THE NEW RUSSIAN ARSENAL THAT CAN DETER WARS

The Oreshnik and Burevestnik cruise missiles and Poseidon super-torpedoes give Russia an edge for the foreseeable future. Its openness to sharing Oreshnik systems with allies should interest India

- M K BHADRAKUMAR

F Russia succeeds in wrapping up its ‘special military operations’ in Ukraine while US President Donald Trump remains in office, this war can end all wars in Europe and Eurasia for along time to come.

The recent weeks are witnessing a phenomenal shift in the ‘correlation of forces’ in international politics attributable to the dynamic relationship between Russia’s productive forces.

Russia, which left socialism behind and crafted a toolbox attuned to geopolitics, is regaining a favourable balance of power visa-vis the West. In the current transitional era of revolutionary change and transformation in the global order, Russia’s surge becomes immensely consequential to India, which is also on a capitalist path of development littered with formidable challenges to its rise.

On Russia’s National Unity Day on November 4, President Vladimir Putin held a ceremony at the Kremlin to present state decorations to the designers of the Burevestnik cruise missile and the Poseidon unmanned submersible, the country’s newest futuristic weapon systems. The terrible beauty of these two weapons is that both are nuclear-powered and the West has neither any matching capability nor defence against them for the foreseeable future.

The 9M730 Burevestnik is a low-flying, nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile that Putin called “a unique weapon that no other country possesses”, and would have a nearly unlimited range because of its onboard nuclear power. The missile’s test lasted around 15 hours, travelling more than 14,000 km. The Norwegian government confirmed the test flight launched out of Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago off the northern coast of Russia.