Russia has won the international race to develop a hypersonic cruise missile, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“This is a serious event,” Putin said at a year-end meeting of government officials. “We are the first to have a strategic weapon of a new kind, enabling us to provide for the effective defense of our state and people for decades to come.”
Putin touted the missile systems in March, boasting that the United States had failed to contain Russia as he displayed a video that simulated a nuclear strike on the state of Florida. The message alarmed Western officials, but also left unanswered questions about whether the Kremlin exaggerated their research progress.
Putin sought to dispel those doubts by announcing the results of a “final test” for the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle at the Kura Missile Test Range in Eastern Russia.
“This test has just proved to be an unqualified success,” he said Wednesday. “Starting in 2019, the Russian army will receive the new Avangard intercontinental strategic system. The first Avangard regiment will be deployed as part of the Strategic Missile Forces.”
The announcement came as the clock ticks toward the U.S. withdrawal from a major Cold War-era nuclear arms control agreement. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was negotiated in 1987 to ban land-based intermediate-range cruise missiles, but the United States maintains that Russia has been in violation of the deal for years.
“Moscow has fielded multiple battalions of SSC-8, and all of them are positioned for offensive purposes,” State Department under secretary Andrea Thompson, using the formal U.S. name for the missile, said during a media call. “If we want credible arms control deterrent, we’ve got to demonstrate that our treaties are worth the paper they’re written on.”
Putin denies any such violations, while issuing ominous comments about the threat of nuclear war.
“If, God forbid, something like this happens, it might destroy the whole of civilization or perhaps the entire planet,” Putin said last week. “These issues are therefore serious, and it is a great pity that there is such a tendency to underestimate the problem, and that this tendency is probably becoming more pronounced.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mocked those denials at the most recent NATO Foreign Minister Summit in Brussels when he announced that the U.S. would begin withdrawing from the INF Treaty in February.
“Russia is responsible for the demise of the treaty,” Pompeo told reporters at his press conference following the NATO foreign minister summit. “Only they can save this treaty. If Russia admits its violations and fully and verifiably comes back into compliance, we will of course welcome that course of action.”
Instead, Putin says Russia has gained the edge in nuclear competition. “This is a major event in the life of the armed forces and probably the entire country,” he said Wednesday. “Russia now has a new strategic weapons system.”
