The Russian president said the last successful test of the Burevestnik, a global cruise missile with a nuclear installation and a nuclear propulsion system, was conducted.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that Russia has successfully tested a new generation of nuclear-powered missiles.
State news agency RIA Novosti quoted Putin as saying, “The last successful test of the Burevestnik, a global cruise missile with a nuclear installation and a nuclear propulsion system, was conducted.”
Putin spoke at the Valdai Forum in Sochi.
Putin announced plans to build the Burevestnik in March 2018 as part of a broader effort to develop a new generation of intercontinental ballistic and hypersonic missiles. These include the Kinzel ballistic missile and the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle. Addressing the West, he said in that speech: “Now listen to us.”
Putin told the Federal Assembly in March 2018 that the aim was to ensure a strategic balance in the world in the coming decades, including the Purvestnik and Sarmat missiles.
“It is a low-flying stealth missile carrying nuclear warheads, capable of almost unlimited range, unpredictable trajectory and crossing interception boundaries,” Putin said at the time.
Western analysts, however, say the project is plagued by a series of failed tests. In 2019, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) reported that “there is consensus in the press, with the agreement of US intelligence services, that Burevestnik has been tested 13 times, with two partial hits”.
NTI quoted Russian military expert Alexei Leonkov as saying the Burevestnik is a retaliatory weapon, saying Russia would leave no chance of survival and wiping out military and civilian infrastructure after intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In his speech at the Valdai forum, Putin said that ratification of the treaty banning nuclear tests could be revoked.
“The United States signed the international law, the document, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Russia signed it. Russia signed and ratified it, the United States signed it, but did not ratify it,” Putin said. Sochi.
The Russian president added that he thought it would be appropriate to “reflect the US way” and withdraw Russia’s approval.
“But this is a question for the State Duma representatives. In theory, this approval can be revoked. If we do, it will be enough,” Putin noted.
Underground nuclear testing was banned by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996. The United States and China signed the treaty, but have not ratified it.
Moscow has ratified the deal, but Putin said in February that he would order the test if the US did so first, adding that “nobody should have dangerous illusions that it can destroy the global strategic balance.”
According to Putin, Russia has “almost finished work on modern types of strategic weapons” and now it is a matter of bureaucratic procedures to “move into their mass production and put them into combat service.” Putin said it would be done soon.
Putin said he was not ready to say whether Russia should conduct tests to verify the effectiveness of the new weapons, but, as a general rule, his experts advise doing so.
A CNN report on SeptAt a time when tensions between the three major nuclear powers, Russia, the United States and China, have reached a peak, satellite images show that they have built new facilities and dug new tunnels at their nuclear test sites in recent years. Over the decades.
While there is no evidence that Russia, the United States or China are preparing for an imminent nuclear test, images obtained and provided by a leading researcher in military nonproliferation studies compare recent developments at three nuclear test sites. A few years ago.
“It is very clear that all three countries – Russia, China and the United States – have invested a lot of time, effort and money not only in modernizing their nuclear weapons, but also in preparing the necessary type of test. Test,” said the analyst.
Putin says the war in Ukraine is not about territory
Meanwhile, Putin, who has been waging a bloody assault on Ukraine for nearly 20 months, said on Thursday that the war was not a conflict over territory – but “principles”.
“The crisis in Ukraine is not a regional conflict, I want to make it clear. Russia is the largest country in the world in terms of territory, and we have no interest in seizing more territory,” Putin said at the Valdai forum.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed, entire towns and villages destroyed and billions of euros worth of infrastructure destroyed since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began on February 24 last year. Meanwhile, the Russian president has attempted to annex four Ukrainian regions in violation of international law to add to the Crimean peninsula, which has been occupied by Moscow forces since 2014.
But on Thursday, Putin said Russia was “not trying to establish a regional geopolitical balance” in Ukraine. Instead, he said, “it is a question of the principles underlying the new international order.”
Rejection of these principles, one of which is “equilibrium in a world where a dominant leader cannot unilaterally coerce or compel others to live or behave as he wishes,” is what Putin said is the cause of the conflicts. West.
Western elites “need an enemy to justify the need for military action and expansion” and have made Moscow the enemy, Putin said.
Putin is a staunch supporter of what he calls a “multilateral world order,” promoting structures like the BRICS group of emerging economies as a counterweight to the U.S. and Western leadership organizations that have strongly condemned Russia’s actions against Ukraine.
Earlier, he tried to justify his brutal war by saying that Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO was a dire threat to Russia, a mission to “degrade” Ukraine, and emphasized his view that Ukraine is culturally part of Russia. , Linguistics and Politics. He compared himself to 18th-century Russian Tsar Peter the Great.
Ukraine has rejected these arguments and has repeatedly said it will not cede any territory to Russia.
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