Twenty years ago Monday, a nineteen-year-old West German named Mathias Rust shocked the world by landing a rented Cessna 172B near Moscow’s Red Square following a six-hour flight from Helsinki.
As this article in today’s Moscow Times notes, the last two decades have been almost as tumultuous for Rust as they have been for Russia. [...]

The second installment of the monthly blog run-down Military History Carnival has turned up a recent and relevant aviation-related post from the collaborative East Asian history blog Frog in a Well. In it, Alan Baumler ponders the question, “How air-minded was China?” and offers some background information concerning the role of airplanes and air power [...]

In yesterday’s issue of Kommersant, Sergei Minaev, a regular contributor to the newspaper’s weekly analytical supplement Власть (Vlast’), published a noteworthy piece on the propensity of Russian citizens and statesmen to measure what happens in their country by the yardstick of foreign standards. Titled, “Half a Century in Pursuit,” the article is a brief history [...]

In the clearest sign yet that the concept of irony is often wasted on state officials, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov today rebuked foreign governments that attempt to re-write history in order to serve contemporary political ends.
In a televised appearance at a ceremony honoring Russian diplomats who died during the Great Patriotic War (i.e. World [...]