The United States wants all the Russian military aircraft that Colombia has. They offered a million for the entire fleet that Joe Biden’s government does not care if they serve or not. Gustavo Petro was not interested in the business and said no to the $300 million offered by the US Department of Defense.
The 26 gigantic and heavy Mi-17 ships are in the hands of the Colombian Army. They are especially used to transport troops and remove wounded from mountains and remote places. They have been protagonists when it comes to putting out fires with special baskets bambi bucket.
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The United States does not want them to expand its fleet of military aircraft. They have the reference CH, which are Italian-American manufactured. The Russian planes that the Colombian Army has are needed by the Americans to send them to Ukraine. The objective is for President Volodymyr Zelensky to put them to work to continue fighting Russia in the war that has now completed two years.
The Mi-17 are of the same reference as the one that crashed on April 29 in the Department of Bolívar and left 9 soldiers dead. They are the type of those used in 2008 in the famous Operation Jaque organized to rescue 15 FARC kidnappers, including Ingrid Betancur.
30 years ago the first Mi arrived in the country. Those robust Russian helicopters were purchased by Ernesto Samper’s government in 1996 when Colombia was left without certification from the United States, the President’s visa was canceled in the middle of the 8000 process and an agreement was aborted.
The idea was to buy some American UH 60 Black Hawks, but Samper, in the midst of tensions with Bill Clinton’s government, ended up doing business with Russia, which in those days was under the command of Boris Yeltsin.
After training Colombian pilots in Russian fields, the first two Mi-17s arrived in April 1997. A couple of months later, another eight arrived. In 2001, President Andrés Pastrana authorized the purchase of a second batch of Russian helicopters.
The good autonomy, the idea that they were cheaper in maintenance and start-up, put them above the American ships, which were again on the table for this second business. Before 2009, already in the government of Álvaro Uribe, another 10 Russian ships were purchased for the Army, very necessary for the National Government’s offensive against the guerrillas in the midst of the Democratic Security policy.
In total, 26 Russian helicopters have arrived in the country, 20 of them are in the hands of the Army and of those, nine, including the one used in Operation Check, are active and in operation. Another nine are stranded awaiting repairs and spare parts that would have to come from Russia. Seven more have a total loss due to accidents, including the one that just had an accident in Bolívar on April 29, 2024.
