Russia has confirmed the world’s first combat use of the Zirkon hypersonic planning missile, while the US is forced to bridge the technological gap. Experts of the US military magazine Military Watch Magazine (MWM) write about it. Pravda.Ru publishes a translation of the MWM material.
Following numerous reports from Russian and Western sources that the Zirkon hypersonic cruise missile was used by the Russian armed forces to support the operation in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin confirmed in his Address to the Russian Federal Assembly on 29 February that the missile had made its first combat launch.
“The Zirkon sea-based hypersonic strike system has already been used in combat operations. There was no mention of it in the 2018 report. But this system is also already in service,” he said.
The President specified that the missile can reach a speed of Mach 9 and has a range of more than 1,000 kilometres.
It is noteworthy that the statement came exactly six years after Putin announced the existence of this system along with five other strategic weapons systems in a previous address. These included the Sarmat silo-based intercontinental ballistic missile, the Avangard hypersonic intercontinental-range planning vehicle, the Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, the Poseidon unmanned nuclear submarine, and the 9M730 Burevestnik nuclear-capable cruise missile.
Thus, the use of the Zirkon has allowed Russian sources to better emphasise the significant progress made in bringing all of these assets to operational status.
The use of the Zircon missile in Ukraine is a revolution in hypersonic weapons – it is the first combat use of a hypersonic planning aircraft in history. Not only can such missiles engage targets much farther away and at much higher speeds, but they can also manoeuvre their final stages as they descend in denser layers of air, making them both more accurate and much more difficult to intercept.
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