Russia Flexes Muscles With Missile Testing

Engaged in its biggest nuclear military exercises in years, Russia prepared Monday to test-launch a series of ballistic missiles and deploy its heavy strategic bombing force in the far north in what President Vladimir V. Putin called an attempt to guarantee the world’s “strategic security.”

The Russian president boarded the Northern Fleet submarine Arkhangelsk and headed for the Barents Sea, where he will oversee the launch of a powerful missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead from deep beneath the northern sea, possibly as early as today.

Military officials said several ground-based ballistic missiles, air-launched cruise missiles and a military satellite also would be test-fired in the coming days as part of an operation clearly designed to remind the world that Russia remains a nuclear superpower.

“We should by no means behave in a way that makes the world fear us,” Putin said last week. “The world should see our military power as an element of strategic security.”

He said Russia has not held military exercises on such a scale in recent years due to lack of financing and preparedness, but pledged that the nuclear war games would not be the last.

“During Soviet times, the very factor of the Soviet Union, its power -- primarily that of its nuclear forces -- was a serious stabilizing factor, the one balancing power in the world,” Putin said. “We need to maintain this power, and we will do it.”

Worried over North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion into Poland and the Baltics, Russia in recent months has adopted an increasingly firm military tone.

This month, Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov even hinted that Russia might be prepared to withdraw from the Conventional Forces in Europe pact, the continent’s principal conventional arms control agreement, in response to what Russia sees as the West’s failure to consider its concerns over enlargement of the alliance.

Moscow analysts say the military posturing reflects a Kremlin that is ready to adopt a tougher line toward the U.S. and the European Union. Many Russians believe their nation has little to show for the more conciliatory policies of Putin’s first four years as president.

With Putin aiming for reelection next month, he no doubt is mindful that a majority of Russians in recent opinion polls say their greatest wish is to see their nation restored to its former status as a superpower. In a statement to his regional campaign managers last week, Putin echoed a similar sentiment, lamenting the demise of the Soviet Union as “a national tragedy on an enormous scale.”

“I think that the ordinary citizens of the former Soviet Union and the post-Soviet space gained nothing from this. On the contrary, people have faced a huge number of problems,” Putin said. But he added: “We cannot only look back and curse about this issue. We must look forward.”

Perhaps reflecting a common view within the country’s military establishment, former top Defense Ministry official Leonid Ivashov said Putin’s role at the helm of the strategic exercises “is a solid manifestation that Russia is ready to adequately react to the expansion of NATO into areas close to Russian borders, and the aggressive conduct of the U.S. military machine in the world in general.”

Ivashov, who is vice president of the Academy for Geopolitical Sciences, said the exercises “are not aimed at threatening anyone, but they are certainly a warning not to be missed by those in the West who adhere only to a policy of sheer military might.”

In a meeting with reporters last week, Col. Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, said neither the U.S. nor any other country would be targeted in the exercises. However, he also said the operation was prompted in part by American plans to develop low-yield nuclear weapons.

“They are trying to make nuclear weapons an instrument of solving military tasks, [to] lower the threshold of nuclear weapons use,” Baluyevsky said, according to news agency reports. “Shouldn’t we react to that, at least on the headquarters level? I’m sure that we should, and we are doing that.”

Baluyevsky declined to disclose the flight routes of the strategic bombers but said the Pentagon had been informed. He called the exercises routine, comparable to test missile launches regularly carried out by the U.S.

Russian news reports said the exercises, parts of which got underway in January, would simulate conventional attacks, including terrorist assaults, on Russia from four sides at once, including outer space -- a frontier that almost by definition assumes the United States as an adversary.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that Tu-160 bombers would fly to the northern Atlantic Ocean, while Tu-95MS bombers would fly over the Arctic region.

Alexander Golts, defense analyst for the journal Yezhenedelny, said the exercises involve a larger-than-usual number of strategic missile launches, most likely timed to coincide with the election campaign in which Putin is expected to easily secure a second term.

“Putin firing one strategic missile after another will look much more convincing than Putin taking part in televised campaign debates,” he said.

“The Russian ruling elite finds it hard to come to terms with the idea that Russia is no longer equal to the United States in the way the Soviet Union was,” he added.

“The only attribute that can support them in this wishful illusion is the strategic nuclear forces.”

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.