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Russia has successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile with a potentially unlimited range, President Vladimir Putin announced on Sunday.
During its test flight this week, the missile is said to have travelled 14,000 km (8,700 miles) and remained in the air for 15 hours.
The 9M730 Burevestnik missile (Storm Petrel) is claimed to be “invincible” to current and future missile-defense systems.
“It is a unique ware which nobody else in the world has,” Putin, said at a meeting with his generals leading the war effort in Ukraine.
The missile was first announced in 2018 as a response to moves by the US to enlarge NATO and develop a missile-defense shield after withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Putin remarked that the missile had once been considered impossible to make, but now its “crucial testing” had been completed.
As Reuters reports, the announcement of the missile’s successful testing is clearly a sign to the West not to discount Russia’s military capabilities, as the war in Ukraine grinds on and efforts to bring it to an end continue to prove fruitless.
“For Trump, who has cast Russia as a ‘paper tiger’ for failing to swiftly subdue Ukraine, the message is that Russia remains a global military competitor, especially on nuclear weapons, and that Moscow’s overtures on nuclear arms control should be acted on,” Reuters notes.
“Putin’s message for the broader West, after the United States moved to provide Ukraine with intelligence on long-range energy infrastructure targets in Russia, is that Moscow can strike back if it wants to.”
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration had lifted a restriction on Ukraine’s using long-range missiles provided by its Western allies for strikes deep inside Russia.
Putin responded by saying that if Russia is attacked, the response will be “very serious, if not overwhelming.”
A day before the restriction was lifted, Russian nuclear forces conducted a test on land, sea and air to rehearse readiness and command structure.
On Saturday, President Trump said he now won’t meet with Putin until a peace deal is reached to bring the war with Ukraine to an end.
“I’m going to have to know that we’re going to make a deal,” Trump said while speaking to journalists on Air Force One as he made his way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a week-long Asia tour.
“I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a very great relationship with Vladimir Putin, but this has been very disappointing.”
President Trump cancelled a peace summit in Budapest with Putin that was scheduled for Tuesday, in a clear sign of his frustration at the lack of progress towards peace.
“I thought this would have gone long before peace in the Middle East,” Trump said.
“We have Azerbaijan and Armenia—that was very tough. In fact, Putin told me on the phone, he said, ‘Boy, that was amazing,’ because everybody tried to get that done and they couldn’t. I got it done. You had others. If you look at India and Pakistan. I could say almost any one of the deals that I’ve already done I thought would have been more difficult than Russia and Ukraine, but it didn’t work out that way. There’s a lot of hatred between the two, between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and Putin.”
After cancelling the summit, President Trump announced fresh sanctions on Russia, targeting its two largest oil-exporting companies, as a result of “Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process to end the war in Ukraine.”
The President has indicated he may discuss Chinese purchases of Russian oil when he meets with China’s premier Xi Jinping in South Korea next week.
I may be discussing it,” Trump said.
“You probably saw today, China is cutting back very substantially on the purchase of Russian oil, and India is cutting back completely. And we’ve done sanctions.”
