The president is trying to hide his limited progress in Ukraine by announcing a new naval doctrine and equipping his ships with the state-of-the-art ‘Tsirkon’ projectile, which flies “at a speed nine times that of sound”
Faced with the interruption of his army in Ukraine, which has spent more than a month without any progress in Donbas after the seizure of Lisichansk (Lugansk) on July 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to encourage his citizens by throwing hands on the state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles and the apparent power of his navy.
For this, Putin took advantage of the celebration of Naval Day, a traditional event in St. Petersburg every last Sunday of July, when he also signed in front of the cameras, at the city’s Museum of History, the decree that includes the new Russian naval doctrine , a very unusual gesture in the context of a parade.
Coincidentally, the Russian Navy is not currently experiencing its best moment. Its role in the conflict with Ukraine has been more than modest, with occasional very long-range missiles, even from the Caspian Sea, for fear of coming within range of Kiev’s coastal defense missiles. The majestic cruiser ‘Moskva’, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, can attest to this from the depths. The ship was hit by two Ukrainian “Neptun” missiles off the coast of Odessa on April 14.
In addition, the Black Sea Fleet could not even prevent the strategic Snake Island from falling back into Ukraine’s hands on June 30. Gone is the image of supremacy the Russian squadron managed to convey when in the summer of 2021 it intimidated and nearly put to flight several NATO ships approaching its territorial waters in the Black Sea.
But Putin promises to change this situation by equipping his ships with ‘Tsirkon’ hypersonic missiles and boosting his navy’s potential to expand its domains in all the world’s seas, especially those that are part of what he considers his zone. of interests.
The Russian Navy “performs strategic tasks successfully and honorably on the borders of our country and in every part of the world’s seas, has a high preparation for carrying out coastal, surface, air and underwater actions that are constantly being perfected constantly” , the Russian president assured a week ago in his speech on the occasion of the great naval parade in the former Russian imperial capital.
According to Putin, “it is enough to mention the latest ‘Tsirkon’ hypersonic missile systems, which have no analogues in the world and for which there are no obstacles (…) their delivery to the Russian armed forces will be in the coming months.” In his opinion, the Navy is “able to respond quickly to anyone who decides to attack our sovereignty and freedom” and specified that the first ship to be equipped with these invincible missiles will be the frigate “Admiral Gorshkov”, attached to the North Sea fleet and from which the tests with the new weapon were carried out.
Putin announced that in his new decree on the naval doctrine of the Russian Federation “we have openly defined the borders and areas of Russia’s interests, both economically and strategically vital. We refer in the first place to our Arctic waters, those of the Black, Azov, Okhotsk and Bering Seas, the straits in the Baltic Sea and the Kuril Islands (…) whose defense we will guarantee vigorously and with all available means’, including Nuclear weapons.
The Kremlin chief explained that the new conception of maritime security is due to the “threat” he believes the United States and NATO pose to Russia, a statement that already encompasses Russian military doctrine as a whole. The document signed by Putin recognizes his country’s “strategic weakness” in naval bases, and therefore provides for the creation of some new ones on its own territory, especially in the Arctic, but also “in the Asian region” -Pacific and in the Mediterranean”, without specifying in which countries. In Syria, it already has a base in Tartus, piers in Cuba and Venezuela, and negotiations are underway to open a base in Sudan.
Russia has four fleets: the North Sea Fleet in Severomorsk and around Murmansk, the Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok, the Baltic Fleet in Baltiisk, Kaliningrad and Kronstadt, and the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol and Novorossiisk. It also has a fleet in the Caspian Sea with bases in Astrakhan and Makhachkala.
The new naval doctrine includes the list of all ships of the Russian Navy, in total, according to official figures, 270, of which 68 are submarines: 48 nuclear-powered submarines (13 armed with ballistic missiles, 27 armed with other missiles and torpedoes, in addition to 8 for “special missions”, including the huge ‘Belgorod’). The Russian Navy also has 20 diesel-powered submarines. According to the Ministry of Defense, eight more ships will enter service this year.
In his State of the Nation speech to the two Houses of the Russian Parliament on March 1, 2018, Putin assured that the ‘Tsirkon’ can fly “at a speed nine times greater than the speed of sound, a has a range of more than a thousand kilometers and can hit both land and sea targets.The speed considered hypersonic must be five times that of sound, above 5,000 kilometers per hour.
In that speech four and a half years ago, the Kremlin chief declared that his country would bolster its war potential with new “unpublished” state-of-the-art weapons, “invincible” and unrivaled in the world. He called the intercontinental missiles ‘Sarmat’, impossible to intercept, he claimed, by not using a ballistic trajectory. Russian Navy submarines will incorporate them into their armaments. He also referred to other hypersonic missiles, the ‘Avangard’ and the ‘Kinzhal’, which are currently in use.
Both the ‘Tsirkon’, the ‘Avangard’ and the ‘Kinzhal’ can be armed with a nuclear or conventional warhead. He also named the terrifying unmanned mini-submarine “Poseidon,” which is actually a torpedo with a multi-megaton warhead capable of creating a radioactive tsunami of such intensity that it could completely engulf the coasts of countries, according to the Russian press. like the US or the UK and make them uninhabitable for decades. The ‘Poseidon’ will board the immense ‘Belgorod’ submarine, currently the longest in the world.
Source: La Verdad
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