Sidelined Russia flexes muscle with missile launch — and Trump is not impressed

Russia’s testing of an “invincible” nuclear-powered cruise missile with a potentially “unlimited range” has been met with a less-than impressed response from U.S. President Donald Trump as a new cold front opens up between the countries.

Russia announced Sunday that it had successfully tested a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, the 9M730 Burevestnik (or ‘Storm Petrel’), on Tuesday last week.

It boasted that the missile, which can carry conventional or nuclear warheads, and code-named ‘Skyfall’ by NATO, can change direction mid-flight and move vertically and horizontally, meaning it can evade missile and air defense systems.

President Trump, who’s undertaking a whirlwind tour of Asia and is also set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, was not impressed with the missile launch, telling reporters Monday that Putin should focus on ending the war in Ukraine instead.

“I don’t think its an appropriate thing for Putin to be saying, either, by the way: You ought to get the war ended, the war that should have taken one week is now in … its fourth year, that’s what you ought to do instead of testing missiles,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Monday.

He also denigrated the use case for the Russian missile, stating that the U.S. did not need a weapon that could fly so far as it had a nuclear submarine off the coast of Russia.

“They know we have a nuclear submarine, the greatest in the world, right off their shores, so I mean, it doesn’t have to go 8,000 miles,” Trump said, according to an audio file published by the White House.

“They’re not playing games with us and we’re not playing games with them either,” Trump added. “We test missiles all the time.”

The Kremlin responded to that on Monday by saying that “Russia is consistently working to ensure its own security. It is in line with this objective that the development of new weapons systems, including the aforementioned [Burevestnik] system, is taking place,” Putin’s Press Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, in comments reported by Russian state media agency TASS.

“Russia must do everything possible to guarantee its own security,” Peskov added.

The timing of the test does not appear to be accidental, taking place on the same day that Russia was left humiliated and sidelined after Trump cancelled upcoming talks that were due to be held with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hungary.

Eager to flex its military muscle, and likely a warning to Trump who has been considering whether to give Ukraine long-range Tomahawk missiles capable of striking targets deep within Russia, Moscow declared on Sunday that it had successfully tested its Burevestnik missile.

During the test, the missile travelled 14,000 kilometers (or 8,700 miles). It was in the air for about 15 hours and this was “not the limit,” Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of Russia’s armed forces, told Putin on Sunday, in comments reported by TASS.

Putin applauded the test as he visited a command post for troops fighting in Ukraine, where he was briefed on the frontline situation, the Kremlin said in a statement on Sunday.

Putin told military officials that such missiles were “unique products, unmatched anywhere else in the world,” in comments translated by AP.

Russia says such missiles are part of its nuclear deterrence, with Putin stating Sunday that the country’s “nuclear deterrent is at the highest level. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that it’s at least higher than that of all nuclear states.” He added, however, that Russia would now work to put such weapons “on combat alert.”

On the same day that Russia basked in an apparent show of strength, the Kremlin warned that any strikes inside Russia would be met with an “overwhelming” response.

Relations between Washington and Moscow took a turn for the worse last week after the White House announced that s planned meeting between Putin and Trump would be postponed indefinitely as the White House leader said he didn’t want to “have a wasted meeting.”

Trump added that the in-person summit was canceled because “every time I speak to Vladimir, I have good conversations and then they don’t go anywhere.”

The announcement was met with a stony silence from the Kremlin as senior Russian officials blamed Western media and “fake news” for the abandoned talks, which had been previously been lauded by Russian state media as a coup for Moscow as it vies with Ukraine for Trump’s ear, and support.