One of Russia ’s Satan-2 hypersonic missiles could demolish “half the coast of a continent”, one of Vladimir Putin's allies boasted.
Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos Russia’s space agency, was showing off some of the deadliest missiles in his country’s arsenal to schoolchildren and students yesterday at an education summit.
Wearing his space agency uniform, he showed them a video of a number of Russia’s strategic rockets at a “federal education marathon” called New Horizons.
This culminated in him showing them the Sarmat, also known as Satan-2, an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking targets at 15,880mph.
"Here you see the test launches of our missiles,” he boasted.
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He added: “The smallest are shown on Red Square parades … The largest will not fit on Red Square, as they are too big.
“Now you can see [on video] Topol, Yars, submarine missile Bulava... and finally Sarmat…
“Such a missile [Sarmat] can demolish half of the coast of some large continent, which we may not like due to its aggressive policy.”
Rogozin said the "unstoppable" Satan-2 would “take up combat duty” in the coming autumn.
“We are also producing Iskanders and hypersonic Kinzhals in our factories,” Rogozin added.
The Satan-2 missiles are nuclear capable, and this is just the latest in a long line of perceived veiled threats from Russian officials and state media propagandists.
Some experts have said that the threat of atomic attacks are an attempt to mask an otherwise poor military campaign in its invasion of Ukraine.
On Wednesday, it was claimed that a new mobile laser radiation system called Peresvet could “blind” all of the satellite reconnaissance systems of an “enemy” up to an orbit of nearly 1,000 miles.
The deputy premier also boasted of a separate laser system which could knock down enemy drones.
However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky laughed at these claims and compared it to Nazi propaganda.
In a late night address, he said: "The clearer it became that they had no chance in the war, the more propaganda there was about an amazing weapon that would be so powerful as to ensure a turning point.
"And so we see that in the third month of a full-scale war, Russia is trying to find its 'wonder weapon' ... this all clearly shows the complete failure of the mission."
This comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues towards the end of its third month, since Putin’s forces began their “special operation” on February 24.
In the time since, tens of thousands have died with reports suggesting that Russia has suffered the heavier losses.
According to the UN, over six million people have fled the country, with countless being displaced internally.
