Allegedly, at the end of December 2022, the Russian, along with his family, arrived in an armored SUV to the US-Mexico border and asked for permission to enter the country.
The man explained that he feared persecution for participating in anti-Putin protests in support of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny. He also offered to reveal “some of Russia’s best-kept military secrets,” according to the report.
The fugitive said that he worked as an engineer at the Tupolev aircraft factory in Kazan, where from 2018 to 2021 he was engaged in the construction of the Tu-160.
Experts interviewed by journalists called it “a strange and unprecedented circumstance” that the report contains all the personal data of a Russian citizen and reveals his proposal to give military secrets to a foreign state. At the same time, they believe that an engineer with such a track record can indeed be a carrier of valuable information.
Yahoo News does not publish the name of the Russian – reportedly in order not to endanger him.
On January 11, 2023, the newspaper writes, the Russian was recognized as “trustworthy” and of potential interest to the United States, after which he was transferred for further interrogation to the FBI. The Pentagon and FBI did not respond to Yahoo News requests for comment.
In Russia, they want to increase the number of long-range aircraft by completing the construction of Tu-160 and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers from blanks and components of the early 90s and earlier. This was reported on January 2, 2023 by the specialized publication Defense Express. The publication writes that over the past year, the Russian defense industry reported on the transfer of two Tu-160s made from Soviet “blanks” and components that have remained since the days of the USSR. Tests of these boards have not yet begun.
The publication claims that the Russians need to restore the entire Tu-160 production chain practically from scratch. Against this background, the Russian Federation had an option to use as an “intermediate option” the completion of bombers from those “blanks” that have been on the factory stocks since Soviet times. How many “blanks” of boards there are in the Russian Federation is not mentioned in open sources.
According to the annual summary of The Military Balance, which publishes The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), as of 2020, the Russian Federation had 16 Tu-160s of various modifications at its disposal. There is no data on how many of them are ready for use. Several of these aircraft are regularly used by the Russian occupiers to launch missiles at Ukraine’s critical and energy infrastructure facilities.
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