Russia deployed bombers capable of carrying a nuclear weapon to the border with Norway - media
At the Russian air base Olenya on the Kola Peninsula, near the border of Norway, strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons were deployed - probably due to nuclear blackmail against Russia amid its defeat in Ukraine.
According to European Pravda, the Norwegian edition Faktisk writes about this, citing satellite images from Planet Labs.
A picture taken on 7 October shows seven Tu-160 and four Tu-95 bombers stationed at the Olenya base. Two days later, Planet Labs spotted one Tu-160 on the runway of the air base.
This is not the first evidence of the presence of strategic bombers at an airbase near the border with Norway: as early as September 30, The Jerusalem Post wrote about it. Then there were four Tu-160s and three Tu-95s on Deer.
The location of strategic bombers on Olenye is unusual, because usually these aircraft are located at the Engels air base, which is 720 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
Military experts interviewed by Faktisk believe that these maneuvers may be related to the traditional autumn Thunder exercises, but they also admit the presence of a nuclear deterrence element in them, and therefore a component of Putin's nuclear threats.
The last Russian nuclear exercise, Grom, took place in February 2022, less than a week before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. "They were clearly a warning to the West not to interfere," says Norwegian military expert Lars Peder Haga.
This is not the first time that Russia has carried out military activities near the Norwegian borders. At the end of June, it began construction of the Rezonans-N radar, capable of detecting F-35 fighter-bombers in service with the Norwegian and Finnish armed forces.
And in July it became known that in Norway there was a sharp increase in the number of cases of violations of the GPS-navigation of civilian aircraft, for which, presumably, Russia is behind.