August 20, 200718 yr Carrier Relaunches Jets After 2 Years MOSCOW -- Russia has started flying jets again from its only operational aircraft carrier after a two-year break, state-run television reported yesterday in the latest show of the country's reviving military capability. "Aircraft are taking off and landing from the deck of the Kuznetsov after a gap of two years. To the pilots and crew [the gap] seemed enormous," Channel One television said in a report from on board the vessel. Last week, President Vladimir Putin announced Russia was returning to its Soviet-era practice of sending long-range bomber aircraft on regular patrols near to NATO airspace. Observers saw those sorties as a sign of Russia's growing assertiveness and ambitions to extend its global reach -- helped by a budget swelled by revenues from energy exports. Russia's other aircraft carriers have been decommissioned or sold. The television report did not say why flights from the Admiral Kuznetsov had been halted. (Reuters)
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