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Putin boasts of ‘unique’ missile while dressed up in combat fatigues for meeting with generals
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Russian president Vladimir Putin said his country has tested its nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile, which he says can “pierce any defence shield”.
The 9M730 Burevestnik, dubbed the SSC-X-9 Skyfall by Nato, is “invincible” to current and future missile defences, Moscow said, adding that it has an almost unlimited range and unpredictable flight path.
“It is a unique ware which nobody else in the world has,” said Putin, dressed in camouflage fatigues at a meeting with generals overseeing the war in Ukraine, in remarks released yesterday, claiming its “crucial testing” had been concluded.
Russia‘s top general Valery Gerasimov told Putin that the missile travelled 14,000 km and was in the air for about 15 hours when it was tested on 21 October.
Meanwhile, Moscow was forced to close two airports overnight as Russian air defences responded to a major Ukrainian drone attack.
In the Bryansk region, one person was killed and five others were injured when a Ukrainian drone struck a minibus. Russia said it downed almost 200 drones, including 34 targeting its capital.
Polish prime minister Donald Tusk has warned that Britain would be in the line of fire if the Kremlin were to attack a Nato country, and said he is been “shocked” by the level of public complacency about the UK’s safety.
Referring to the Russia-linked arson attacks on prime minister Keir Starmer’s former family home in Kentish Town, London, he told the Sunday Times of his shock.
“The problem is that no one in Britain was [taken aback] by this. I was shocked, frankly speaking,” Tusk said. “After information about it appeared in the British press, the reaction was like it was just an Arsenal-Liverpool football match. But if the Russians are ready and able to organise something like that, it means that they are ready and able to do anything.”
He added that if Moscow deployed its new hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missiles to Belarus or Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave next to Poland, it would be easily capable of unleashing a nuclear warhead in any European capital, including London, given the missiles’ range of up to 2,000 miles.
“The threat is global and universal, above all because of technology,” Tusk said. “You and we are both already under massive attack in cyberspace. In Poland they are ready to destroy the cyberinfrastructure [underpinning] our railways, our hospitals. It could be really painful. This is why you can’t live under this sweet illusion that you are too far away from them, that it’s not your war, it’s just Ukraine or Poland.”
Polish prime minister Donald Tusk has said that Ukraine is ready to fight for another three years, but hopes the war will not last longer.
Poland’s leader revealed that Kyiv was anxious about the toll the war could take on its population and economy should it stretch on for longer than a few more years.
“I have no doubts Ukraine will survive as an independent state,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times. “Now the main question is how many victims we will see. President Zelensky told me [on Thursday] that he hopes that the war will not last 10 years, but that Ukraine is ready to fight for another two, three years.”
The Burevestnik has a poor test record of at least 13 known tests, with only two partial successes, since 2016, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), an advocacy group focused on reducing nuclear, biological and emergent technology risks.
The setbacks include a 2019 blast during the botched recovery of an unshielded nuclear reactor allowed to “smolder” on the White Sea floor for a year following a prototype crash, according to State Department reports.
Russia’s state nuclear agency Rosatom said five staff members died during the testing of a rocket on 8 August.
Putin presented their widows with top state awards, saying the weapon they were developing was without equal in the world, without naming the Burevestnik.
Vladimir Putin announced Russia has successfully tested its nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile, a nuclear-capable weapon Moscow says can pierce any defence shield and evade US missiles.
But experts, citing its poor test record, have said Burevestnik missile will not add capabilities that Moscow does not already have and risks a radiation-spewing mishap.
The missile – referred to as SSC-X-9 Skyfall by Nato – has a nuclear-powered engine that threatens to disgorge radiation along its flight path and its deployment risks an accident that could contaminate the surrounding region, said Cheryl Rofer, a former US nuclear weapons scientist.
“The Skyfall is a uniquely stupid weapon system, a flying Chernobyl that poses more threat to Russia than it does to other countries,” agreed Thomas Countryman, a former top State Department official with the Arms Control Association, referring to the 1986 nuclear plant disaster.
Russia has reportedly tested a new nuclear-capable and powered cruise missile, which president Vladimir Putin claims is designed to confound existing defences, moving closer to its military deployment.
– The 9M730 Burevestnik, whose name translates as “storm petrel”, is a ground-launched, low-flying cruise missile that is not only capable of carrying a nuclear warhead but is also nuclear-powered. Nato refers to it as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall.
– Putin, who first revealed the project in March 2018, has said it has an unlimited range and can evade US missile defences. But some Western experts have questioned its strategic value, saying it won’t add capabilities that Moscow does not already have, and may disgorge radiation along its flight path.
Russian air defence systems destroyed 193 Ukrainian drones overnight, officials said.
These included 34 that targeted Moscow and 47 over the Bryansk region where one person was killed and five others were injured, Russian authorities said today.
The drones over Moscow were downed within a span of six hours, starting at just before 10pm last night Moscow time (1900 GMT), mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.
The Russian defence ministry said in its daily report on Telegram that in addition to the drones destroyed over Moscow and the Bryansk region, Russian systems downed drones over 11 other regions, chiefly in the country’s west and south.
There were no reports of damage in Moscow, but Russia rarely discloses the full scale of damages inflicted by Ukrainian strikes inside its territory unless civilians or civilian objects are involved.
Russian aviation watchdog Rosaviatsiya said that two of Moscow’s four airports, the Domodedovo airport and the smaller Zhukovsky airport, were shut for about 2.5 hours from 2240 GMT to ensure air safety.
Ramzan darts about his garage workshop with gleeful enthusiasm, showing off a small blue mortar bomb from “Holland or Poland”, a whopping thin-tailed, bulging-headed shell from America, Ukrainian bespoke high-explosive packed grenades and even an anti-tank mine – all for dropping on the heads of Russians.
A former infantry soldier, he has been at war for three years and says he misses the thrill of fighting up close, but, as the armourer for a four-man drone team flying an unmanned bomber in the National Guard’s Typhoon drone unit: “This is the best way to kill Russians.”In a war of constant frontline improvisation, workshops like Ramzan’s garage – where he makes his own detonators and devises new types of incendiary bombs – have taken on the value of billion-pound industrial-military research centres in Nato countries.
Drone war was pioneered by self-funded Ukrainian soldiers adapting civilian toys to mortal effect. Kyiv now has the capacity to produce drones by the million, but on the front lines the model remains a killer startup.
Sam Kiley joins the Ukrainian infantry near Zaporizhzhia:
A Ukrainian drone hit a minibus in the Bryansk region, killing the driver and injuring five people, the governor of the southwestern Russian region bordering Ukraine said this morning.
All those injured were taken to a local hospital, the governor, Alexander Bogomaz, said on his Telegram channel.
Intelligence analysts inside the Trump administration were reportedly divided over whether Vladimir Putin was sincerely interested in negotiating an end to the Ukraine war.
Ahead of a controversial August summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin, the State Department’s internal intelligence agency took a more dim view of the question than other sectors of the administration, warning the president of Putin’s reluctance to end the conflict in assessments and presidential briefings, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“We kept standing firm,” John Williams, who resigned earlier this year from his post as director of the State Department’s Russia-Eurasia analysis in the intelligence bureau, told the paper. “We didn’t see that [Putin] had incentive to negotiate an end to the war.”
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