Russia tested new strategic and tactical missiles on Tuesday, flexing its muscles amid military disputes with the West and bitter opposition to a US plan for a defensive shield in Europe.
Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said the country had tested an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple independent warheads and a tactical cruise missile with an increased range, boasting that the weapons could penetrate any missile defense system.
"As of today, Russia has new tactical and strategic complexes that are capable of overcoming any existing or future missile defense systems," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Ivanov as saying. "So in terms of defense and security, Russians can look calmly to the country's future."
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ivanov, a former defense minister seen as a potential Kremlin favorite to succeed Putin next year, have repeatedly said that Russia would continue to improve its nuclear arsenal and respond to US plans to deploy components of a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia has bristled over the plans, vocally dismissing US assertions that the system would be aimed at blocking possible attacks by Iran and saying it would destroy the strategic balance of forces in Europe.
"We consider it harmful and dangerous to turn Europe into a powder keg and to fill it with new kinds of weapons," Putin said on Tuesday at a news conference with Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates.
US Senator Trent Lott said yesterday he would try to convince Russian lawmakers that the missile defense system posed no threat to their country and that concerns about the project were ``a relic of Cold War thinking.''
Lott and Senator Ben Nelson arrived at Russia's Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, for the start of two days of talks with officials about strategic and economic issues.
The intercontinental ballistic missile, called the RS-24, was fired from a mobile launcher at the Plesetsk launch site in northwestern Russia. Its test warhead landed on target some 5,500km away on the Far Eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, a statement from the Strategic Missile Forces said.
Ivanov said the missile was a new version of the Topol-M, first commissioned in 1997 and known as the SS-27 in the West, but one that can carry multiple independent warheads, ITAR-Tass reported.
While Ivanov's saber-rattling about missile defense penetration was clearly aimed at the US -- and at Russians who will vote next March for a successor to Putin -- Ivanov suggested Russia's armament efforts were also aimed at countering a potential treat from the Middle East and Asia.
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