IN 30 SECONDS
- What happened? Russia has successfully carried out a test of the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
- Who is behind? The Kremlin, with Vladimir Putin calling the system the most powerful in the world and announcing its operational deployment before the end of the year.
- What impact does it have? The Sarmat, with a range of 35,000 km and the capacity to carry Avangard hypersonic warheads, alters the strategic nuclear balance and pressures NATO to review its deterrence posture.
The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed on Monday the successful launch of the RS-28 Sarmat from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the north of the country. The missile’s trajectory, according to the official note cited by the state agency RT, covered thousands of kilometers before impacting at the Kura test site on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The commander of the Strategic Missile Troops, Sergei Karakayev, personally informed Vladimir Putin that the test will allow equipping the first regiment with this system before the end of 2026.
Putin, in a televised appearance, did not spare adjectives. He described the Sarmat as “the most powerful missile system in the world” and emphasized that its reach of 35,000 kilometers makes it an almost unlimited-range weapon, capable of bypassing any current anti-missile shield. “This missile strengthens Russia’s deterrence capacity for decades,” he stated. The released images showed a launch from a silo, a technical detail relevant in contrast to the mobile systems Moscow prioritizes in other programs.
A 200-Ton Monster with Hypersonic Warheads
The RS-28 Sarmat is a behemoth of late Soviet military engineering, rescued and modernized. With a launch weight around 200 tons, it can carry up to ten independently targetable nuclear warheads (MIRV) or, as the Kremlin has emphasized, the Avangard hypersonic reentry vehicle. The latter is the real strategic key: Avangard flies at Mach 20 within the atmosphere, performing erratic maneuvers that make it unpredictable to radars and kinetic interceptors. The Sarmat-Avangard combination theoretically yields an almost inescapable second strike capability.
The test arrives at a moment when nuclear arsenals are once again currency in geopolitics. The New START Treaty, which limited deployed warheads, expired in February 2026 without a substitute, and both Washington and Moscow have withdrawn from verification clauses. The Sarmat test is the first for this system since 2023, when a failed launch left a crater at Plesetsk that was detected by OSINT satellite imagery. That fiasco raised doubts about the program’s reliability, and this successful test serves to quiet them, at least in official reporting.
The immediate timetable is worrying. If the first regiment truly becomes operational before year-end, the Sarmat will move from a demonstration weapon to a staple of the permanent deterrence board. The silos at Dombarovskiy and Uzhur, in the Urals and Siberia, have been being adapted for years to receive these missiles. The mass production capacity, hampered by Western sanctions on electronic and precision components, remains the big unknown.
The Sarmat is not just a missile: it is proof that the Kremlin has prioritized nuclear modernization as its main pillar of security against NATO.
Balance of Power
The Sarmat test occurs in a context of maximum tension. The Trump administration has made clear that the US nuclear umbrella in Europe is not a blank check, tying it to allied defense spending rising to 5% of GDP. Brussels, for its part, is trying to build its own deterrence with the FCAS program and the European Intervention Initiative, but the reality is that without B61 warheads stored at bases in five NATO countries, the Old Continent lacks a credible response to a missile like the Sarmat. Putin’s signal is unequivocal: Russia can reach any corner of Europe in less than thirty minutes, and the anti-missile shield at Rota or Deveselu is not designed to intercept a salvo of hypersonic vehicles.
For Spain, the direct impact is limited, but not zero. The naval base of Rota houses four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers with the AEGIS system, the centerpiece of the so-called European Missile Defense Shield. A missile like the Sarmat, with its capability to attack in polar trajectories or via the South Pole, renders obsolete the concept of regional defense based on SM-3 interceptors. That forces a rethink of the defense architecture, and by extension, Spain’s position as a platform for projecting American power toward the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Moreover, this technical nuclear escalation reinforces the argument of those in Moncloa and Congress who demand accelerating the modernization of the Air Force, including replacing the F-18s with the Eurofighter Tranche 4 and integrating into the FCAS program.
The immediate risk is not an attack, but a miscalculation. The combination of hypersonic tests, heightened rhetoric, and nearly non-existent channels of communication between military commands—the red phone between the Pentagon and the Kremlin has hardly worked since 2025—creates a dangerous cocktail. An unnotified launch, a false alarm on NATO’s OTH radars, or a misinterpretation of a trajectory could trigger an unwanted response. The last time a Russian missile test sparked alarms was November 2025, when a launch from the Borei submarine in the White Sea activated Alliance protocols for seventeen minutes.
Beyond the propaganda clutter, the Sarmat serves a clear function in Russia’s nuclear doctrine of escalation for de-escalation. By displaying a first-strike weapon that could decapitate command centers in Washington or key bases in the Pacific, Putin seeks to restore a strategic parity that, in purely budgetary terms, has never been lost: Russia spends on defense barely 6.6% of GDP, compared with the United States’ 10.5%, but concentrates that spending on nuclear deterrence. The true measure of this test’s success will not be measured in meters of dispersal, but in the next moves of NATO leaders, who meet in Vilnius next month. The Alliance summit will be the first real test of a nuclear umbrella that has suddenly become more porous.
