Moscow moves up plan to finally scrap Soviet-era missiles

Thirty years after the end of the USSR, the Russian defense ministry has announced that it will begin scrapping strategic missiles from the Soviet era and replace them with updated versions, a mark of just how dependent the Russian Federation remains on what the Soviets achieved even in the defense sector. Sergey Karakayev, the commander of the Russian strategic rocket forces, says that the Voyevoda rockets – called “Satan” by NATO – created in 1980s will be scrapped next year and replaced by what Moscow calls Sarmat missiles. The Voyevoda rockets, with their ten independently-targeted reentry vehicles carrying a one-megaton warhead were perhaps “the most threatening element of the Soviet nuclear triad,” Finanz.ru says. According to Western sources, there were about 40 such weapons still in place as of the end of 2019.

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