Greeeaaat. The Telegraph reports:

Russian bombers are reported to have buzzed an American military base for the first time since the Cold War when they flew over the Pacific island of Guam.

Moscow said that US fighter jets were scrambled to intercept the two Tupolev-95 warplanes as they resumed the Cold War era practice of flying over Western offshore military installations in a mission on Wednesday.The incident, seen as the latest attempt by a revitalised Russia to project its military might, is likely to have unnerved the Pentagon and caused further perplexity at the State Department over the Kremlin’s mercurial course.

The US military was silent about the mid-air confrontation but the Russians were happy to boast about it.

“It was always the tradition of our long-range aviation to fly far into the ocean, to meet (US) aircraft carriers and greet (US) pilots visually,” Maj Gen Pavel Androsov, the head of long-range aviation in the Russian air force, told a press conference in Moscow.

“Yesterday we revived this tradition.”

Yeah, that’s dandy. How about we shoot them out of the sky next time they do that?

Capable of carrying nuclear bombs, the Tu-95 was the Soviet Union’s aviation icon. A lumbering beast, it was instantly recognisable to every US fighter pilot who had to escort the aircraft on its regular sorties down the American east coast.

A new generation of pilots may now have to get used to doing the same.

And this isn’t the first time, in recent weeks, it’s happened:

The return of the airborne games of cat-and-mouse is likely to elicit queasier grins in Western capitals, where military chiefs will be puzzling over how to respond to Russia’s increasingly frequent displays of defiance.

Last month RAF Tornado fighters were twice forced to scramble after Tu-95 bombers flew close to British airspace.