran and the US have common interests? Is he freakin insane? We neither...

Russia showcased its military might and youthful new president to the world Friday, as heavy tanks and missile launchers rumbled across Red Square in a Victory In a nationally broadcast speech two days after his inauguration, President Dmitry Medvedev avoided the bellicose rhetoric of his mentor and predecessor, Vladimir Putin, who drew parallels between United States and Nazi Germany during last year's parade. However, in his speech marking victory over Adolf Hitler's Germany, the 42-year-old Medvedev said the history of World War II demonstrated that military conflicts are rooted in "irresponsible ambitions which prevail over interests of nations and entire...

Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the United States of mounting an imperialist conspiracy against Russia that could push the world into a new Cold War. With Dmitry Medvedev due to be inaugurated today as Russian president, the Soviet Union's last leader said that the White House's claims of peaceful intentions towards its former superpower rival could no longer be trusted. Delivering one of his most scathing attacks on the US, Mr Gorbachev told The Daily Telegraph that a US military build-up was under way to contain a resurgent Russia. From Nato's expansion plans in the former Soviet Union to Washington's proposals...

For the first time in 17 years, Russia will celebrate the victory over Nazi Germany with a display of the country's big military hardware. Red Square will host a monumental procession of tanks and missiles on May 9, including the country's new Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile and the S-300 missile-defense system that Russia now sells to Iran. More than 30 military airplanes and helicopters will roar overhead. "This is not saber-rattling," Vladimir Putin told the last cabinet meeting he will preside over as Russian president before stepping down in two days. "We are not threatening anybody and we are not...

Russia's display of heavy weapons in this year's Victory Day parade in Moscow is "not sabre-rattling", President Vladimir Putin insists. Tanks and intercontinental missiles are to be paraded for the first time since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The outgoing Russian leader said that Friday's parade to mark the end of World War II would demonstrate Russia's growing defence capabilities. "We do not threaten anyone and do not intend to do so," he said. A dress rehearsal for the parade was conducted on Monday. Mr Putin is stepping down as president on 7 May to be replaced...

MOSCOW (AFP) — Georgia has called on the United Nations to send more observers to the separatist Georgian region of Abkhazia to check on the increase in Russian troops there, a parliamentary spokesman said Saturday. "We have serious suspicions that there have been violations," said Nika Sturoua the vice-president of the defence and security committee, the Interfax news agency reported. Sturova said they believed that Moscow had exceeded the quota of troops allowed for its contingent in the pro-Russian province and that "illegal weapons" had been deployed there. Sturovas said that the UN was going to send extra observers to...

Why Does Ahmadinejad Want Russian Troops in Iran? 25/04/2008 By Amir Taheri Why is the leadership in Tehran anxious to give Russia the right to land troops in Iran? The question is not fanciful. The Islamic Republic is conducting a devious campaign to prepare public opinion for that eventuality. The message is relayed through deliberately vague terms that diplomats understand immediately while the general public does not. The device is to revive two treaties that most students of Iranian history thought were dead and buried long ago. The first is the 1921 Treaty that the government of Sayyed Ziauddin Tabatabai,...

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have written an interesting piece for today's Washington Post in which they argue that the 80's television drama "Dallas" helped win the Cold War. Their case is overstated, but not entirely invalid: It was the booze-and-sex-soaked caricature of free enterprise and executive lifestyles that proved irresistible not just to stagflation-weary Americans but viewers from France to the Soviet Union to Ceau?escu's Romania. "Dallas" wasn't simply a television show. It was an atmosphere-altering cultural force. The voluptuous charms of big oil, beautiful women, and sprawling ranches were dangled before viewers in nearly 100 countries, and spoke...

Former Rep. Charles Wilson played no official role in the making of last year's film "Charlie Wilson's War," which chronicled how he helped the Mujahedeen repel the invading Soviet army in the 1980s. If the Texas Democrat had participated, it's clear he would have cast an actor to portray a figure all but ignored in Mike Nichols' production — President Reagan. "He was absolutely essential to the victory," over the Soviets in Afghanistan, Mr. Wilson says during a phone interview to promote "War," out on DVD this week. ... Mr. Wilson's work, by all accounts, helped bring about the Soviet's...

