Putin issues a warning to the West as Russia launches test

Vladimir Putin did his best to put a menacing spin on Russia’s testing of a new intercontinental ballistic missile on Wednesday, April 21st.

The Russian President said the successful launch of the “Sarmat” ICBM, nicknamed the “Satan II”, in the West is capable of delivering multiple nuclear warheads as far as the continental United States:

A fact that would “give thought to those who are trying to threaten Russia”. But Western experts portrayed the test as “nuclear saber-rattling,” saying the threat to the US or its allies was “extremely low” and suggesting Putin’s real motivation was to distract his domestic audience from Russia’s recent military failures, such as the sinking of its Black Sea flagship the “Moskva”. The Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday it had test-fired the “Sarmat” from a silo launcher at the Plesetsk State Test Cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia toward the Kura test site on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s far east.

The launch was the most extensive yet for a missile that was first tested in December 2017 and was promptly lauded by Putin in a statement published by the state-run TASS news agency.

It is not the first time Putin has boasted of the missile’s potency. He mentioned the Sarmat in a 2018 speech as being among a host of new weaponry he said would render NATO defenses “completely useless.”

Putin was engaging in “nuclear saber-rattling,” former CIA chief of Russia operations Steve Hall told CNN’s Kate Bolduan, and the probability of any strike on the US was extremely low.

Just last week, Russia lost one of its most visible military assets when the guided-missile cruiser Moskva sank in the Black Sea. The loss of the ship was an embarrassment to Moscow, which admitted the vessel had suffered a catastrophic fire but did not confirm Ukrainian claims that it had been hit by anti-ship missiles.

Such high-profile failures have left Putin in dire need of some positive military news to feed audiences back home and Wednesday’s launch provided exactly that. At the same time, experts say Russia’s obsession with showcasing weapons such as the “Satan II” hides deeper, more basic problems at the heart of its military.