Putin hails successful test of Russian missile one expert calls ‘a tiny flying Chernobyl’

Moscow: Russia tested a new nuclear-capable and powered cruise missile fit to confound existing defences, and is inching closer to deploying it to its military, President Vladimir Putin said in remarks released on Sunday.

The announcement, which followed years of tests of the Burevestnik missile, comes as part of nuclear messaging from the Kremlin, which has resisted Western pressure for a ceasefire in Ukraine and strongly warned the US and other NATO allies against sanctioning strikes deep inside Russia with longer-range Western weapons.

The previous Burevestnik launch in 2018, which ended in failure. Credit: AP

A video released by the Kremlin showed Putin, dressed in camouflage fatigues, receiving a report from General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of general staff, who told the Russian leader that the Burevestnik covered 14,000 kilometres in a key test on Tuesday.

Gerasimov said the Burevestnik, or “storm petrel” in Russian, spent 15 hours in the air on nuclear power, adding “that’s not the limit”.

“This is a unique product that no one in the world has,” Putin responds in the video. “We need to identify potential uses and begin preparing the infrastructure for deploying this weapon in our armed forces.”

The Russian leader also claimed the missile was invulnerable to current and future missile defences, due to its almost unlimited range and unpredictable flight path.

Putin and chief of staff Valery Gerasimov (right) in a still from a video released by the Kremlin.Credit: AP

Little is known about the Burevestnik – codenamed Skyfall by NATO – and many Western experts have been sceptical about it, noting that a nuclear engine could be highly unreliable.

Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at Middlebury College in the US, described it to The New York Times as “a tiny flying Chernobyl” in reference to the former power plant in Ukraine that melted down in 1986, causing the world’s worst nuclear accident.

“This is a bad development,” Lewis said. “It is one more science-fiction weapon that is going to be destabilising and hard to address in arms control.”

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When Putin first revealed that Russia was working on the weapon in his 2018 state-of-the-nation address, he claimed it would have an unlimited range, allowing it to circle the globe undetected by missile defence systems.

Many observers argue that such a missile could be difficult to handle and pose an environmental threat. The US and the then Soviet Union worked on nuclear-powered missiles during the Cold War, but they eventually shelved the projects, considering them too hazardous.

The Burevestnik reportedly suffered an explosion in August 2019 during tests at a navy range on the White Sea in north-west Russia, which killed at least five nuclear engineers and two service members and resulted in a brief spike in radioactivity that fuelled fears in a nearby city.

Russian officials never identified the weapon involved, but the US said it was the Burevestnik.

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Kirill Dmitriev, a top Putin aide who was in the US when the latest video surfaced, said his delegation informed American colleagues of the “successful testing” of the Burevestnik, which he said was an “absolutely new class” of weapon.

In the past week, Putin directed drills of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces that featured practice missile launches. The exercise came as his planned summit on Ukraine with US President Donald Trump was put on hold.

The Kremlin said that the manoeuvres involved all parts of Moscow’s nuclear triad, including intercontinental ballistic missiles that were test-fired from launch facilities in north-western Russia and a submarine in the Barents Sea.

The drills also involved Tu-95 strategic bombers firing long-range cruise missiles and tested the skills of military command structures, the Kremlin said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Burevestnik has been tested at three sites in western Russia – Kapustin Yar, Nenoksa and Pankovo – according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The US intelligence community first identified the project at the Kapustin Yar missile range, and its development had likely been under way for well over a decade, the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank said.

Despite the lethal accident and numerous test failures, Moscow seems to be continuing with the program. Whether the project is driven by a desire to overcome what have so far been considerable technical difficulties and move ahead with development, or rather to provide a substantial bargaining chip in any future arms-control discussions, remains to be seen.

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