Russia Wants 50 of These Deadly 'New' Bombers

The Russian air force could receive the first of up to 50 new Tu-160M long-range bombers as early as 2021, Deputy Minister of Defense Alexei Krivoruchko said in late December 2019.

That’s not a new assertion. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the same thing back in January 2019.

But it’s a dubious assertion. Buying 50 Tu-160Ms could prove too expensive for the cash-strapped Kremlin. And that’s assuming the contractor actually can build the giant, swing-wing bombers.

The Tu-160 is not a new aircraft. The 177-feet-long, four-engine Tu-160 first flew in 1981. Tupolev built for the Soviet air force 36 of the huge bombers including nine prototypes.

For two decades the Tu-160 was the USSR’s, and later Russia’s, only supersonic, nuclear-armed strategic bomber. The Tu-95 strategic bomber is subsonic.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, newly-independent Ukraine inherited 19 Tu-160s. Kiev ultimately returned to Russia eight of the bombers and scrapped the other 11. By the turn of the millennium, just a handful of Russia’s Tu-160s were airworthy. One of the bombers crashed in 2003.

In the early 2000s, Moscow paid Kazan, a subsidiary of Tupolev, to finish assembly of two incomplete Tu-160 airframes left over from the 1980s. As of early 2020, the Russian air force possessed 16 Tu-160s and at least around a dozen apparently were airworthy.

To put that number in context, the U.S. Air Force possesses more B-2 stealth bombers — 20 — than the Russian air force possesses non-stealthy Tu-160s.

In the 2000s, the Russian air force modified the Tu-160 to carry non-nuclear weapons. The type first saw combat in 2015 over Syria. Tu-160s reportedly can fly as far as 7,700 miles while carrying missiles and without refueling in mid-air. Tu-160s frequently probe the air space of the United States and its allies and even periodically deploy to Venezuela.

The Tu-160 is a high-profile aircraft. Its deployments are as much statements of national purpose as they are practical preparations for war. In 2005 Russian president Vladimir Putin posed for photos in the cockpit of a Tu-160. 

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