{"id":43559,"date":"2025-12-02T21:22:04","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T13:22:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/the-missile-meant-to-strike-fear-in-russias-enemies-fails-once-again\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T21:22:04","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T13:22:04","slug":"the-missile-meant-to-strike-fear-in-russias-enemies-fails-once-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/the-missile-meant-to-strike-fear-in-russias-enemies-fails-once-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The missile meant to strike fear in Russia\u2019s enemies fails once again"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country\u2019s southern steppe Friday on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn\u2019t even make it 4,000 feet.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile\u2019s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border.<\/p>\n

A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site. The missile ejected a component before it hit the ground, perhaps as part of a payload salvage sequence, according to Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.<\/p>\n

The crash was accompanied by a fireball and a noxious reddish-brown cloud, the telltale sign of a toxic mix of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used to fuel Russia\u2019s most powerful ICBMs. Satellite images taken since Friday show a crater and burn scar near the missile silo.<\/p>\n

Analysts say the circumstances of the launch suggest it was likely a test of Russia\u2019s RS-28 Sarmat missile, a weapon designed to reach targets more than 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) away, making it the world\u2019s longest-range missile.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Sarmat missile in better times at the start of the program\u2019s only successful full-scale test flight in 2022.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Russian Ministry of Defense<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

An unusable weapon<\/h2>\n

The Sarmat missile is Russia\u2019s next-generation heavy-duty ICBM, capable of carrying a payload of up to 10 large nuclear warheads, a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Simply put, the Sarmat is a doomsday weapon designed for use in an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

Therefore, it\u2019s no wonder Russian officials like to talk up Sarmat\u2019s capabilities. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called Sarmat a \u201ctruly unique weapon\u201d that will \u201cprovide food for thought for those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country.\u201d Dmitry Rogozin, then the head of Russia\u2019s space agency, called the Sarmat missile a \u201csuperweapon\u201d after its first test flight in 2022.<\/p>\n

So far, what\u2019s unique about the Sarmat missile is its propensity for failure. The missile\u2019s first full-scale test flight in 2022 apparently went well, but the program has suffered a string of consecutive failures since then, most notably a catastrophic explosion last year that destroyed the Sarmat missile\u2019s underground silo in northern Russia.<\/p>\n

The Sarmat is supposed to replace Russia\u2019s aging R-36M2 strategic ICBM fleet, which was built in Ukraine. The RS-28, sometimes called the Satan II, is a \u201cproduct solely of Russian industry cooperation,\u201d according to Russia\u2019s Ministry of Defense.<\/p>\n

The video of the missile failure last week lacks the resolution to confirm whether it was a Sarmat missile or the older-model R-36M2, but analysts agree it was most likely a Sarmat. The missile silo used for Friday\u2019s test was recently renovated, perhaps to convert it to support Sarmat tests after the destruction of the new missile\u2019s northern launch site last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWork there began in Spring 2025, after the ice thawed,\u201d wrote Etienne Marcuz, an analyst on strategic armaments at the Foundation for Strategic Research, a French think tank. The \u201curgent renovation\u201d of the missile silo at Dombarovsky lends support for the hypothesis that last week\u2019s accident involved the Sarmat, and not the R-36M2, which was last tested more than 10 years ago, Marcuz wrote on X.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this is indeed another Sarmat failure, it would be highly detrimental to the medium-term future of Russian deterrence,\u201d Marcuz continued. \u201cThe aging R-36M2 missiles, which carry a significant portion of Russia\u2019s strategic warheads, are seeing their replacement pushed even further into the future, while their maintenance\u2014previously handled by Ukraine until 2014\u2014remains highly uncertain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state media agency Sputnik, Russia\u2019s President Vladimir Putin chairs a Security Council meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow on November 5, 2025.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Gavriil Grigorov\/Pool\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

Podvig, the UN researcher who also runs the Russian Nuclear Forces blog site, agrees with Marcuz\u2019s conclusions. With the R-36M2 missile soon to retire, \u201cit is extremely unlikely that the Rocket Forces would want to test launch them,\u201d Podvig wrote on his website. \u201cThis leaves Sarmat.\u201d<\/p>\n

The failure adds fresh uncertainty to the readiness of Russia\u2019s nuclear arsenal. If this were actually a test of one of Russia\u2019s older ICBMs, the result would raise questions about hardware decay and obsolescence. In the more likely case of a Sarmat test flight, it would be the latest in a series of problems that have delayed its entry into service since 2018.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

While Sarmat has floundered, Russia\u2019s military resources have been devoted to fighting the war against Ukraine, a conflict burning through Russian airplanes, artillery, drones, and troops. In his rhetoric, Putin has invoked his strategic arsenal to warn against increasing US or European involvement in the war. In reality, Russia\u2019s modernization of its nuclear forces has stalled while the Kremlin replenishes assets core to the war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Russia has an inventory of lighter ICBMs capable of carrying single warheads or a handful of MIRVs\u2014Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles\u2014each with its own nuclear weapons. When it works, the Sarmat can heave many more warheads to far-flung targets in a single launch.<\/p>\n

Russia has scheduled a test of its Yars missile, one of the military\u2019s smaller ICBMs, for next week, according to airspace warning notices issued Monday advising pilots to steer clear of the rocket\u2019s flight path. Like the United States, Russia routinely tests its missile arsenal to ensure its nuclear forces are ready for war.<\/p>\n

A few days before last week\u2019s ICBM test, the US Air Force sent at least one RC-135S Cobra Ball surveillance plane to Alaska, a three-hour flight from Russia\u2019s missile impact range in Siberia. The aircraft is outfitted with optical and electronic sensors to monitor ballistic missile tests, collecting data \u201ccritical to arms treaty compliance verification and development of US strategic defense and theater missile defense concepts,\u201d the Air Force says in a fact sheet.<\/p>\n

In a speech last month, Putin declared the Sarmat missile would undergo \u201ccombat trials\u201d before the end of this year, before its deployment on \u201ccombat duty\u201d next year. If Friday\u2019s launch was a Sarmat trial run, it is clear Russian leaders can\u2019t rely on it for combat duty.<\/p>\n

Even before last week\u2019s accident, some analysts raised the possibility of Russia canceling the Sarmat program and relying on its smaller ICBMs. Unlike Sarmat, many of Russia\u2019s other land- and sea-based ballistic missiles have the advantage of using mobile launchers.<\/p>\n

One Russian researcher based in Moscow, Dmitry Stefanovich, suggested the same in a social media post Saturday: \u201cSarmat deserves to be canceled.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country\u2019s southern steppe Friday on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn\u2019t even make it 4,000 feet. Russia\u2019s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile\u2019s crash […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}