Strategic bombers off the American coast, battleships in the
Mediterranean - the Russian military is displaying its might once again
with Moscow pumping billions into new weapons, but where does the
Kremlin see its enemies today and why is it risking another nuclear
arms race with Washington?
At eleven o'clock at night, when the moon is reflected in the
slow-moving waters of the Volga River, when the steppes are exhaling
the heat of the day, and when the last bars are closing in
Yekaterinburg and Pokrovsk - old provincial cities on the river's left
bank that are now called Marx and Engels - Gennady Stekachov is on
his way into world politics. And everyone can hear it.
The shutters shake in the crooked old wooden houses German settlers
built 250 years ago, and the windowpanes rattle in the prefabricated
high-rise apartment buildings from Soviet days.
The cause of the commotion is Stekachov guiding his 150-ton,
long-range bomber down a runway outside the city and, together with his
crew of seven other men, taking off into the night sky.
He follows his usual route north, up to the Arctic Sea and the
Barents Sea, and then turns sharply to the West to circle the polar ice
cap. The first NATO fighters, now on high alert, have appeared by the
time Stekachov reaches the Norwegian coast. From there on the jets -
French Mirages, British Tornados or Norwegian F-16s - escort the
Tupolev Tu-95 past the Shetland and Faeroe Islands to a point off the
American coast.
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