BRUSSELS -- Can communism be compared to Nazism? Does communism's record deserve as unequivocal a condemnation as that of Nazism? And should communism's modern-day adherents and apologists be rejected as firmly by Europe's political mainstream as those of Nazism? The debate over the historical record of communism simmers on in the European Union. Forced onto the bloc's agenda by its new ex-communist member states, the issue was most recently broached at a European Parliament debate in Strasbourg on April 21. Reflecting deep-seated divisions among member states and political camps, the parliament ultimately failed to agree on a common declaration. Some...

Ukraine's Pursuit of Genocide Designation Upsets Russians Who Say Others Died, Too MOSCOW -- Relations between Russia and Ukraine, bedeviled by disputes over natural gas supplies and NATO expansion, have lately been roiled by one of the great tragedies of Soviet history: the famine of 1932-33, which left millions dead from starvation and related diseases. Ukraine is seeking international recognition of the famine, which Ukrainians call Holodomor -- or death by hunger -- as an act of genocide. When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forced peasants off their homesteads and into collective farms, special military units requisitioned grain and other food...

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and I have tried to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to you to decide just how urgent a message it is. My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse. The rhetorical device I am going to use is the "Collapse Gap" – to go...

Rescued from digital doom, Soviet Union's Internet domain name evokes nostalgia, controversy MOSCOW (AP) -- The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there's one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace. Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising -- registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the online Soviet outpost. Russian nostalgia for the Soviet empire is part of the story. Nashi, or "Ours," is...

Last week, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolu tion insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine... wasn't genocide. Not even the Russians dispute that the Soviet government deliberately starved millions. But the Russian resolution indignantly states: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines." It notes that victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country." Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers. And that's all it takes to be acquitted of genocide. The United...

Is the European Union the new Soviet Union? I ought to be the happiest man in the universe today after in 1991 my lifelong enemy the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared. . . snip. . . Corruption today in Russia is something out of another world. It's not corruption anymore, but a system where the KGB have become something like a crime syndicate not unlike the famous Spectre of the James Bond films. . . How was the Soviet Union governed? It was governed by fifteen unelected people who appointed each other and who were not accountable to anyone. How...

After 50 years, an American state secret has been revealed, about the arrest of 12,000 people because of Hoover’s “red” paranoia. The former director of the FBI, Edgar Hoover made plans for the arrest of 12,000 American citizens which he considered to be threats to national security – documents reveals that no longer bear the status of state secret. Hoover sent this request to the president at the time Harry Truman at the beginning of the Korean war during the 50s. He justified the move as necessary for protection from “treason, spies and sabotage”. For now there is no evidence...

German police and state security officers have launched a wide-scale hunt for a Russian artist and critic of Vladimir Putin's government who disappeared from her Berlin flat 10 days ago. Anna Mikhalchuk, 52, who has lived in the German capital since November, went for a walk on Good Friday and failed to return. At the weekend, police divers and sniffer dogs trawled a lake and searched allotments close to the home she shares with her husband, Michail Ryklin, a prize-winning philosopher and author. "On that afternoon she said goodbye to me and said she wanted to go for a short...

PRAGUE (Thomson Financial) - Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev attacked US plans to site an anti-missile system in central and eastern Europe, saying that it was aimed at Russia and China and not Iran. 'You believe that (the system) will be used against Iran? No, the whole system is aimed against Russia and China,' Gorbachev said in an interview broadcast by Czech public television today. He dismissed sustained US statements that the anti-missile system is aimed exclusively at countering the threat from 'rogue states' such as Iran. 'The US radar is a serious question and the Czech government has been...

