MOSCOW, Russia - July 22, 2008 -
Russia may start regular flights by long-range bombers to Cuba in response to
U.S. plans to build missile defense sites in Eastern Europe, the newspaper
Izvestia reported Monday, quoting an official.
"Such discussions exist," the unidentified senior Russian air force official was quoted as saying, adding that the measure would be a response to the United States "deploying missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic."
It was not clear whether he meant permanently basing the bombers in Cuba or using the island as a refueling stop, but former top defense ministry official Leonid Ivashov told the newspaper that Cuba was best used for brief stopovers.
Cuba should be used "not as a permanent base - this is unnecessary - but as a stopover airfield, a refueling stop," Ivashov was quoted as saying.
Spokesmen for the air force and the defense ministry declined to comment about the report.
Starting long-range bomber flights to Cuba would signal a reawakening of military cooperation by former Cold War allies Moscow and Havana. In 2002, Russia closed its last military base on the island, a radar base at Lourdes.
Plans to fly long-range bombers to Cuba "would be a good answer to attempts to place NATO bases near Russia's borders," former top air force commander Pyotr Deinekin told the RIA Novosti news agency in response to the Izvestia report.
In a speech last year, then president Vladimir Putin likened the U.S. missile defense dispute to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, though he added that relations between Moscow and Washington "have changed a lot" since then.
The discovery in 1962 that Moscow was secretly building nuclear missile launch pads in Cuba pushed the world close to nuclear war in a terrifying two-week brinkmanship between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Last week, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned Moscow would take countermeasures against U.S. plans to build an anti-missile radar facility in the Czech Republic and site interceptor missiles in Poland.
Russia argues that the installations threaten its national security despite U.S. assurances that they are directed against "rogue states" like Iran.