Russia carried out a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears to have failed around the time US President Joe Biden was in Ukraine on Monday, February 20, according to a new report by CNN citing two US officials familiar with the matter.
Russia notified the United States in advance of the launch through deconfliction lines, a US official said.
Another official said that the test did not pose a risk to the United States and that the US did not view the test as an escalation.
The test of the heavy SARMAT missile nicknamed the Satan II in the West and capable of delivering multiple nuclear warheads appears to have failed, security officials told CNN.
US officials believe Russian President Vladimir Putin would have highlighted the test in his State of the Nation address on Tuesday.
Instead, Putin made no mention of the launch in the speech that lasted an hour and 45 minutes.
He did, however, formally declare that Russia will be suspending his country’s participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, imperiling the last remaining pact that regulates the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.
The timing of the test suggests that the US and Russia were communicating through several different channels earlier this week for deconfliction purposes as US officials also notified the Russians on Sunday night, hours before Biden’s visit to Kyiv, that the president would be making the trip to the Ukrainian capital, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Monday.
Putin warned last year that the missile would ‘give thought to those who are trying to threaten Russia.’
The report adds that as at the time, Western military experts portrayed the 2022 test by Russia as ‘nuclear saber-rattling’ and it was perceived as an attempt to distract from Russia’s military failures at the time, such as the sinking of its Black Sea flagship the Moskva.
A picture taken by local residents in Plesetsk – a notorious missile testing area – showed a white trail low in the sky that suggested the missile had failed in flight. – though the Russian defence ministry did not announce any launch or respond to requests for comment.
‘There was a huge loud bang, and it went on rumbling for a whole minute,’ said one Plesetsk resident, named Maksim.
‘I rushed outside to have a look, and didn’t see anything, but there was a trail very low in the sky.
‘IÂ could even see it being wiped away by the wind. And the thing I am most concerned about is that there is no information from Plesetsk cosmodrome.’
He said that usually rocket launches ‘fly right over my house’.
