Russia’s President Vladimir Putin oversaw exercises of his nuclear forces from the Kremlin on Wednesday as planned in-person talks with U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to collapse, leading to claims of conspicuous timing.
Russian forces launched missiles from land, air, and sea on Wednesday as part of a drills to exercise its strategic nuclear forces. Speaking from the Kremlin from where he oversaw the exercise, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin told a bank of television screens on which he had live feeds to his Minister of Defence and head of the armed forces at other locations: “Today, we have a scheduled strategic nuclear forces management drill, as the defense minister just reported. Let’s get to work”.
In a statement, the Kremlin said of the exercise: “Under the leadership of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, a strategic nuclear force exercise was conducted involving the land, sea, and air components. During the exercise, practical launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles and air-launched cruise missiles were conducted”.
Hans Møller Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists observed given these tests came at the same time as the United States launched Exercise Global Thunder 26, an exercise of nuclear command and control systems with “increased bomber and other aircraft flights”, and as NATO ran the nuclear Exercise Steadfast Noon. Kristensen characterised this overlap as a “nuclear rush hour”.
As is customary for the Russian Ministry of Defence with such exercises, it published a quantity of videos showing the launches. The land component of the exercise involved the firing of what appeared to be either a Topol or Yars Intercontinental Ballistic Missile — essentially identical nuclear missiles differing in the potential warheads carried — from a mobile truck-based launcher inside a Krona shelter at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in north-west Russia.
The Russian Ministry of Defence identified its at-sea launch as having been from a submarine in the Barents Sea. Sailors aboard the vessel captured in the footage promulgated by Russian state media shows the crew wearing overalls bearing the badge of Delta IV class submarine K-117 Bryansk, commissioned in 1988.
The air component was at least one TU-95 bomber which was reported to have launched cruise missiles.
As reported by Breitbart News, Wednesday also saw a perceptible freeze in only recently thawing relations between Moscow and Washington as President Donald Trump punished Russia for dragging its heels on peace, and planned talks with President Putin seemed to have collapsed. While several media outlets clearly implied in their coverage that Wednesday’s nuclear drills appeared timed to send a message in the wake of these developments, it remains the case that Russia does exercise its strategic forces at this time every year.
Before yesterday’s drills on October 22nd, 2024’s edition of the same operation was on October 29th. 2023’s were on the 25th, while 2022’s were on October 26th.
The rhetoric surrounding this year’s exercises are fractionally different to 2024, however. Whereas last year the Russian military said the purpose of the exercises was simulating “a massive nuclear strike by strategic offensive forces in response to a nuclear strike by the enemy”, this week it was instead described as practicing “the procedures for authorizing the use of nuclear weapons”, perhaps implying a shift from retaliatory to first-strike wargaming.
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