The major reason behind this is the Northwest Passage, as the Arctic ice melts over the next 10 years, a clean path for ships will be made straight trough the Canadian Arctic, not to mention that the area is the richest deposit of Oil and Natural Gas left in the world. This is all untapped waiting to be exploited, and the beauty and the cleanliness of the Arctic pissed on. Now Russia is claiming this region as theirs, even tough it is covered under Canada's sovereign territory. Russia, just last year, went and planted an underwater flag. Right under the passage, inside Canadian borders.
:blink: Any source proving that the flag was planted
last year and
in the area of the Northwest Passage, please? I'm only informed of the flag made of Titanium planted on August 2, 2007 in the spot of the seabed right under the North Pole. This one:
Also, in my understanding, the Nortwest Passage should be something like is drawn on this map:
Why do you assume Russia pretends on any piece of the pictured territory? From my information, the disputed area is what's hatched red on the following map:
So you can see Russia lays no claim on any seabed on the "opposite side" of the ocean with relation to the North Pole. I can agree it may be disputable if creeping someone's claims out of the 200-mile zone from the closest firm land is just, but that's a job of politicians and lawyers to make deals around slippery matters.
It's also not quite clear how flying a Tu-95 over Labrador (can't confirm the location from any independent source, though) can be connected with whatever political process around the area thousands of kilometres away from this spot.
It's sad to see, however, how greediness and race for profit knock nations together once again.
---------- Post added at 03:03 ---------- Previous post was at 02:56 ----------
The engines may be getting a bit old in design, and of course the avionics can always be upgraded as the years go by. This is true of many old aircraft, especially the large subsonic designs, and explains why the C-130 and B-52 are still in service after 50 years, and the C-130 is still in production.
True, and for precision strikes in conditions when there's no long range anti-aircraft activity, it's just as good as supersonic planes - or maybe even better due to low fuel consumption and ability to stand by for long times. So it's kind of a Russian equivalent for strike UAV's, but with inferior observation capabilities.