Putin’s Satan 2 nuclear missile ‘ready by autumn’

A RUSSIAN nuclear missile dubbed ‘Satan 2’ that is capable of striking Britain will be ready to deploy by the autumn, according to the head of Moscow’s space programme.

The Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile travels at five times the speed of sound, can carry up to 15 nuclear warheads and has a 12,000-mile range.

Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Roscosmos space agency, said a military unit will be armed with the weapon no later than this autumn.

Sarmat is a replacement for the Soviet-era Voyevoda Satan and can strike targets in Europe and the US.

A post on Rogozin’s official Telegram channel claims the missile has been given its nickname by Western officials because ‘only Satan 2.0 can be worse than Satan’.

The ambitious deployment target comes after Russia reported the missile’s first test-launch last Wednesday, an event watched live by Vladimir Putin.

Western military experts say more testing will be needed before the missile can be deployed.

Some analysts believe it would be extremely difficult to intercept such a missile if it were launched.

This week’s test, after years of delays due to funding and technical issues, marks a show of strength by Russia at a time when the war in Ukraine has sent tensions with the US and its allies soaring to their highest levels since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Kremlin has said the weapon is a ‘present to Nato’. Rogozin told Russian state TV that the missiles would be deployed with a unit in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, about 1,900 miles east of Moscow.

He said they would be placed at the same sites and in the same silos as the Voyevoda missiles, something that would save ‘colossal resources and time’.

The launch of the ‘super-weapon’ was a historic event that would guarantee the security of Russia’s children and grandchildren for the next 30 to 40 years, he added.

Western concern at the risk of nuclear war has increased since Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

It has been warned that any attempt to get in Russia’s way ‘will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history’.

‘The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility,’ United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last month.

‘A present to Nato’