Amid the crisis with the West escalating over the situation in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has accelerated his program of testing a hypersonic cruise missile for naval use.
This Thursday (16), the Ministry of Defense announced that it had made another successful launch of the 3M22 Tsirkon (zircon, in Russian). It is the fourth test of the model since October — until then, there had been five launches on the frigate Admiral Gorchkov in the White Sea.
According to the Tass agency, the series production of the missile is in the contract phase. This explains the acceleration in the pace of the tests, but the disclosure takes place in the context of heightened tensions with the United States and NATO (Western military alliance).
Also on Thursday, the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said Putin’s demands on the US in the crisis are unacceptable. The Russian wants written assurances that the club will not expand to the east, withdrawing invitations made in 2008 to Ukraine and Georgia.
This is unacceptable in Russia, which sees the old pieces of the Soviet Union (1922-91) as areas that, if not allied with the Belarusian dictatorship, cannot be incorporated into the Western military structure and bring troops and missiles to Russian borders.
In the Georgian case, the Kremlin waged a quick war in 2008 and guaranteed the autonomy of two areas of ethnic Russian majority in the country, halting their NATO accession process.
Six years later, it was Ukraine’s turn, where a coup toppled the pro-Putin government and the response was the annexation of Crimea, a political fait accompli, and the civil war that generated the virtual independence of pro-Russian separatist areas in the east. from the country.
Seeking a show of force when negotiating accommodation, Putin deployed around 100,000 men and equipment such as armor, tanks and anti-aircraft systems to areas relatively close to Ukraine.
For the West, there is a real risk of invasion, which the Kremlin denies. In any case, tempers remain high and on Thursday the Kremlin said that Putin is open to a new virtual conversation with Joe Biden, the American president who had already rejected Russian demands in a videoconference last week.
In addition to threats of Western sanctions, Putin has new problems. The Kremlin had to deny, on Thursday, a compromising report about its presence in Ukrainian territory.
It all starts with a simple corruption case, in which an employee of a company that supplies food and products to the Armed Forces was convicted of charging bribes. However, in his testimony to the court in Rostov (near Ukraine), he said that some of the material handed over went to Russian troops in rebel areas.
This is an open secret. Chancellor Sergei Lavrov himself said, at a seminar in Moscow, that there had been a Russian intervention in the region. But the Kremlin has always denied having forces stationed there.
It is in this climate that hypersonic testing continues. Weapons are considered part of the arsenal of the future, and the recent launch of an advanced model attributed to China has raised alarm in the US — which has not yet very advanced programs in the field.
The Chinese are allies of the Russians in the current crisis, with leader Xi Jinping urging Putin to defend both countries together against the West.
Looking at the European scene, the introduction, even if limited of such a naval missile into the Black Sea, which bathes the contested area of ​​Crimea, as well as Russia, Ukraine and other countries, would pose a problem for NATO. This Thursday, by the way, the Russians carried out attacks on ships in the region.
In this farm’s test, the Tsirkon hit a target about 400 km from the launch point, at the Chija test field (Arkhangelsk region, in the Arctic). The Tsirkon can reach up to nine times the speed of sound (11 thousand km/h) in a maneuverable trajectory, facilitating the evasion of defenses.
He is one of the “invincible weapons” that Putin announced in 2018 to say he was ahead of the West in the field of hypersonic technology. Unlike two other hypersonic models already in limited use, the Kinjal and the Avangard, it does not employ nuclear warheads.
Its primary function, from the initial design and testing phase in 2012, is to serve as an anti-ship weapon. It goes up to 28 km altitude on solid propellant, and then drives a high-performance liquid fuel engine called a scramjet.
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