Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, said on Wednesday that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered drone considered a superweapon, days after he announced the trial of a nuclear-capable missile.
Poseidon, the unmanned underwater drone, is one of Russia’s latest nuclear-capable missile projects, unveiled by Mr. Putin in 2018 in a clear message of deterrence for the West.
Mr. Putin said the Poseidon test took place on Tuesday.
“There is nothing like this in the world in terms of the speed and the depth of the movement of this unmanned vehicle — and it is unlikely there ever will be,” he said, adding that there were “no ways to intercept” it.
The president did not say from where the Poseidon was launched or how far it went, but he mentioned it had “traveled for a certain amount of time.”
The Poseidon is one of Russia’s six nuclear-weapons projects, called superweapons by experts, unveiled before the invasion of Ukraine as apparent leverage in disarmament talks with the United States.
The underwater drone, believed to be able to travel at 100 knots (about 115 miles per hour), is designed to evade defenses to cause a tsunami powerful enough to devastate a coastal city.
Some experts had for years doubted that the weapon existed after a first glimpse of it leaked on Russian state television in 2015 during a broadcast of a meeting between Mr. Putin and top Russian generals.
Mr. Putin said on Sunday that Russia had successfully tested the nuclear-capable Burevestnik missile and was preparing to deploy it. On Wednesday, he added that the missile had “unrivaled advantages” and its nuclear reactor would take “minutes or seconds” to start.
The announcement came a few days after a scheduled summit between President Trump and Mr. Putin collapsed, an apparent breakdown of talks for a cease-fire in the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Trump on Monday criticized the Russian president, saying the testing of a nuclear-powered missile was “inappropriate” and urged the Kremlin to instead focus on peace talks. He did not directly react to Mr. Trump’s comments on Wednesday
Mr. Putin also said another Russian superweapon, the intercontinental missile Sarmat, was soon going to placed on combat duty.
But whether Sarmat actually works is unclear. Satellite photos from a launch site in northwestern Russia indicated that the weapon failed to take off and exploded in its silo, leaving a massive crater.
Dmitri Trenin, a veteran Russian political analyst known for channeling Kremlin talking points, said in a piece for the Kommersant newspaper that the Kremlin had failed to explain its vision of the war to the Trump administration and that a “special diplomatic operation” to woo the U.S. president was essentially over.
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