Putin private jet price
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Vladimir Putin: From Russia's KGB to a long presidency defined by war in Ukraine
Four years later, Chechen rebels took 1,000 hostages, most of them children, at a school in Beslan, North Ossetia. When Russian special forces stormed the building, 330 people died. It later emerged that Russia had intelligence of a planned attack but had failed to act.
The first years of the Putin presidency were both bloody and turbulent, but the Russian economy was doing well, buoyed by high oil prices.
He won public support for taking on the billionaire oligarchs who had run rife in Russia in the 1990s. Summoning them to the Kremlin, he said they could keep their money as long as they kept out of politics and backed him.
He acted fast against those who didn't, such as Russia's then-wealthiest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested at gunpoint and jailed in Siberia.
Russia's president had something of a honeymoon with the West. He was one of the first foreign leaders to ring President George W Bush after the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on the US. He even helped the US launch
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Wednesday's meeting between President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Geneva is the first time the two meet face-to-face since the former was sworn in in January.
It takes place following G7 and NATO summits in Britain and Belgium respectively
Both Biden and Putin have flown into Switzerland on their presidential planes. While there's little left unknown about Air Force One, its Russian counterpart is somewhat more obscure.
Here's a breakdown of five facts about Putin's presidential plane.
What model is the Russian presidential plane?
Vladimir Putin flies on a modernized and heavily modified Ilyushin II-96-300PU.
As per the designer's official website, the plane is a quadjet long-haul wide-body airliner—that is to say a plane powered by four jet engines and boasting a fuselage wide enough to accommodate two passenger aisles with seven or more seats abreast—designed by Ilyushin Aviation Complex and manufactured by the Voronezh Aircraft Production Association.
The four jet engines powering the plane are produced by Russian engine manufactur
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U-2 Overflights and the Capture of Francis Gary Powers, 1960
On May 1, 1960, the pilot of an American U-2 spyplane was shot down while flying though Soviet airspace. The fallout over the incident resulted in the cancellation of the Paris Summit scheduled to discuss the ongoing situation in divided Germany, the possibility of an arms control or test ban treaty, and the relaxation of tensions between the USSR and the United States.
Francis Gary Powers with model of U-2 plane
As early as 1955, officials in both Moscow and Washington had grown concerned about the relative nuclear capabilities of the Soviet Union and the United States. Given the threat that the nuclear arms race posed to national security, leadership in both countries placed a priority on information about the other side’s progress. At a conference in Geneva in 1955, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower proposed an “open skies” plan, in which each country would be permitted to make overflights of the other to conduct mutual aerial inspections of nuclear facilities and launchpads. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ref
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