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.