More than 4,000 people are facing eviction to make room for the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, according to campaigners, who say that many will receive little or no compensation. “My family has lived on this land for five generations,” said Dmitry Drofichev, a farmer. “We are being offered a fraction of what the land is worth. They’ll have to bulldoze me and the house to make me move.” The authorities have already begun forcibly removing people from areas where Olympic facilities are to be built. Fifteen families of refugees from a war in the...

Vladimir Putin is to fulfil an unrealised dream of Joseph Stalin's by creating a grandiose state cemetery. In a corner of northern Moscow bulldozers began churning the earth his week in a section of wasteland where Mr Putin and Stalin, the dictator he is said to revere, could one day be laid side by side. The Federal Military Memorial Cemetery, its designers boast, will be Russia's answer to America's Arlington. Arguably the most ambitious architectural project undertaken since the fall of the Soviet Union, it remains to be seen whether the cemetery, due to be completed by 2010, will become...

Prague - Russia in the era of outgoing President Vladimir Putin is a new-style dictatorship ruled by KGB spies and mobsters, former Czech president Vaclav Havel said in a Wednesday interview with Lidove Noviny daily. "The era of president Putin brought a new type of dictatorship, dangerous in its inconspicuous fashion," said the Soviet-era dissident playwright turned Czech Republic's long-time post-communist president. The Putin rule has been a combination of "the worse from both communism and capitalism," Havel said. "A grouping, simply said, of KGBs and mafiosi has ascended to power." He said that Russia seems to have a difficulty...

Soviet Aide Asserts Guilt, Again Reversing Himself Krestinsky at Trial Says Shame and Pain Caused Him to Repudiate Confession – Rykoff Links Generals in Plot By HAROLD DENNY Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES MOSCOW, March 3 – Nikolai N. Krestinsky, who yesterday alone of all the twenty-one defendants in the treason trial, pleaded not guilty, repudiated the confession he had made to NKVD [secret police] investigators and defied his accusers, broke down overnight. Tonight he repudiated his not guilty plea and declared himself guilty of all the allegations. The charge against this one-time brilliant Soviet diplomat, who had sat...

The Voices of the Dead   By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, February 20, 2008 Frontpag Interview’s guest today is Hiroaki Kuromiya, a professor of history at Indiana University. He is the author of the new book, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. FP: Hiroaki Kuromiya, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Kuromiya: Thank you very much for your interest in my book and the opportunity to speak here. FP: What made you write The Voices of the Dead? Kuromiya: I was always interested in Stalin's terror. I have a keen scholarly interest in explaining it and...

<p>Russian bomber aircraft approached a US Aircraft carrier in the Pacific on Saturday and were intercepted by American fighter jets, a US Defense official said on Monday.</p>

As 40 years have passed since Gagarin’s flight, new sensational details of this event were disclosed: Gagarin was not the first man to fly to space. Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin's famous space flight, Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located in Khimki, in the Moscow region) said on Thursday. According to Rudenko, spacecraft with pilots Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov at the controls were launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome (in the Astrakhan region) in 1957, 1958 and 1959. "All three pilots died during the flights, and their names were never...

January 27, 2008 Margaret Thatcher told navy to raid Swedish coast Pelle Neroth MARGARET THATCHER ordered the Royal Navy to land Special Boat Service (SBS) frogmen on the coast of Sweden from British submarines pretending to be Soviet vessels, a new book has claimed. The deception involved numerous incursions by British forces into Swedish territorial waters in the 1980s and early 1990s, designed to heighten the impression around the world of the Soviet Union as an aggressive superpower. Sometimes the boats landed commandos, but often their job was to fool the Swedes by mimicking the sonar signals given off by...

Over the past several years, the Russian Federation has taken a posture that is increasingly antagonistic and hostile toward the US and NATO. Recent Russian military activity and the Kremlin’s stances on Iran and Kosovo indicate a potential for confrontation with the West. We assess that the Kosovo situation in particular could be a catalyst for this confrontation. Kosovo’s quest for independence from Serbia has been largely ignored by Western policymakers and the media, but this volatile issue could quickly become a global crisis, pitting Kosovo and its NATO allies against the Russian Federation. Putin has explicitly stated that they...

