The head of Russia’s space agency has said the country plans to deploy its first military unit armed with the nuclear-capable Sarmat, a new intercontinental ballistic missile, within months.
The Sarmat is capable of carrying 10 or more nuclear warheads and decoys and of striking targets thousands of miles away in the United States or Europe, reports Reuters.
On Sunday, in televised remarks, Col. Gen. Sergei Karakayev, the commander of the Russian military’s Strategic Missile Forces, said that the new Sarmat ICBM is designed to carry several Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles.
The Sarmat was test-fired for the first time Wednesday from the Plesetsk launch facility in northern Russia and its practice warheads have successfully reached mock targets on the Kura firing range on the far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula.
The test launch came amid soaring tensions between Moscow and the West over the Russian military action in Ukraine, particularly with Russian armed forces publicly derided by Western military analysts as underperforming, poorly trained, and badly equipped in the Ukraine campaign, according to Radio Free Europe.
Roskosmos Director-General Dmitry Rogozin, in an interview with state television station Rossia-24 on Saturday, said the Sarmat unit will be based in the Siberian town of Uzhur, in the Krasnoyarsk region, about 3,000 kilometers east of Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed the Sarmat launch as a major achievement, claiming that the new missile has no equivalent anywhere globally.
“This really unique weapon will strengthen the combat potential of our armed forces, reliably ensure Russia’s security from external threats and make those, who in the heat of frantic aggressive rhetoric try to threaten our country, think twice,” Putin said Wednesday.
President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 with a speech in which he pointedly referred to Moscow’s nuclear forces and warned that any attempt to get in Russia’s way “will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history.”
“The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last month.
