Friday August 10, 2007
Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday August 10, 2007
Russian bombers resuming Cold War patrols
Russian bombers have resumed Cold War-style long-haul missions to areas patrolled by NATO and the United States, top Russian generals said Thursday.
A Russian bomber flew over a U.S. naval base on the Pacific island of Guam on Wednesday and “exchanged smiles” with U.S. pilots who had scrambled to track it, said Major General Pavel Androsov, head of long-range aviation in the Russian Air Force.
President Vladimir Putin has sought to make Russia more assertive. He has increased defense spending and sought to raise morale in the armed forces, which were starved of funding after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The bombers give Russia the capability of making a nuclear strike, even if the nuclear arsenals on its own territory are wiped out.
During the Cold War, Soviet pilots played elaborate airborne games of cat and mouse with Western air forces.
The current state of Russia’s economy, which is booming for the eighth year in a row, has allowed Russia to finance such flights, said Safranchuk of the World Security Institute. (Source: Herald Tribune)
Between 1989 and 1991 Graeme MacKay illustrated and, along with writer Paul Nichols, co-wrote a weekly comic strip, entitled “Alas & Alack”, a satire of current day public figures framed in a medieval setting. It was published in The Fulcrum, the English language student newspaper at the Univesity of Ottawa. In total, 46 strips were created.
Last week I did a cartoon showing Vladimir Putin atop Lenin’s tomb reminiscent of photos we’d see of Soviet leaders during the cold war years. I was inspired to draw it following renewed interest by the Russians in the Arctic from the North Pole to the Mediterranean via the Caucasus. It made me think back, before Boris Yeltsin, to the last time I drew Lenin’s tomb back when Mikhail Gorbachev was in power, as he warming up to the west with Glasnost, and implementing political and economic reforms otherwise known as Perestroika. The year was 1989, democracy was spreading throughout Eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall had just come down, and I was a student at the University of Ottawa. I was just starting out getting my worked published in the student press, through the campus newspaper called The Fulcrum. I had a cartoon strip called: Alas & Alack.