Russian state television host Vladimir Solovyov threatened the annihilation of the UK on April 27th with the Sarmat, Russia’s latest ballistic missile. “One Sarmat means minus one Great Britain,” Moscow mouthpiece Vladimir Solovyov said on state TV. “Because they’ve gotten totally boorish.”
Solovyov– sometimes called “Putin’s voice “for his close ties to the strongman– is the very same TV presenter at the center of a debunked assassination effort, in which the Kremlin stated 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 actually ended up being symbolic for people who are supportive of Russia’s unprovoked, illegal invasion of Ukraine.
This isn’t the very first time Putin’s propagandists cavalierly thought about international thermonuclear war. Recently, after the first effective test of the Sarmat’s basic flight capabilities, a pair of state television hosts chuckled over the possibility of eliminating “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 preliminary tests, the rocket struck mock targets over 3,000 miles away, a fraction of the approximately 10,000-mile range it is expected to have as a global ballistic missile.
US officials have called the nuclear dangers saber-rattling, and noted the Sarmat test was prepared ahead of time– which Russia had informed the United States– as both countries 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.”
