I recall that the Russians are pretty good at convincing people that their weapons are better than they really are.  How firm ae thes specs.

So how does this figure in with the supposed return to a cold war state? From an uneducated, war mongering point of view, it looks like a second strike strategy.

30 Blackjacks does not make for much of a Cold War - considering the thousands of warheads we were looking at during the 1980s.  If anything this is a move toward shoring up the Russian Air Force - which is a hollow shell of what it used to be.  Power projectin wise - it fits within a regional - not global - style of conventional warfare to have the Blackjacks at hand.

"Can you imagine entrusting
a vital military mission, or precious lives, or even sensitive and
expensive PGMs, missiles, electronics, codes and nuclear devices, to a
Russian aircraft, half-built by drunken frostbite-victim zeks in the
communist era, left outside to rot in the Russian winters, probably
half stripped over a decade, and now to be recycled (I suppose the
titanium is worth something) into new and vital threats to China and
NATO?
"

1.) Tupolev OKB employed zeks to build their planes?
2.) If they were no threat to NATO, why did America pay the Ukrainians money to destroy 11 machines that were on their territory?
3.) Note how the Americans use the B-1s today. Russia has Chechnya. Does anyone know which squadrons these Blackjacks are going to, and where these squadrons are located geographically?

1)  OK, now we're talking.  In the Solzhenitsyn sense of semi-well-treated, elite scientific and technical worker-prisoners , as opposed to the Ivan Denisoviches, those who for instance dug the canals, yes, I would assume that at least at lower levels, draftsmen and such were employed at Tupolev, Mikoyan, Kalashnikov, Sukhoi, etc., works.  I am not up on the greater geniuses of the Russian aircraft industry, but do you mean to sugest that no Peenemunde Germans, for instance, were employed in the space program?  I have no idea how valuable or close to the top a given 'zek' might become.

In the sense of cowed slave labor, uh, DUH, yeah!  Since Russia had forthrightly turned itself into a nation of slaves, a Slav into a slave nation, yeah, I would say those quota-bound food-rationed centrally-assigned anti-Stakhanovite metal-bashers, fuelers, wing-wipers, and the rest were slave labor. 



There is no such thing as a stupid question, we are always taught, but this one, while impertinent and has many ready answers.  Let me drop 2 quickly...

My first being that money is the American weapon of choice today and that if we could bomb their defense plants with dollars, the better for them to pay to shred all the old commie letterhead and learn to interoperate with NATO weps, fuel, ammo, prowords, etc. as they got in line to Move Away From Russia, then hooray for us! 

Second, if they were such a threat, why didn't we pay to TAKE them?  That
alone, that they were not worth stealing for analysis let alone to add
to our arsenal, proves my point rather than disproving it. Might as well break 'em up so no gang of urka can get juiced up on samogon and ride a Blackjack to Red Square.  Enough of that kind of thing happening in RFSFR.  Look at Nicolas Cage in that movie.  Bad enough he had AKs and cargo planes, heaven forbid he had B-17s let alone modern strategic bombers to sell. 

At least 11 machines is a manageable number to contain in this way ("Never send a man where you can send a bullet buck."  -- Adm. Sir Miles Messervy, via Ian Fleming). 


3)  Now you're getting to the point.  But if Russia thinks the US is using the Bone as a ginormous attack aircraft...well, it depends how well and how cheaply FSU PGMs work.  One could easily see them taking a beating in Chechnya or any high country vs. a determined foe.  They don't need bombers, they need a good cheap weapon they can drop from 30k feet and hit the right car most every time, to arm them with. 

I would also assume they have ample basing and the distances are nil for a heavy bomber.  SInce you ask the question you probably know more than I and are invited to speculate on what those distinctions could imply.