January 22, 2008 RAF scrambled as Russia tests nuclear-capable missiles (RAF/MoD Crown Copyright/PA Wire) A Russian Bear-H bomber Tony Halpin in Moscow RAF fighters scrambled to track Russian long-range bombers joining a naval task force today as Moscow practised strike tactics off the coast of France and Spain and test-launched nuclear-capable missiles. The fleet of Russian warships, supported by fighter jets and the bombers, engaged in Russia’s biggest naval exercises since the end of the Cold War. The war games close to two Nato member states were the most forceful reminder to date of President Putin’s determination to flex Russia’s...

"MOSCOW— Vladimir Dobrovinsky, 33, a teacher at a design school in Moscow, says he's not interested in politics. But bring up America and the well-traveled, university-educated Dobrovinsky holds forth. He criticizes Washington's "crude interference" in world affairs. He complains that Russia is not treated as an important partner by the Bush administration. "A lot of Russians," he says, "are angry that America deals with us like we're Thailand." "

Liberal Fascism Explained by: Amanda Busse, January 16, 2008 Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg is tired of being called a fascist. In his latest book, Liberal Fascism, he fights back against the term that those on the right are often saddled with, reminding readers that the original fascists leaned more toward the left. Goldberg, the editor-at-large for National Review Online, argues in his book that fascism under Benito Mussolini and Nazism under Adolf Hitler came from the same intellectual source as Progressivism, the birth-mother of American liberalism. The term “liberal fascism” comes from a speech made by author H. G. Wells...

Dictatorships have gotten good at keeping democracy at bay. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Ten years ago the autocrat was an endangered species. According to the conventional wisdom, authoritarian regimes were incapable of adjusting to a world of globalization and global civil society. Autocrats recognized the need to exploit the economic benefits of globalization, but how could they keep out intrusive NGOs and censor the Internet? Policymakers also jumped on this bandwagon. Soon after George W. Bush delivered his second inaugural address, his administration exulted in a wave of democratic uprisings. By the spring of 2005, "color" revolutions...

It's a plot straight out of Hollywood. A sexy female superagent circles the globe in pursuit of a cold-blooded terrorist who has hidden nuclear bombs in four of the world's major cities. In the climax, the two of them fight in a Pakistani fortress while the heroine's bosses nervously watch the countdown from their high-tech command center. But this isn't your latest Jerry Bruckheimer action movie. It's a Russian production called "The Apocalypse Code," and its heroine, Darya, works for the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. The command center is supposed to be the Lubyanka, a real-life building...

A Genocidal Legacy by: Bethany Stotts, January 03, 2008 Those human-rights activists combatting genocide in Darfur and lobbying for the Armenian Genocide Resolution would likely be displeased to hear that important massacres and purges may never make the history books as genocide—or be prosecuted—because the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention does not include social and political groups as possible victims of genocide. The 1948 Genocide Convention defined genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Punishable genocidal actions which can referred to an international...

Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union's secret service, reluctantly eased himself into the commander's seat in the underground early warning bunker south of Moscow. It should have been his night off but another officer had gone sick and he had been summoned at the last minute. Before him were screens showing photographs of underground missile silos in the Midwest prairies of America, relayed from spy satellites in the sky. He and his men watched and listened on headphones for any sign of movement - anything unusual that might suggest the U.S. was launching...

From Kengor,p.205 During his first three years in office and particularly since the spring of 1983, Ronald Reagan had pushed a plan to deploy intermediate-range nuclear forces (INFs), also known as Pershing II's , in Western Europe. His goal was to prompt the Soviets to remove their medium-range nuclear missiles from Eastern Europe. He told Yuri Andropov that if the Kremlin removed its missiles, there would be no need for the United States to deploy INFs. Reagan called this the zero-zero option: he wanted both sides to slash INFs to zero levels. If Andropov would not agree to do this,...

