Report: Russia mulls sending bombers to Cuba

Russia may start regular flights by long-range bombers to Cuba in response to US plans to build missile defence sites in Eastern Europe, the newspaper Izvestia reported Monday, quoting an official.

"Such discussions exist," the unidentified senior Russian air force official was quoted as saying, adding that the measure would be a response to the United States "deploying missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic."

It was not clear whether he meant permanently basing the bombers in Cuba or using the island as a refuelling stop, but former top defence ministry official Leonid Ivashov told the newspaper that Cuba was best used for brief stopovers.

Cuba should be used "not as a permanent base -- this is unnecessary -- but as a stopover airfield, a refuelling stop," Ivashov was quoted as saying.

Spokesmen for the air force and the defence ministry declined to comment about the report to AFP.

Starting long-range bomber flights to Cuba would signal a reawakening of military cooperation by former Cold War allies Moscow and Havana. In 2002 Russia closed its last military base on the island, a radar base at Lourdes.

Plans to fly long-range bombers to Cuba "would be a good answer to attempts to place NATO bases new Russia's borders," former top air force commander Pyotr Deinekin told the RIA Novosti news agency in response to the Izvestia report.

In a speech last year, then president Vladimir Putin likened the US missile defence dispute to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, though he added that relations between Moscow and Washington "have changed a lot" since then.

The discovery in 1962 that Moscow was secretly building nuclear missile launchpads in Cuba pushed the world close to nuclear war in a terrifying two-week brinkmanship between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Last week, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned Moscow would take countermeasures against US plans to build an anti-missile radar facility in the Czech Republic and site interceptor missiles in Poland.

Russia argues that the installations threaten its national security despite US assurances that they are directed against "rogue states" like Iran.