I know China bought Boeings to assuage Americans protesting the bilateral trade deficit. But what political motive could Putin (or whoever is behind the decision) have had?

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Aeroflot is bying Boeings because they will use them to fly to western country's. That way they have planes adopted technicely and meeting all the western standards. Russian planes have their own technology (navigation and so on..) that has to be changed to obtain internatinal homologation(=more expensive).
With western planes they also try to attract more western passengers.
But The main reason is financial: Russian air-industry was in big financial troubles in 1985-2000. Development and building aircraft demands huge financial investements which the Russians alone could not bring up. So we see a lot of joint-ventures be created between almost all Russian plane-builders and western companies like Boeing, Airbus and a lot of manufactures of electronics, navigation and other materials.
So parts of some Airbus en Boeing models are now in fact developed and manifactured in Russia. So bying Boeing is also supportive for Russian air-industry.
An example: for the Be-200-firefighter a UK-based firm developed the electronics to control all waterbombing actions (gps,glidepad,reference-point calculation.....)
That computer is programmed in ADA ; they found the programmers mastering ADA in Russia.
But later on I will write a diary about this, because we see a mounting concurrence between European and American interests in that particular Russian market.


The struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.(Kundera)