Russian state TV threatens to wipe out ‘boorish’ UK with ballistic missile
Russian state TV host Vladimir Solovyov threatened the annihilation of the United Kingdom on Wednesday with the Sarmat, Russia’s newest ballistic missile.
“One Sarmat means minus one Great Britain,” Moscow mouthpiece Vladimir Solovyov said on state TV. “Because they’ve gotten totally boorish.”
Solovyov — occasionally called “Putin’s voice” for his close ties to the strongman — is the same TV presenter at the center of a debunked assassination attempt, in which the Kremlin said neo-nazis armed with video games planned to kill the Kremlin lackey.
Solovyov made the statement from behind a laptop emblazoned with the letter “Z,” which has become shorthand for support of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
This isn’t the first time Putin’s propagandists cavalierly considered global thermonuclear war. Last week, after the first successful test of the Sarmat’s basic flight capabilities, a pair of state TV hosts chuckled over the prospect of wiping out “a good city” like New York.
“If 7.5 megatons will be delivered to the territory of our so-called [American] partners — the word ‘partner’ is very important — then objects like the city of New York, a good city but it would be gone,” one host said.
“Completely gone, with one rocket. Completely, I mean completely,” he went on, laughing. “So it’s better we don’t. Americans always feared our heavy rockets.”
In the Sarmat’s initial tests, the missile struck mock targets over 3,000 miles away, a fraction of the roughly 10,000 mile range it is expected to have as an intercontinental ballistic missile.
US officials have called the nuclear threats saber-rattling, and noted the Sarmat test was planned ahead of time — and that Russia had notified the US — as both nations are treaty-bound to do.
“Russia properly notified the United States under its New START obligations that it planned to test this ICBM,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said following the test last week. “Such testing is routine. It was not a surprise. We did not deem the test to be a threat to the United States or its allies.”
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