An unprecedented battle is taking place inside the Kremlin in advance of Vladimir Putin's departure from office, the Guardian has learned, with claims that the president presides over a secret multibillion-dollar fortune. Rival clans inside the Kremlin are embroiled in a struggle for the control of assets as Putin prepares to transfer power to his hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, in May, well-placed political observers and other sources have revealed. At stake are billions of dollars in assets belonging to Russian state-run corporations. Additionally, details of Putin's own personal fortune, reportedly hidden in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, are being discussed for the...

A Russian opposition activist has been sent to a psychiatric hospital by authorities a day before a planned demonstration. Artem Basyrov's detention is the latest in a series of incidents suggesting a punitive Soviet-era practice is being revived under president Vladimir Putin. Mr Basyrov, 20, was ordered to be held at a hospital in the central region of Mari El on November 23, a day before planned demonstrations, said Alexander Averin of the opposition National Bolshevik Party. The party is part of the Other Russia coalition which organised the so-called Dissenters' Marches across the country this year. Mr Basyrov ran...

<p>Salvador Allende Gossens of Chile was an icon of the American left, the first Marxist to assume office via the ballot box. The CIA has been blamed for his overthrow and death, further enhancing his cult standing in Cambridge, Berkeley, and Ann Arbor. Now, 35 years after his election, a book being published today in the U.K., The Mitrokhin Archive, Volume II: the KGB and the World, reveals that Allende was in fact a KGB asset, on the payroll. The London Sunday Times published a valuable summary yesterday.</p>

In 1984 a book was published with the title New Lies For Old. It was written by Soviet KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn. The book claimed that the Soviet Union had a secret long-term strategy to disarm and defeat the United States through a controlled collapse of the Soviet empire that would take place in the last decade of the twentieth century. In the book's most remarkable chapter, titled "The Final Phase," Golitsyn accurately described the future of the Soviet bloc. Communism would give up its monopoly of power in Russia, he explained, as apparent freedom and democracy would be introduced....

November 14, 2007 Vladimir Putin honours traitor George Blake with tit-for-tat birthday medal Tony Halpin Moscow Vladimir Putin has honoured a notorious British traitor as one of Russia’s greatest spies. George Blake received the Order of Friendship during a gala celebration of his 85th birthday, in what appears to be the latest twist in deteriorating relations between Moscow and London. Mikhail Fradkov, director of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, read out telegrams from officials praising Blake’s contribution to Soviet espionage as a double agent in the British Secret Service, MI6. “It is hard to overrate the importance of the...

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - U.S.-allied President Mikhail Saakashvili declared a state of emergency Wednesday in the capital of Georgia, where six days of demonstrations have fueled a worsening crisis. Saakashvili has blamed Russia for fomenting the unrest in the former Soviet nation. His prime minister, Zurab Nogaideli, said in a televised statement that there had been an effort to overthrow the pro-Western government. "An attempt to conduct a coup was made, and we had to react to that," Nogaideli said. The emergency declaration "will temporarily ban demonstrations and protests, and calls in the media for violence, and the ouster of...

Russia's President Vladimir Putin drew a parallel on Friday between U.S. plans for a missile shield in Europe and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, widely regarded as the closest the world came to nuclear war. "I would remind you how relations were developing in an analogous situation in the middle of the 1960s," he said when asked at a news conference about Washington's plans to station elements of a missile defense shield in eastern Europe.

Russia is again flexing its aviation muscles, resuming Cold War-like global operations in ways that create new complications for the United States Air Force. On Aug. 17, Russian bombers flying long-range missions fanned out from the North Pole over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, inaugurating what Russian President Vladimir V. Putin called a permanent return to strategic aviation operations. The bomber flights were carried out mostly by old but serviceable Tu-95 Bears, but also by younger Tu-22M Backfires and Tu-160 Blackjacks. Russian strategic aviation numbers about 70 aircraft. Putin made the announcement at the close of multinational exercises conducted by...