MOSCOW: Russia’s new strategic weapon has rendered any missile defences useless at a small fraction of their cost, officials said on Thursday.

The Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle flies 27 times faster than the speed of sound, making it impossible to intercept, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov told Russian state television.

The new weapon “essentially makes missile defen­ces useless,” he said.

Borisov spoke a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw what he described as the conclusive successful test of the Avang­ard and hailed it as a reliable guarantee of Russia’s security for decades to come.

In Wednesday’s test, the weapon was launched from the Dombarovskiy missile base in the southern Ural Mountains. The Kremlin said it successfully hit a practice target on the Kura shooting range on Kamchatka, 6,000 kilometres (3,700 miles) away.

The Defence Ministry released footage from the test launch, in which a ballistic missile could be seen blasting from a silo in a cloud of smoke, but it hasn’t released any images of the vehicle itself.

Putin said the Avangard will enter service with the Russian Strategic Missile Forces next year.

The test comes amid bitter tensions in Russia-US relations, which have been strained over the Ukrainian crisis, the war in Syria and the allegations of Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

Sergei Ivanov, a former Russian defence minister, said in televised comments that the Avangard constantly changes its course and altitude as it flies through the atmosphere.

He emphasised that unlike previous nuclear warheads fitted to intercontinental ballistic missiles that follow a predictable trajectory allowing it to calculate the spot where they can be intercepted, the Avangard chaotically zigzags on its path to its target, making it impossible to predict the weapon’s location.

A smiling Ivanov likened the weapon’s flight through the atmosphere to a pebble skipping off the surface of water.

Ivanov, who now serves as Putin’s adviser, said the Avangard could be fitted to the Soviet-made UR-100UT­TKh intercontinental ballistic missile, which is code-named SS-19 Stiletto by Nato.

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2018