Russia secretly deploys missile, in violation of treaty
RUSSIA has secretly deployed a new cruise missile that US officials say violates a landmark arms control treaty, posing a major test for President Donald Trump as his administration is facing a crisis over its ties to Moscow.
The new Russian missile deployment also comes as the Trump administration is struggling to fill key policy positions at the State Department and the Pentagon – and to settle on a permanent replacement for Michael Flynn, the national security adviser who resigned on Monday. Flynn stepped down after it was revealed that he had misled the vice president and other officials over conversations with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington.
The ground-launched cruise missile at the centre of US concerns is one that the Obama administration said in 2014 had been tested in violation of a 1987 treaty that bans US and Russian intermediate-range missiles based on land.
The Obama administration had sought to persuade the Russians to correct the violation while the missile was still in the test phase. Instead the Russians have moved ahead with the system, deploying a fully operational unit.
Administration officials said the Russians now had two battalions of the prohibited cruise missile. One is still located at Russia’s missile test site at Kapustin Yar in southern Russia near Vol- gograd. The other was shifted in December from that test site to an operational base elsewhere in the country, according to a senior official who did not provide further details and requested anonymity to discuss recent intelligence reports about the missile.
US officials had called the cruise missile the SSC-X-8. But the “X” has been removed from intelligence reports, indicating that US intelligence officials consider the missile to be operational and no longer a system in development.
The deployment of the system could also substantially increase the military threat to NATO nations, depending on where the highly mobile system is based and how many more batteries are deployed in the future. Jim Mattis, the US defence secretary, is scheduled to meet Wednesday with allied defense ministers in Brussels.
Before he left his post last year as the NATO commander, General Philip Breedlove warned that deployment of the cruise missile would be a militarily significant development that “can’t go unanswered”.
While senior Trump administration officials have not said where the new unit is based, there has been speculation in press reports that a missile system with similar characteristics is deployed in central Russia.
The Trump administration is in the beginning stages of reviewing nuclear policy and has not said how it plans to respond.