Russia is betting on Blackjack and upping the odds: It may be a bluff, or Kremlin policymakers may believe they already are holding an inside straight.

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 three days earlier on July 21, to deploy the Blackjacks in Cuba, this one was reported Thursday in the newspaper Izvestia and was also attributed to unidentified sources in the Russian Defense Ministry.

Both reports were carefully unofficial to avoid putting the government of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Medvedev's predecessor, out on a limb. Russian government spokesmen lost no time in pooh-poohing the original Monday report, and Izvestia has not carried anything like the weight of the major government mouthpiece it was in the later Soviet decades.

However, the Bush administration in Washington still took the original report so seriously that four-star U.S. Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz, at his confirmation hearing to be the next USAF chief of staff the very next day before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, solemnly warned Moscow that actually sending the super-bombers, which can carry 99,000-pound payloads at Mach 2 at nearly sea-level, or 1,380 miles per hour, would be crossing "a red line in the sand."

If that was meant to sober up the leakers in the Russian Defense Ministry and put them in their place, it didn't. Izvestia considerably advanced the original story in its second report by saying the aircrew of currently operational Tu-160 Blackjack and venerable but still active Tu-95MS Bear strategic bombers in recent months had traveled to Cuba and studied the location of a possible air base there on which their heavy aircraft could land to take on fuel.

As previously reported in these columns, the Russian air force revived its old Soviet-era, Cold War practice of conducting regular long-distance air patrols over the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans in August 2007, implementing a written directive from President Putin.

RIA Novosti, commenting on the Izvestia reports, said establishing such forward air bases for long-range strategic bombers in Venezuela, Algeria and Cuba ultimately could be part of a much wider network of Russian forward air bases around the world. It described the proposed system as being designated as "jump-up" bases that would offer Russian heavy bombers fuel and maintenance facilities.

"The flight to the United States (from the bases in southern Russia where the Tu-95s and Tu-160s are currently deployed) takes about 10 hours, and, even with two midair refuelings, the aircraft can spend only 1.5 hours near the U.S. coast," four-star Russian army Gen. Pyotr Deinekin, ex-head of the Russian air force, told RIA Novosti.

RIA Novosti also cited Deinekin as saying that building such bases in Cuba or even Venezuela would allow the bombers to operate on an almost 24/7 basis within very close distance of the United States itself.

Izvestia also cited Russian Foreign Ministry officials as saying they might not actually base the strategic nuclear bombers in Cuba and Venezuela, even if they received use of the bases, but instead might permanently deploy Ilyushin Il-78 air tankers at the Cuban bases that could refuel the strategic bombers in midair over the Atlantic in international air space.

The Tu-160 Blackjacks and the more than a half-century old but still very much operational Tu-95MS Bears have gone through extensive refits in recent years. Both aircraft now carry new X-555 cruise missiles that can fly more than 2,200 miles, so that they do not have to fly out of bases close to the United States, or ever risk entering U.S. air space, to fire their nuclear-capable supersonic cruise missiles at almost any city or military target in the entire domestic United States, the report said.

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.

The proposed policy of opening forward bases for the strategic bombers is not without its skeptics in Russia. RIA Novosti noted that the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta argued Thursday that Russia could not afford the infrastructure costs of building the new bases.

The answer to that is: Even if the idea of an entire network of bases around the world remains an unachievable dream in the immediate future, the Russian treasury, bursting with the windfall profits of being the world's largest combined oil and gas exporter when oil prices remain at unprecedented high levels of well over $120 a barrel, can easily afford to build two or three of them, at least in countries like Cuba and Venezuela.

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.

related report
Russia Defense Watch: Tu-160 threat rises
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.