Putin puts doomsday Satan-2 nuclear weapon ‘that can sink Britain’ on combat duty for the first time

Vladimir Putin today commissioned the world’s most powerful Armageddon nuclear rocket, dubbed Satan-2, into combat service.

The “unstoppable” 15,880mph intercontinental missile system, known to the Russians as Sarmat, is the size of a 14-story tower.

The announcement came from Yury Borisov, director of the Russian Space Agency.

“The Sarmat strategic complex has been placed on combat duty,” he told students at an educational event.

He did not give further details.

In June, the Russian leader threatened the West with his new 208-tonne Satan-II nuclear doomsday rocket while speaking to military graduates at the Grand Kremlin Palace.

The 208-tonne missile was due to enter service late last year, but was mysteriously delayed.

Russian propagandists have boasted that an attack could plunge Britain under the sea.

The move comes as Russia resents setbacks in the war in Ukraine, as kyiv gains ground and subjects Putin’s territory to increasing drone strikes.

However, its deployment – if the measure is real – comes after only a tested test launch.

Others were forecast but not announced.

It also comes shortly after the Russian Space Agency faced international humiliation over its failed lunar mission last month.

Nine months ago Putin threatened: “In the near future, Sarmat ICBMs will enter combat service for the first time.”

“We know that there will be a certain delay, but this does not change our plans: everything will be done.”

In June he boasted: “In the near future, the first Sarmat launch pads will [Satan-2] with a new heavy missile it will be put into combat duty…’

The Armageddon weapon can be loaded with multiple nuclear warheads.

Putin TV propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, also a deputy director of the company that runs the state-run Rossiya 1 channel, has threatened Britain in revenge for a comment then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson never made about attacking Russia with a nuclear strike.

Downing Street dismissed the claim – widely repeated in Russian state media – as “another example of disinformation spread by the Kremlin”, but it continues to be hawked in Moscow.

Russia has claimed its most powerful nuclear missile, the 26,000mph hypersonic ‘Satan-2’, can destroy the UK.

The giant missile, which can supposedly reach the UK in just three minutes and is known to the Russians as the Sarmat, has experienced embarrassing delays in its development.

Putin’s “chief propagandist” Dmitry Kiselyov previously threatened to drown Britain twice in a radioactive tidal wave using the Satan-2 missile.

“The island is so small that a Sarmat missile would be enough to drown it once and for all,” Kiselyov said.

‘Russian Sarmat missile [Satan-2]the most powerful world… is capable of… destroying an area the size of Texas or England.

‘One toss, Boris, and there will be no more England.

‘Once and for all.’

The first and only known large-scale test of Satan-2 was announced with great fanfare as soon as it took place on April 20, 2022, with Putin in contact via video conference.

The launch of Satan-2 from the silo was carried out from the Plesetsk cosmodrome.

The following month, former Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin, considered a close Putin ally, said nearly 50 Satan-2 missiles, which were in mass production, would soon be in combat service.

In early June, a major ICBM test was scheduled and locals near the Kura test range were warned to stay away from the target site in remote Kamchatka.

But this test never happened.

Russian propagandists boasted that one attack could sink Britain.

On June 25 last year, Rogozin boasted: “We are absolutely on schedule, now we are preparing for the second flight test of the Sarmat.”

The following month, Rogozin was fired for unknown reasons, and his promised new job had yet to arrive.

His successor, former Deputy Prime Minister Borisov, repeated in July 2022 the claim that the missile is in mass production without reiterating Putin’s goal of having the Satan-2 on combat duty by December last year.

Defense analysts who suspected hypersonic hyperbole pointed out that Russia’s R-36M2 Voevoda missile was tested no less than 17 times before being put into combat duty.

Some experts will doubt the reality of today’s announcement.

Another missile, the RT-2PM Topol, was tested a dozen times before deployment.

‘In this context, the truth of the terms used by Rogozin (that Sarmat is in [serial] “In production and soon to be put into ‘combat duty’, they look doubtful,” said defense expert Leonid Nersisyan.

“Sarmat is far more likely to undergo the same program of testing, prototyping and experimentation as its predecessors,” he wrote in Shephard Media.

Russia takes its hypersonic Satan-2 [Sarmat] missile in a forest ahead of “new tests” amid acute tension with the West

“Actual acceptance of the ICBM into service with the Strategic Missile Forces…will hardly be possible by 2024.”

More than a year ago, Rogozin visited the Krasmash defense factory in Krasnoyarsk in eastern Siberia, which he dubbed the ‘Doomsday Plant’, to inspect the Satan-2 production process for flight tests.

The missile was launched into a forest for the cameras, and Rogozin, saber-rattling, said: “The world’s most powerful global-range nuclear-warhead missile is being prepared for further testing.”

However, there is no evidence that these tests ever occurred.