Entering service in , the Tu was the last strategic bomber designed for the Soviet Air Forces and was built to serve as a conventional and nuclear-capable strike aircraft. Production was stopped in following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in , and the newly independent Russian and Ukrainian air forces inherited a fleet of 13 and 19 Tus, respectively. Following protracted negotiations, eight Ukrainian Tus were purchased by the Russian Federation while the remaining 11 were scrapped in the late s under the Nunn—Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction agreement.
Following these actions, the sole operator of the aircraft type became the Russian Aerospace Forces ' Long Range Aviation branch, which still had 17 Tus in service as of Various overseas deployments have been conducted, including to distant nations such as Venezuela and South Africa.
Since the early s, the active fleet has been subject to several upgrades, largely focusing on various electronics systems. The TuM modernization program of existing models began with the first updated aircraft delivered in December Plans announced in called for the delivery of 50 new-built TuMs as well as the upgrading of 16 existing aircraft. In January , a newly-built TuM performed a test flight, [ 5 ] the first of the resumed serial production, with two new aircraft planned for delivery in [ 6 ] from 10 on order.
The first competition for a supersonic strategic heavy bomber was launched in the Soviet Union in In , the Soviet Union launched a new multi-mission bomber competition to create a new supersonic, variable-geometry "swing-wing" heavy bomber with a maximum speed of Mach 2. The Tupolev design, named Aircraft M , with a lengthened blended wing layout and incorporating some elements of the Tu , competed against the Myasishchev M and the Sukhoi T-4 designs.
The prototype was photographed by an airline passenger at a Zhukovsky Airfield in November , about a month before the aircraft's first flight on 18 December The modernization appeared to be split into two phases, first concentrating on life extension with some initial communication—navigation updates, followed by engine upgrades after Although Kuznetsov designed an NKM engine with improved reliability over the NK engines, its successor company has struggled to deliver working units.
