A Russian lawmaker on Russian state-run television threatened this week that Russia could destroy the entire east coast of the United States with just two missiles if Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered such a strike.
The New York Post reported that in a Monday interview on the state-run Russia-1 television station, parliament member Alexei Zhuravlev said “I will tell you absolutely competently that to destroy the entire the East Coast of the United States, two Sarmat missiles are needed.”
“The same goes for the West Coast,” Zhuravlev added. “Four missiles, and there will be nothing left.”
The Russian RS-28 Sarmat missile, which is also known as the Satan II, is an intercontinental ballistic missile believed to be able to carry multiple warheads, including up to 10 large nuclear warheads, or 16 smaller ones, or a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic boost-glide vehicles. In 2016, the Russian military news station TV Zvezda reported the Sarmat missile could carry enough warheads to destroy an area the size of Texas or France.
Last month, Russia 1 host Dmitry Kiselyov aired a segment depicting England being destroyed either by a Sarmat missile or being flooded by a radioactive title wave created by a nuclear weapon detonating along its coastline.
Russian missile forces are reportedly set to begin receiving the new Sarmat missiles — which is nicknamed “Satan II” — by fall of this year.
Russian officials have repeatedly threatened that the U.S. could face “unpredictable consequences” for continuing to support Ukrainian forces fighting against Russia’s ongoing invasion. Russia has said it would treat suspected U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine as legitimate military targets.
This week, the Biden administration announced the U.S. would provide an additional $700 million in weapons to Ukraine, including long-range mobile rocket artillery systems known High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).
“We know that the United States has been purposefully and meticulously adding fuel to the fire,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the Russian news agency Interfax, ABC News reported. “The United States pursues the course towards fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”
The Russian state-run TASS news agency reported Peskov also told reporters that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s claims that Ukrainian forces won’t use the long-range HIMARS weapons to attack Russian territory.
“In order to trust, there must be previous experience when such promises were fulfilled. Unfortunately, such experience is completely nonexistent,” Peskov said. “On the contrary, the entire history of events proves that, starting with Zelenskyy’s main campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine’s southeast once and for all, [the promise] was not fulfilled, and the Minsk Agreements were not implemented, they sunk into oblivion, and by Ukraine’s fault at that.”
The Minsk Agreements were a series of international agreements to end the fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, which has been ongoing since 2014.
