Although President Putin has repeated time and again that he will not be drawn into an arms race for fear of bankrupting Russia, that is precisely what his policies imply. On 28 January 2015, two Russian TU-95 bombers, presumably armed with nuclear weapons, approached British airspace and disrupted civil aviation. The last in a series of fifty close encounters worldwide, this incident confirmed fears of a resurgence in Russian military might. If the Ukraine crisis showed that Russia could project force in the ‘near abroad’, military manoeuvres further afield are intended to prove that Russia is a global power, in …read more
Russia’s military: the weak links
