Russia uses Tu-160 bombers handed over by Ukraine in 1999 – investigation

Russia has been deploying Tu-160 strategic bombers, which Ukraine transferred to Moscow in 1999 in exchange for clearing debts for Russian gas supplies. Source: investigation by Schemes, an investigative journalism project of Radio.Liberty Details: Journalists compared the serial numbers from an archived agreement, international aviation registers and serial numbers of bombers used by Russia, as documented by Ukraine's Defence Intelligence.

Schemes identified ten Ukrainian strategic aircraft transferred to Russia, including Tu-160 bombers renamed in Russia as Nikolai Kuznetsov (formerly with the Ukrainian tail number 10), Vasily Senko (11), Aleksandr Novikov (12), Vladimir Sudets (15), Aleksei Plokhov (16), Andrei Tupolev (18) and Igor Sikorskyi (22).

At least six of these bombers remain operational within Russia's armed forces. The Schemes discovered an agreement in the archives, signed in Yalta, Crimea, in 1999, between Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers, led by Valerii Pustovoitenko and the Russian government under Vladimir Putin. The agreement indicates that Kyiv transferred eight Tu-160 bombers, three Tu-95MS bombers, and 575 Kh-55 cruise missiles to Moscow in exchange for settling Ukraine's gas debt of 275 million hryvnias (approximately US£ 6.6 million), the estimated value of the equipment.

The journalists note that the transfer of the aircraft and missiles occurred without parliamentary approval by Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament).

The investigation further highlights that the value of the transferred weaponry was underestimated by a factor of ten, according to conclusions by a Temporary Investigative Commission of the Verkhovna Rada, which investigated the misappropriation of military assets and undermining Ukraine's defence capability between 2004 and 2017. Former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma commented to Schemes that retaining the strategic bombers would not have significantly enhanced Ukraine's defence capabilities against Russia. Quote from Kuchma: "Russia has air defence systems capable of countering Kh-55 class missiles, while the large and relatively slow bombers would have become easy targets for Russian weapons in the air or on airfields in the early days of the war.

Strategic weapons were unlikely to aid Ukraine's strategic objectives and did not align with Ukraine's scale.

We lacked testing ranges for the missiles and even the territorial expanse required to operate such equipment - strategic weaponry requires strategic space."

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