MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday flew an advanced Tu-160M missile carrier, the Kremlin said in an official statement.
The plane took off from the Gorbunov Kazan Aviation Plant, which Putin had visited the day before. It said the flight lasted about 30 minutes.
Putin’s short flight on the supersonic bomber was seen as part of his pre-election effort to project confidence and power inside Russia and remind the West of his country’s nuclear capabilities, The New York Times reported.
The extensive range of the Tu-160M, also known as the White Swan in Russia, enables it to carry up to twenty nuclear warheads and reach the United States.
Putin, 71, was shown on Russian state television climbing stairs to the bottom of the giant warplane, one of the world’s largest and heaviest, before it departed from an airfield in Kazan, east of Moscow.
The Kremlin released a video of Putin sitting in the pilot’s seat during the flight. After the landing, Putin told reporters that the experience was positive and appreciated that the new advanced bomber was “very reliable”.
Putin made the impromptu decision to fly Thursday during his visit to an aviation factory in Kazan, where he examined four advanced Tu-160M bombers, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov, according to The New York Times.
However, over his more than two decades as Russian president, Putin has gained a reputation for attending events aimed at portraying him as a strong leader of a significant power.
Over the years, Putin has engaged in attention-grabbing activities such as flying fighter jets, submarine sea dives, and guiding Siberian cranes to their winter habitat in a motorized hang glider. These widely publicized stunts were intended to portray Putin as a physically fit and fearless leader. The recent bomber flight appeared to send a deliberate message amid the intensifying geopolitical conflict between Moscow and the West, the most serious since the Cold War era.
The Tu-160M, an advanced Soviet-designed strategic bomber and part of the Russian nuclear triad, is primarily tasked with delivering nuclear bombs over long distances in the event of a nuclear war. Putin previously flew an earlier version of the bomber in 2005, The New York Times reported. (ANI)
