The Russian government has announced that it has tested a Sarmat ICBM capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads. The missile was launched from Plesetsk in north-western Russia and landed on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east: Putin spoke about it on TV and said that it is a weapon that is unparalleled in the world and will make countries that threaten Russia think twice. The United States said it had been warned about the test, adding that it did not see the missile as a direct threat to it.
All of this is happening as Russia ramps up its attacks in eastern Ukraine to achieve the goal of the “second phase” of the war, which is to capture the entire Donbass (today, Russian forces control only part of it). In those hours, over a thousand targets were attacked along a front nearly three hundred miles.
Russia’s first military objective is to capture Mariupol, the port city that has been under siege for nearly two months. Resistance is now limited only to the area of the Azovstal steel plant, where barricaded Ukrainian soldiers rejected a Russian ultimatum on Wednesday. Now the Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak called to be unconditionally “ready for negotiations in Mariupol” to save the people there: “Azov, the military, the civilians, the children, the survivors and the wounded”.