President Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday took a brief flight on a supersonic bomber, a part of his pre-election effort to challenge confidence and energy inside Russia, and a conspicuous reminder to the West of his nation’s nuclear capabilities.
The flight took solely half-hour, the Kremlin mentioned in a press release, however the vary of the wide-wing Tu-160M, often known as a White Swan in Russia, permits it to achieve the United States with two dozen nuclear weapons aboard.
Russian state tv confirmed Mr. Putin, 71, climbing up the steps beneath the enormous warplane, one of many largest and heaviest on the earth, earlier than it took off from the runaway of an airfield in Kazan, a metropolis east of Moscow. The Kremlin launched a video of Mr. Putin’s flight, displaying him sitting in a pilot’s seat.
Upon disembarking the aircraft, Mr. Putin advised reporters that the flight left an excellent impression and praised the brand new modernized bomber as “very reliable.”
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, advised state tv that Mr. Putin made the choice to take the flight spontaneously on Thursday when he visited an aviation manufacturing unit in Kazan, the place he inspected 4 modernized Tu-160M bombers.
But since he turned Russian president greater than twenty years in the past, Mr. Putin has develop into identified for publicity stunts, designed to forged him as a powerful chief of an excellent energy.
Over this time, Mr. Putin has flown in a fighter jet, plunged into the ocean in a submersible and steered Siberian cranes to their winter habitat in a motorized dangle glider. The extensively coated stunts projected Mr. Putin as a bodily match and fearless chief.
The flight on the bomber seemed to be an effort to ship a pointed message amid probably the most dire geopolitical battle between Moscow and the West for the reason that darkest occasions of the Cold War.
The Tu-160M is a modernized model of a Soviet-designed strategic bomber. Part of the Russian nuclear triad, the Tu-160M’s main mission is to ship nuclear bombs at lengthy distances in case of a nuclear battle. In 2005, Mr. Putin took a flight in an older model of the bomber.
